When A Fan Hits The Shit
This email in from my friend Ester in Scotland.
Looking at some of the fandom drama out there I remembered about a person called Victoria Bitter/Amy Player. She was involved in a fandom convention called tentmoot and defrauded some fans.
I thought if you have a chance to read through it might be useful for the encylopedia of scams. It’s certainly a bit of a bizzare story…
And it is.
Amy Player, a Lord of the Rings fan from Virginia created an online fan club in homage to actor Sean Astin and his LOTR character.
She teamed up with fellow fan and started a ‘Bit of Earth’ - a charity based around gardening and literacy.
The signed up Astin to assist them and, with the actor supporting, created a small army of nerds around the word willing to help out.
They created a LOTR convention in New Zealand which fell apart at the last minute, resulting in several very pissed off actors who had jetted around the world to attend the event.
The failed event revealed the Bit of Earth charity to be a fraud and that Player had being lying to celebrities and businesses to get support for her fake fundraisers.
It also turns out she had multiple characters (both in real life and in the fictional LOTR world.)
She was reported missing by her parents and ended up on the side of a milk carton.
She changed her name to Jordan Wood , Elijah Wood’s male cousin who was on the run from IRA.
And then things got weird…
The whole fiasco can be found in When A Fan Hits The Shit by Jeanine Renne.
