Results tagged “daba”

Remember how last month we all had fun hating that "support group" Dating a Banker Anonymous [DABA], created by and for materialistic ladies freaking out about their suddenly penurious boyfriends? And then, after a NY Times article about the women led to an immediate book deal for the DABA co-founders—swiftly followed by talk of a movie and TV deal—we all gagged on our own bile? Well, as previously suspected, the whole thing was just a satirical put-on—there never was any support group, just a blog—and the Paper of Record has just issued a mea culpa, almost four weeks after the article was originally published:

An article on Jan. 28 about women who commiserated over dating Wall Street bankers caught in the financial crisis described a group they had formed, Dating a Banker Anonymous, as a support group. That is the name of their blog. Its creators originally told The Times that about 30 women had participated, but since publication, they have said that all involved were friends. Laney Crowell, one of the women who started the blog, said in the article that it was “very tongue in cheek;” she has since described it as a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect. Had the nature of the blog been made clear at the outset, the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.

Not that it makes a difference to anyone rushing to cash in on the nation's lust for Schadenfreude; the DABA girls' new literary agent tells Newsweek, "It’s a humor book. That’s the category it would be." The continued interest is damn good news for Crowell; she was recently fired from her job at online fashion channel StyleCaster "because DABA-fever had become a distraction."

The Internets lit up with Schadenfreude Wednesday when the Times published an article about a group of some 30 unabashedly materialistic ladies who gather regularly to vent about how their financial industry boyfriends are no longer keeping them in Manolo Blahniks and Megu. But some observers immediately smelled something fishy, and when the two women who started the Dating A Banker Anonymous group and blog swiftly scored a (rumored) book deal, the needle on the bullshit meter jumped. Media Bistro points us to one NPR blogger's thorough debunking, which asserts there most likely is no support group of 30 women, just a couple of media-savvy satirists who cleverly exploited the nation's eagerness to play tiny violins for bankrupt banking tools and the disillusioned gold diggers who "love" them. True or not, it's still a fun show, but the paper of record is going to have some serious 'splaining to do if this is indeed just an elaborate hoax. (Blogs, naturally, are unaccountable.)