Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women
For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.
On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshotsannouncing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.
Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Between the Box Score throughout 2017.
People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl.
Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13. As the deception went on, she couldn’t figure out how to get out of the middle of her web of lies.
you may have seen me mention this last night - this is literally one of the craziest things i have ever experienced online. the community of baseball writers on twitter is pretty tight-knit, and literally all of us had interacted with this person in some way, as well as personally knowing the people she harassed
she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13.
this is the person our parents warned us about with all those ‘everyone on the internet is lying to you about their passion for baseball’ speeches
this is like the opposite of that TV show where you enjoy a little sexual flirtation with a creepy married man only to discover to your shock and horror that it’s actually a 13 year old girl luring you in under false pretences