Meet "Angela Cheng" and "Sabrina O'Connor."
They were writers for Examiner.com, a news and entertainment website that says it has "100,000 contributors," from 2012 to early 2014. They mainly wrote negative stuff about pop divas:
Lots of takedowns, particularly about Lady Gaga:
Tons of mean stuff about Lady Gaga.
Cheng once said the "top reason to dislike Madonna" was because "she helped encourage the spread of AIDS."
And she's become a meme of sorts.
Perez Hilton has publicly cheered on Cheng's work.
@AngelaCheng91 Thank you for all the amazing work you did this year! xoxo
Cheng wrote a post on Jan. 1, 2014, reporting rumors that Billboard editorial director Bill Werde was about to be fired.
A week later it was announced that Janice Min, the editor credited with turning Billboard's sister publication The Hollywood Reporter around, would be in charge of Billboard, starting immediately.
Werde dismissed Cheng's report on Twitter:
Like clockwork, up pops the articles saying @bwerde was fired for being a "shady Gaga fan". Bye.
@Anthagiox hah. A certain subset of ppl will never let logic or reason interfere with an opinion.
Bill Werde
@bwerde
@Anthagiox hah. A certain subset of ppl will never let logic or reason interfere with an opinion.
And although her post has since been removed, Cheng took the announcement of Min’s hiring as a vindication:
I received legal threats for telling the truth. Nobody believed me, but now, http://t.co/7eLWHY4CNK. Either way, let's all wish him success.
On March 31, a spokesperson for Billboard parent company Guggenheim Media Entertainment Group issued a statement to BuzzFeed, confirming that Werde had not in fact been fired.
"Bill has not been fired, he continues to work at Guggenheim Media. The accusations are false and untrue."
It's worth nothing that in November 2013, fans revealed that Cheng's author photo was from this Flickr account and most likely not actually her. It soon changed to the image above. One commenter also alleged that O'Connor and Cheng are the same person:
On Jan. 8, 2014, BuzzFeed requested a comment from Examiner.com about the work of these two writers. That afternoon, both of their archives were completely removed:
Justin Jimenez from Examiner.com told BuzzFeed that the two writers are "no longer are affiliated with Examiner.com, as of January 3" — one day after O'Connor's last post. With regards to their accounts being cleared, Jimenez said that it's against company policy to talk about relationships with individual writers, but did say that account removals are most likely due to a "terms of use violation" which could include "false or defamatory statements, abusive language, or plagiarism."
As he explains in a Tumblr post he published after being contacted by BuzzFeed, Werde himself tried to verify Cheng's identity and asked his friends at Examiner's parent company to look into her posts.
After seeing that her articles had been removed, Cheng announced on Twitter that she had plans for a new site:
To all my fans: I have decided to start my own website. Stay tuned!
BuzzFeed requested comment from Cheng several times though Twitter and then email. Before the launch of her new site, she responded.
She denied being the same person as Sabrina O'Connor outright: "LOL — I am not Sabrina O'Connor. I did use a Flickr picture at first because I am afraid of crazy people recognizing or stalking me. However, I was forced to take that one down and put the current one up." She added that her new site would be a place for more "positive articles."
BuzzFeed then asked Cheng, in an email, about this January tweet, where she seemingly outed herself as a fictional person:
Preventing someone from taking their life last evening made my career as "Angela Cheng" worth every bit.
The email was returned by an automated message, saying her Gmail account had been shut down.
Cheng's new site, launched a week later and called PopMusicGadfly, has posted more of the same negative Gaga coverage that ran on the Examiner.
In the meantime, a new Examiner critic named Amira Hassan has popped up to fill the Gaga-hating void left by Cheng.
Another Examiner columnist, Jim Strzalkowski, also sounds a lot a lot like Cheng.
It's been rumored that Perez Hilton is the person behind Angela Cheng.
CORRECTION: The parent company of Billboard is Guggenheim Media Entertainment Group. An earlier version of this item misstated the company's name. (3/31/14)