There Is No Ethan
How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
Part memoir, part explosive window into the mind of a catfisher, a thrilling personal account of three women coming face-to-face with an internet predator and teaming up to expose them.
In 2011, three successful and highly educated women fell head over heels for the brilliant and charming Ethan Schuman. Unbeknownst to the others, each exchanged countless messages with Ethan, staying up late into the evenings to deepen their connections with this fascinating man. His detailed excuses about broken webcams and complicated international calling plans seemed believable, as did last minute trip cancellations. After all, why would he lie? Ethan wasn't after money — he never convinced his marks to shell out thousands of dollars for some imagined crisis. Rather, he ensnared these women in a web of intense emotional intimacy.
After the trio independently began to question inconsistencies in their new flame's stories, they managed to find one another and uncover a greater deception than they could've ever imagined. As Anna Akbari and the women untangled their catfish’s web, they found other victims and realized that without a proper crime, there was no legal reason for “Ethan” to ever stop.
There Is No Ethan catalogues Akbari's experience as both victim and observer. By looking at the bigger picture of where these stories unfold — a world where technology mediates our relationships; where words and images are easily manipulated; and where truth, reality, and identity have become slippery terms — Akbari gives a page-turning and riveting examination of why stories like Ethan's matter for us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sociologist Akbari (Startup Your Life) expands on her 2014 Observer article for this riveting account of deception and emotional abuse in the early days of online dating. It begins in March 2011, when Akbari connected with two other women who had been communicating with—and growing suspicious of—a man named Ethan Schuman, before flashing back to December 2010, when Akbari received her first OkCupid message from Ethan, initiating their protracted virtual courtship. "It was his cleverness, his openness, and... his eagerness to keep the conversation going" that Akbari says kept her hooked despite repeated delays to their IRL meeting (Ethan's excuses escalated from a snowstorm to a cancer diagnosis). The narrative takes on a thriller-like quality as Ethan grows increasingly cagey and flies into rages. Eventually, the women discover that Ethan is actually medical student Emily Slutsky (now a practicing gynecologist), who, when caught, offers insincere apologies and murky justifications; she pleads boredom, talks about Ethan as the narrator of a novel, and calls catfishing "an addiction." While they were corresponding, Akbari was ironically teaching a class at NYU about the construction of identity—a topic about which she and Ethan mind-bendingly engage in a lively debate early on—and Akbari concludes with a fascinating if brief discussion of the sociological implications of catfishing. Though Emily's motivations remain somewhat opaque, there's plenty in this internet horror story to hold readers' attention.
