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 ditziness seemed, well, just a bit too polished.
The bust came at the hands of an 18-year-old devotee named Matt Foremski, a professional blogger for the Silicon Valley Watcher and the son of a reporter.
He started with two clues: Lonelygirl15 had been caught in an internet 'sting' emailing from a server at the Creative Artists Agency, the very heart of Hollywood; and her name had been patented by a lawyer in Encino, California.
If this is an actress, he deduced with Holmesian logic, she has a bunch of headshots somewhere on the internet.
Foremski found them, or at least a stash of snaps that looked enough like Bree to prompt a confession from one of her production crew - Grant Steinfeld, a San Francisco software engineer who set up the Lonelygirl15 web sites. He got tired of his role
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 Visit Lonelygirl15's pages on YouTube and MySpace |
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| Lonelygirl15 was created by a filmmaker and a doctor who dabbled in films |
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and dropped out of the project: that, it turns out, alerted early suspicions as bloggers detected an 'unsupervised' Lonelygirl15 fan site.
Lonelygirl15 was created, we now know, by filmmaker Ramesh Flinders, and Miles Beckett, a doctor dabbling in films. Bree's bedroom is actually home to Flinders. How did the CAA come into it? A friend, Amanda Goodfried, works there and helped them hide behind an office server. Her father-in-law is the lawyer who trademarked the name.
What were they up to? Flinders and Beckett are confessing only to running a "project" which might have led to a movie. They found their moment of fame by cutting a new, fine line between reality and fiction.
They are going on with the story, on a new site. But, art form or not, why should we care about Bree if we can't at least fool ourselves a little bit that she is real? 
FIRST
POSTED SEPTEMBER 14, 2006
 The rise and rise of fake news
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