This is likely a story you only noticed or cared about if you were a) growing up in Marin in 2004-05, or b) paying close attention to LGBT hate-crime news, but it did make some national headlines at the time. It goes like this: A senior at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, who was an out lesbian and co-president of the school's Gay Straight Alliance, was the victim of a rash of anti-gay vandalism in the fall of 2004 for which no suspects were ever identified. Epithets were scrawled on her locker and the side of her car, and then the attacks grew more threatening, with eggs thrown at her, and death threats. The school rallied behind her, holding a vigil and talking a lot about tolerance. Ultimately, several gay teachers at the school, who were not out to their students, received cryptic, threatening voicemails from a disguised voice in the spring of 2005. Tracing those calls lead Marin police to identify the culprit, who was the girl herself. She faced charges. Her friends and the rest of the community disowned her. The case made plenty of local news headlines. Now, ten years later, a BuzzFeed reporter who went to school with the unidentified girl tracked her down at her Bay Area home where she lives with her wife, and got her talking about the incident.

At the time, the resolution of the story was pretty unsatisfying. "She did admit to police that it was basically for attention," said the school superintendent. Ten years on, the explanation from the woman who was that attention-starved girl is a little more nuanced. First of all, she was drunk on cough medicine. A lot. Also, the day it all started, she was mostly trying to get out of going to class because she hadn't done her homework. The principal immediately let her go home when a janitor spotted the word 'FAG' scrawled on her locker.

"I was like, Sweet. I went home and did my homework.” She puffs air between her freckled cheeks and meets my eyes, summarizes: “I started a whole fake hate-crime thing with the police so I didn’t have to do my homework.” ... Each time she committed another crime, she says, “It was a little like pressure-release valve.’” “Imagine someone was like, ‘You have zero responsibility now.’” In her voice, I can still hear a glimmer of how incredible she found this effect. She could go to school if she wanted. She could still play sports. Her mom, friends, teachers, and coaches rallied around her, told her how much they loved her: “All that shit that you just wish somebody would have said without there being an explicit reason to.”

As for why she decided to place the threatening calls to gay teachers, which ultimately got her caught...

“It was probably about calling them out,” she admits. “None of our teachers were really out. Even ones we knew were gay. You definitely got a sense like they wanted to let you know, very old-school gay code shit where you drop hints about things but you never come out and say it. It’s kind of fucked up to be on the other end of that as a gay person, like, ‘Oh, we can’t talk about this.’” But she insists she didn’t do what she did out of a spirit of activism. Her motives were totally selfish: “If I put us two steps forward, I definitely took us 10 steps backward.”

The story, unfortunately, is not unique, and because of the media's sensitivity around LGBT issues and intolerance, the temptation for the dishonest to get attention for such stories can be great. There have been numerous incidents of faux hate crime in the last few years that have received wide attention on social media, only to be debunked — e.g. the lesbian waitress in New Jersey who wrote that fake note on a customer's bill denying her a tip. And the more such incidents there are, the more fuel there is for right-wing blogs to suggest that anti-bigotry is all in our lefty imaginations.

But, ultimately, the story of Marin's great hate-scare of 2004 was just one of teenage impulsiveness and stupidity. The woman looking back on her crimes is a teacher now, dealing with kids every day, and she seems to have forgiven herself. And, despite the reporter's seriousness about it all, it was really only dramatic for the people in the middle of it all.

[BuzzFeed]