Armed with a dim grasp of time, space, and the people they’re impersonating, some hoaxsters are trying to smear politicos with fake swinger profiles. The creators of the profiles, made in the names of Hunter Biden and Jerry Falwell, are selling fake stories about group sex on Disney Cruises just as the famous figures find themselves in the midst of media frenzies. It’s an attempt to con journalists into reporting even more salacious stories about political celebs who are no stranger to them.
So how are the scams being pulled off? And what’s the connection to the scandal involving former congresswoman Katie Hill?
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Falwell fail: Jerry Falwell Jr. made news when a former Miami pool boy alleged that the self-righteous evangelical preacher liked to watch as his wife had sex with the cabana boy the couple had showered with gifts over the years.
In an apparent bid to capitalize on the scandal, a hoaxster sent The Daily Beast a profile on the dating website Cruise Ship Mingle, where cruise-goers can find casual hookups, purporting to be a lightly anonymized account for Jerry and Becki Falwell. The fake tipster claimed to have met the couple on the dating site in December 2019 where they “had a mind-boggling foursome.”
The bullshit artists behind the attempted con had a poor sense of both the concept of time and reverse image searches. The pictures they sent supposedly showing the women of the foursome were generic pics of women who aren’t Becki Falwell, easily traced to porn sites through a reverse image search.
The “EastCoastCouple” account on Cruise Ship Mingle which they tried to pass off as the Falwells’ listed a Disney Fantasy cruise with a departure date set at Dec. 21, 2019—a detail which tracked with the tipster’s email. Unless the Falwells have mastered time travel or mitosis, the story is physically impossible. Falwell appeared in public at a Liberty University football game in Florida on the night of Dec. 21, after the Disney cruise had departed and while he and his wife were supposedly engaged in passionate group sex. He appeared on Fox News three days later for an interview.
In a final act of ineptitude, the hoaxsters sent along a forged PDF purporting to show their email traffic with the Falwells arranging a Caribbean tryst. Unfortunately for the hoaxsters, they used the wrong email address—an address for a 70-year-old woman with a different name—in fake emails meant to show messages from Becki Falwell.
Hunting for Hunter: Another hoax tried to put Hunter Biden in the crosshairs of a new sex scandal. A fake tipster sent emails to the New York Times and The Daily Beast in an attempt to claim that they were a Ukrainian woman impregnated by Biden's son during a Mediterranean cruise in November 2019. As evidence, the tipster forwarded along a comically obvious Cruise Ship Mingle profile disguised as “HunterB” with a picture of Hunter Biden taken from the internet with a bio pleading that "I just want to get away from the Craziness in Washington."
Once again, the hoaxsters behind the fake profile didn’t do enough homework on the person they were spoofing. In February 2020, Hunter Biden wasn’t living in Washington, D.C., as the profile page and the quote about looking to “get away from the Craziness in Washington” suggested. Instead, Biden and his new wife, Melissa Cohen, were on the other side of the continent in a Los Angeles apartment, where numerous paparazzi sightings and a New York Times profile placed him at that time.
Copycat trail: The hoax artist (or artists) behind the fake Cruise Ship Mingle profiles appear to be taking a page from the scandal surrounding former California congresswoman Katie Hill. When the right-wing news site RedState published nude photos of Hill and revealed that she’d had an affair with a campaign staffer, Hill admitted the relationship but claimed that her ex-husband had set up a profile for the couple on Cruise Ship Mingle without her knowledge or consent.
That detail appears to have caught the attention of whoever’s behind the fake Cruise Ship Mingle profiles sent to the media. One phoney tipster sent an email to The Daily Beast about the fake Hunter Biden profile using an address identical to the username for a Reddit user who appears obsessed with the Katie Hill profile on the site.
That familiar brand of stupid? Fake sex scandals have become disturbingly common, thanks to the efforts of one especially inept conman, Jacob Wohl. Wohl is notorious for bumbling his way through thinly back-storied fake sex scandals in an attempt to smear rivals, real or perceived, of his favorite politician, Donald Trump. Wohl has recruited (or duped, depending on the incident) men and women to serve as the fake paramours or sexual assault victims of Robert Mueller, Elizabeth Warren, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Pete Buttigieg, in addition to falsely accusing Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar of incest.
The Daily Beast reached out to Wohl to ask if he had any role in sending out the fake profiles but he denied it. "No, I'm not aware of that,” Wohl wrote in an email.
—with additional reporting by Marlow Stern
