Fake fight: Mid-flight note-passing drama revealed to be a hoax
It was all a hoax.
The note-passing drama live-tweeted by TV producer Elan Gale was simply how he chose to amuse himself on a flight home this past Thanksgiving.
In a story that went viral, Gale chronicled a feud with "Diane in 7A," an insufferable woman who was treating flight attendants poorly.
He sent her a note with a glass of wine, essentially telling her to drink and shut up.
She was unimpressed, and the fight was on.
The battle in the air concluded with Gale handing Diane a very rude note — and Diane responding with a good ol' fashioned slap across his face.
Read the whole dramatic tale here.
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It didn't take long for critics to emerge, questioning the authenticity of Gale's tale.
First of all, Gale's lied on social media before, live-tweeting a non-existent blind date. That should hurt his credibility some.
Then there's the violence issue:
"I find it hard to believe an employee wouldn’t report violent behaviour, since 'Diane' was boarding a connecting flight. Any type of violence in any airport would cause the police to be called, especially since the recent shooting at LAX," wrote Melissa Stetten, the live-tweeter of another airline altercation (which she still stands by).
Grantland's Tess Lynch wrote that Gale's weak attempt at creating a morality tale, telling the world to "be nice," was lost in his equally obnoxious and hard-to-accept behaviour.
"Ideally, there is no Diane at all, and Gale is just producing his own social-media reality distraction with invented characters, points and counterpoints, and a lot of moral ambiguity — Fakes on a Plane. Unfortunately, I doubt it. In an effort to teach people how to be nice (and to get plenty of attention for this lesson), Gale showed us how little he knew about kindness," Lynch wrote.
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Morality issues aside, Tommy Christopher at Mediaite points out a huge hole in Gale's story: the wine glass photo.
"I didn’t pay much attention to Gale’s latest story, which he stands by so far, but now that Stetten and Lynch mention it, there are serious flaws in it. For example, it is entirely plausible that a passenger would send another passenger a glass of wine, and somewhat less plausible that a flight attendant would also deliver a nasty note to an already-antagonistic customer, but it seems fatally implausible that the flight crew would first deliver said drink to Elan’s tray table for photographing," he wrote.
Yesterday, Gale responded to his critics: There is no Diane.
Gale confessed to the ruse with a photo — and a typo, addressing the fictional passenger as "Diana" — on Twitter.
Here is Diana sitting in a chair pic.twitter.com/OE5q7j8dhr
— elan gale (@theyearofelan) December 3, 2013
"I conclude by saying hopefully a few people got a few laughs over a slow Thanksgiving weekend," he tweeted.