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We woke up to the breaking news today that a Boston radio contest featuring a chance to meet Taylor Swift was abruptly canceled. The unconfirmed rumor is that the contest was canceled because one of the leading contestants turned out to be a 39-year-old man who’d been ushered to victory on the back of a 4chan and Reddit campaign*. The contest was put on by Kiss 108FM and required fans to vote on who they thought was most deserving of the honor to meet the former Conor Kennedy flame. A 39-year-old man who went by the moniker Charles Z. was among the (mostly female teenage) contestants and, since the Internet can’t resist the idea of sticking it to Taylor Swift, someone decided to rouse the masses to vote Mr. Z in. Then things got weird. According to the original 4chan poster, who claimed to be a friend of the contestant, Charles was a "creepy 39 year old" who wanted a chance at making a "complete ass of himself by blatantly just sniffing (Swift’s) hair." We wanted to get to the bottom of all of this hair sniffing and creepiness, so we tracked down this mysterious Charles Z. to hear what he had to say.

GQ: So this Taylor Swift thing really blew up for you. How did it all get started? Did you know the anonymous 4chan poster?

Charles: I thought it would be great to meet Taylor Swift, so I told my friends, and my friends told everybody. This became the weirdest possible game of telephone. "I want to meet Taylor Swift!" turned into "What’s that? You’re a fat, old maniac and want to smell Taylor Swift’s hair?" I never asked anyone to do anything other than vote for me. My friends took it and ran with it. I’m not entirely sure what a "4chan" even is. I entered the contest and my friends liked it and started to share it with their friends and it blew up from there. I guess the sorcerers of the Internet adopted me. I’m still not sure what happened, other than that I won, and everyone that helped was awesome. But to answer your question, no, I had no idea. I don’t know who did what.

When did you find out that all of this was happening?

Everyone I know emailed, texted, Facebooked, Tweeted, and/or sent me a Western Union telegram at the same time to let me know I was all over the Internet.