Saturday, January 18, 2014

Secretive Trans* Woman 'Dr. V' Kills Herself (Himself?) After Being Outed by Journalist Caleb Hannan

Well, the story's not quite what you'd imagine from the hysterical leftist outrage. Simply, context matters. When you live a lie, bad things are bound to happen.

First, the hysteria, at Autostraddle, "Dr. V Is Dead, Caleb Hannan Is Celebrated: Why We Can’t Accept Lazy, Transmisogynistic Journalism."

Also from far left Melissa McEwan, at Shakesville, "Careless, Cruel, and Unaccountable." And from the precious boys at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, "Caleb Hannan, Gender Identity and Journalistic Ethics."

Look, these people lost my sympathy (and respect) at "Transmisogynistic." Society's FUBAR, doubly so, and never hesitate to lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of the left's Gramscian cultural collectivists.


Whatever. Just do yourself and favor and see Hannan's piece at Grantland, which is probably 5,000 words but should be read in its entirety: "Dr. V’s Magical Putter."

Here's some of the key bits, but again, RTWT:
Here is what I now know about Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, inventor of the Oracle GX1 putter.

She was born a boy on July 12, 1953, in Philadelphia. She was given the name Stephen Krol, a person who has not received degrees from MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. She has been married at least twice, and the brother of one of Krol’s ex-wives says Dr. V has two children, possibly more. She was once a mechanic at a Sunoco station that she also may have run in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She filed and subsequently dropped a lawsuit against Sunoco. She moved to Arizona at some point after marrying her second wife in 1997. She ended up in Bonney Lake, Washington, a short time later. She filed a “petition for change of name” on October 14, 2003, in the Pierce County, Washington, District Court. She scratched out an unsuccessful first attempt at writing “Essay” on that petition. She wrote “OLD NAME DOES NOT MATCH ME” where the court paperwork asked why she no longer wanted to be known as Stephen Krol. She worked as general manager at Trax Bar and Grill, an LGBT bar in Kent, Washington. She was the subject of three separate harassment claims from her time there, including one from a male coworker who said she made “inappropriate comments about her breasts and genitalia.” She moved to Arizona again sometime later. She met Gerri Jordan. She built a putter. She met Gary McCord. She told me the focus should be on the science and not the scientist.

What little else I know about Stephen Krol in the years before and after he changed his name comes from people who knew him, but didn’t know him well. My attempts to get in touch with members of his family and his ex-wives were unsuccessful. Some people didn’t pick up or return my calls. Others, like Ewa Kroll, whose name showed up alongside his in searches and whose relationship to Stephen I still haven’t been able to parse, hustled me off the phone as quickly as possible. “I have not talked to him for years,” she said. “I’m just going to have to say ‘good-bye’ now.”

The darkest discovery was something that occurred after Krol had decided to live as Dr. V. In 2008, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of prescription drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning from closing herself in a garage with her car running. A police report offered some explanations for why she might have tried to take her own life — Yar’s business was slow and Dr. V’s romantic relationship was on the ropes. She had recently fought with her girlfriend, Gerri Jordan, president of Yar Golf. Jordan told police that she and Dr. V were in a monogamous relationship and that they had gotten into an argument two days before. She had found Dr. V in the passenger seat of her car after the suicide attempt and tried to keep her awake. Jordan had also presumably been the first person to read the suicide note Dr. V had taped to the window of the car door, which read in part, “Tell Gorgeous Gerri that I love her.”

♦♦♦

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the biggest question remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a great story? ....

The last time I heard from Dr. V she warned me that I was about to commit a hate crime. But before that, I received a voice mail from Jordan.

Neither of them had contacted me in months, since I had sent an email trying to confirm what I had discovered, and Jordan wrote back to deny everything. “Your attack tale should be published in the National Enquirer,” Jordan wrote, “right next to the article on Martians … If I am to believe your diatribe, what you are telling golfers is that the most scientifically advanced Near Zero MOI putter, and the science of the Inertia Matrix was invented by a lesbian auto mechanic.”

