We all know by now not to believe everything we see on the internet. Your Instagram feed is generally a matter of seeing people at their best. It’s a highlight reel. It’s not real life.
And even Facebook isn’t much better. But there’s a big difference between just showing off the good stuff that happens to you, and making up good stuff out of thin air.
How can you tell the difference? Well, hopefully your internet friends will come to your aid, as they did for Chloe Condon after a stranger dragged her into his baffling, mind-boggling internet life.
As a woman in tech, Chloe Condon is no stranger to, well, strange dudes on the internet.
Most days, however, she just has to deal with the random mentions and tagging that happens as a matter of course on social media.
But one particular mention stuck out, and kind of turned her life upside-down over the course of a weekend.
One Friday afternoon after work, she opened up her mentions on Twitter to find the picture below with a tag asking if that was her in the pic. It was. But the rest was way, way off.
For one thing, she wasn’t at a conference that weekend, nor had she been recently. For another, she didn’t know this “Tee Medlin” guy accusing her of stalking.
For yet another, that picture was almost three years old, used in an article she had written and that had received more than a little attention in tech circles.
So, naturally, she sent out a tweet about it, because nobody should ever be accused of stalking when there’s so much immediately available evidence that they weren’t.
Her rep was on the line, and she wasn’t going to take it lying down. Neither were her followers.
Chloe’s online detective gang got right to work, looking into just who this Tee Medlin was.
Nothing in their experience — or, let’s face it, just about anyone’s for that matter — could have prepared them for the absolutely bonkers things they would find out about Tee Medlin.
In fact, it’s hard to say if Tee Medlin even exists, or if it’s a completely fabricated persona.
It’s all just so weird. One of Chloe’s followers dug up an Instagram post of his in which he claimed to be “in Chapel Hill with Rachel.”
Neither of the women pictured in the post were named Rachel, however. They’re both well known fashion bloggers, easily recognizable to many Instagram users.
He had also photoshopped his own name into a pic to suggest that he had been a presenter at a conference.
As @dluippold uncovered, the pic was originally from a fashion event for Calvin Klein.
Folks, this is just the tip of the iceberg with this person. It gets weirder .
Another one of her followers, @jpp123, found this gem: A published article he put his name on, calling it “my interview in a global Engineering and Robotics publication.”
The original had no such byline, so he has obviously been trying to make himself out to be a great mind in tech, but faking it does not actually make it so.
Nevertheless, the legend in his own mind has been growing for a long time.
@jpp123 dug up another amazing revelation: This post about surviving a car wreck and a brain tumor.
As he found, the pic that Tee used for this car crash post did come from a real car accident. It happened in 2012 and only one man was involved — a 75-year-old.
So, chance Tee Medlin’s caption has an ounce of truth to it? Zero.
There are also a couple of bizarre posts where Tee wanted folks to think he had rubbed elbows with a celeb.
For some reason, he decided to post a pic of him with Seth Rogen, which at first folks thought was photoshopped. Given how much he’d already made up, it seemed like a reasonable assumption.
Turns out, anybody can get a pic with that particular Seth Rogen.
He’s on display at the Hollywood Wax Museum. You can just put your head next to his and snap away, blur it up a bit and nobody will know the difference, right?
Even Seth himself couldn’t resist commenting, tweeting “This dude is nuts.”
It looks like Tee has been fabricating his entire online presence, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, the whole shebang, for years.
And Chloe does believe that there’s a real, human hand behind all this.
“I know there’s lots of ‘Russian bot’ chatter these days, but this is a real-life human man who has faked an entire life for over 5 years,” she wrote. “I can assure you, this isn’t artificial intelligence or machine learning.”
Apparently Tee, or whoever is behind Tee’s accounts, deleted his Twitter and changed up his Instagram.
He also claimed to have been the subject of a hack by “a disgruntled past emoloyee or coworker and now getting cyberbullied.”
He also claimed to have gotten a lawyer involved.
As much as this has been a bizarre adventure for Chloe, and as much as her followers had her back, she emphasized in a message that she didn’t want anyone to harass this guy.
“Unfortunately, many folks online have been posting personal information about Mr. Medlin, and I do not condone threats against him or his family in any way,” she wrote . “Though I have sufficient cause to believe this is not a hacked account, and that this took some serious time/effort to create such a deep rabbit hole of an online life, I in no way want to ruin this guy’s life.”
She did, however, file a police report against Tee Medlin.
After all, she has to consider her own safety first. But she also doesn’t wish Tee any harm. “He is likely an individual who is unstable and needs treatment,” she says.
And as she noted, the set of circumstances that had to happen for her to even know about this guy’s post might be the most amazing part.
“The pure happenstance of the situation is insane to comprehend. Someone who follows me on Twitter, who had read my article at some point, saw a man he knows from North Carolina on his feed, saw the Instagram post featuring my image, and tweeted it to me because he recognized it and thought it was odd,” she wrote.
If not for that, she might never have known about this at all.
