The Ugly Truth About That Poor Little Rich Girls Blog

It was billed as a blog and support group for Wall Street's saddest cases: the once pampered young women forced to adjust to life without bottle service, Bergdorf Goodman accounts and boom-time sex—the collateral damage caused by thousands of points vanishing in a blink from the Dow. Last month, Dating a Banker Anonymous broke out as the hated, irresistible Website du jour, and it has earned its self-pitying, gold-digging authors some national press, not to mention promises from Hollywood agents of a "Real Housewives"–style media franchise. But hold on a minute—are the DABA girls even for real?

Not exactly. DABA cofounder Laney Crowell tells NEWSWEEK that what The New York Times and many other outlets portrayed as a serious Web site is, in fact, a full-blown parody by Crowell and her sidekick Megan Petrus, a Manhattan lawyer. There are no DABA meetings. There is no support group. Crowell and Petrus fill the blog with a liberal mix of their own experiences, anecdotes from girls they meet out on the town and stories from people who e-mail the site, which they make no effort to verify. Often the DABA girls invent fresh details for maximum satirical effect.

"That isn't my life," says Crowell, 27, from a coffee shop near her apartment in New York's West Village. Dressed modestly in jeans and a pullover, Crowell describes her DABA identity as an online "character" and admits that she doesn't actually know anyone with a boyfriend-backed credit card or a slashed department-store allowance. And despite DABA posts suggesting otherwise, she says, her own relationship with a corporate real-estate investor runs more toward Netflix at home than no-limit nights on the town. When a NEWSWEEK photographer asked for a Wall Street bar recommendation, she couldn't name a single one—although she'll have plenty of time to look into that now. Crowell was recently canned by her employer, the online fashion channel StyleCaster, because DABA had become too much of a distraction.

Did everyone get punk'd? The New York Times thinks so. In an editor's note prompted by questions from NEWSWEEK, the Times contended that the DABA girls had misled their reporter, that it should not have described the site as a support group and that it was caught unawares by word that much of the site's content was pixie dust. Still, Crowell denies any intentional snookering. She insists that DABA is rooted in truth—the romantic ramifications of economic decline—and that she and Petrus launched it as a way to poke fun at themselves when the recession turned their men into "emotional train wrecks." "Did my boyfriend want to watch 'Gossip Girl' rather than hang out with me?" she asks. "Yes." Her agency, Janklow & Nesbit, says that's enough for a book deal. "It's a character," says agent Rebecca Gradinger, "but it's a little bit of them as well." Just not as much as everyone thought.