Now, Jordan’s message said she was calling to propose a deal. When I phoned her back, Jordan explained the offer. I could fly to Arizona and meet with Dr. V at her attorney’s office, where she would show me proof of her degrees from both MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. V then got on the phone and added another detail. Once I saw the documents I would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring me from revealing any of the details I’d learned about Dr. V’s past.

The “deal” was one I could not accept, and when I explained this Dr. V got upset. “What is your intention?” she asked. “Are you being paid by someone to destroy Yar?” Dr. V’s anger made it so that what she said came out fast and with almost no interruption. I tried to record everything she said and ask the occasional question, but it was like yelling into a wind tunnel. When she finally had said her piece, she handed the phone back to Jordan. “Well, I guess you’re just going to print what you’re going to print,” Jordan said. “Try to lead a decent life. Have a good one.” Then she hung up.

A few days later, Dr. V sent one final email. It had her signature mix of scattered punctuation and randomly capitalized words. Once upon a time I had brushed off these grammatical quirks, but now they seemed like outward expressions of the inner chaos she struggled to contain. “To whom this may concern,” it read. “I spoke with Caleb Hannan last Saturday his deportment is reminiscent to schoolyard bullies, his sole intention is to injure or bring harm to me … Because of a computer glitch, some documents that are germane only to me, were visible to web-viewers, government officials have now rectified this egregious condition … Caleb Hannan came into possession of documents that were clearly marked: MADE NON-PUBLIC (Restricted) … Exposing NON-PUBLIC Documents is a Crime, and prosecution of such are under the auspices of many State and Federal Laws, including Hate Crimes Legislation signed into Law by President Obama.”

Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. Yet despite all that, the main emotion I felt while reading her desperate, last-ditch email was sadness. Although there were times when I had been genuinely thrilled with the revelation that Dr. V’s official narrative didn’t line up with reality, there was nothing satisfying about where the story had ended up. People had been hurt by Dr. V’s lies, but she was the person who seemed to be suffering most.

Not long after she sent her email, I got a call from a Pennsylvania phone number that I didn’t recognize. It was Dr. V’s ex-brother-in-law, who represented the closest I had gotten to finding someone who could tell me what she’d been like in her previous life. “Well, there’s one less con man in the world now,” he said. Even though he hated his former family member, this seemed like an especially cruel way to tell me that Dr. V had died. All he could tell me was what he knew — that it had been a suicide. A few weeks later a police report filled in the details.

Around 11 a.m. on October 18, Jordan walked into the home office she shared with Dr. V and found pieces from her business partner’s jewelry collection laid out on a desk next to some handwritten letters. Each letter explained which friend or family member was to get which piece of jewelry in case of Dr. V’s death. Jordan then noticed that Dr. V’s car was missing. At first, Jordan explained to the police, she didn’t think much of the missing vehicle. Jordan prepared some breakfast and then drove to her nearby apartment. When Jordan arrived and reached her bedroom, she found Dr. V lying on the floor curled in a fetal position with a white plastic bag over her head; an empty bottle of pills sat on the kitchen counter.

Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience. What makes it that much harder is that Dr. V left so few details — on purpose, of course. Those who knew her in her past life refused to talk about her. Those who knew her in the life she had created were helpful right up to the point where that new life began to look like a lie. The only person who can provide this strange story with its proper ending is the person who started it. The words she spoke came during our last conversation, when she was frantically trying to convince me of things I knew couldn’t possibly be true. Yet though they may have been spoken by a desperate person at one of the most desperate times in a life that had apparently seen many, it’s hard to argue with Dr. V’s conclusions. “Nobody knows my life but me,” she said. “You don’t know what the truth is.”
Everything's a "hate crime" nowadays.

Oh brother. See more of the leftist outrage at Mediagazer.


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