nyadfactcheck, Author at Diana Nyad Fact Check Annex

Diana vs. The Machine: An AI-Written Article Prompts A Classic Nyad Rant

Diana Nyad responded to a machine-written article with a fantasy-filled tour de force. She followed the rules, but she didn’t follow the rules; detailed logs from the crossing confirmed everything; she puts her words into Evan Morrison’s mouth; and much more!

A few weeks ago, a shoddy, year-old reformulation of a three-year-old Time Magazine piece riled up a lot of folks. The reformulation, a piece of robo-writing called (you’ll need to take a deep breath for this) “At 60, She Swam 110 Miles Through Shark-Infested Waters—No Cage, No Sleep, No Turning Back. But Did Diana Nyad Really Do It Alone?,” appears under the byline of one Julien Raby. But two of the three AI detectors I ran it through agree that it’s 100% AI.

The article’s source, Raby’s boxlifemagazine.com, seems to have a single purpose: generate ad income by publishing sloppy articles and saturating them with so many ads that they become unreadable. To send “At 60 . . .” to the AI detectors, I first had to pluck the text from boxlife’s ad-infested waters. Read at your own risk.

I doubt Nyad read more than the title and some Facebook comments, but that was enough to provoke a lengthy and ludicrous defense of her Cuba crossing:

How Low Can Nyad Go? On The Impact Podcast, All The Way Down To Five.

In “Finding a Way with Legendary Swimmer and Endurance Athlete Diana Nyad,” host John Shegerian called Nyad a “humble legend” after she’d spent 45 minutes lying, boasting, and bashing other swimmers.

Diana Nyad can’t tell the truth. She gets away with her constant fabrications because of her grandest fabrication: She has convinced most of the press and public that she’s not a serial liar. Few think to question her, even when her fabrications become absurd.

*Diana Nyad Cuba-Florida Crossing, Special 13th Anniversary No-Asterisk Edition

Diana Nyad says she swam without a shark cage because she “didn’t want an asterisk next to my name on this record and a shark cage would have required that asterisk.” Her no-asterisk wish came true, but not because she left her shark cage at home. Her crossing will never appear on any list of ratified crossings, with or without an asterisk. And it’s no record unless she means the record for fraudulent claims about a marathon swim.

Three Reasons No Governing Organization Will Ever Ratify Nyad’s Crossing

We didn’t want an asterisk next to the swim. But if anybody wants to ratify it now and stamp it assisted, we can accept it. Because we did it fair and square, no help in any way.

— Los Angeles Times, Aug 30, 2023

In 2019, Diana Nyad began hunting for an organization that would ratify her crossing. She tried the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) and the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF). No luck. By 2023, with her biopic nearing release, she was desperate for some official acknowledgment, even if it meant accepting an asterisk. Again, nobody bit.

Below are three reasons they never will.* The first reason may make sense only to experienced marathon swimmers. The second should make sense to everyone. The third — the farce at the finish — shouldn’t make sense to anyone. I’ve made these arguments before, but new photographic and video evidence reinforces and expands the arguments. I suspect there’s a lot more evidence out there, but Nyad has good reason to withhold it: new material always exposes new deception.

*For more on why Nyad’s crossing is unratifiable, see WOWSA’s “Report on the Diana Nyad Cuba-Florida Swim (2013) Issues Index” and its ratification denial. Both documents supplement the organization’s exhaustive and essential report on Nyad’s crossing.

For Diana’s Birthday, I Resurrected The Blog She Says She Didn’t Have

“One thing I wish I had done earlier, and regret not doing — I didn’t dive into the marathon swimming world, I didn’t write blogs or get on the websites of various organizations.”

— Diana Nyad, Time Magazine, “The Deeper Story Behind Netflix’s Nyad,” November 4, 2023

Diana often talks about living life without regrets. So it’s odd that she told Time Magazine she regrets not keeping a blog. She has plenty of things to regret, but that’s not one of them. Between 2010 and 2016, Nyad and her supporters uploaded over 500 posts to what she called “Diana’s Blog.” Many of her posts remained accessible via diananyad.com through most of 2023. Then, on September 1, 2023, the day Nyad premiered, her website redesign went live — absent a “blog” link for the first time in 13 years.

Unfortunately, some things do disappear from the internet forever. But thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to salvage about 500 of the blog’s 526 entries. I posted them all here:

“Diana’s Blog” Archive

Notes about the archive:

Diana Nyad Is Living Her Best Life At 106 Strokes Per Minute

In her latest interview, Diana Nyad declares, “I’m nothing special,” then spends an hour trying to prove she’s something special.

Last week, Diana Nyad spoke with Marty Moss-Coane of Philadelphia public radio station WHYY. Their chat, “Long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad gets real about living her best life,” which aired on October 31, will likely be her last published interview before she unveils her Florida State Historic Marker on November 6. She seized the opportunity to lie her burning pants off in a way only Diana Nyad can. She told some new lies and cranked some of her old ones well beyond 11.

Evan Morrison’s Decade Of Doubt

Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder Evan Morrison questioned Diana Nyad’s crossing for ten years after she walked ashore in Key West. Then the gaslighting began.

In his August 2023 “On NYAD: An Open letter to the marathon swimming community” (archived), Evan Morrison said that his “general view” of Nyad’s Cuba-Florida crossing hadn’t changed in a decade:

Incidentally, here’s what I wrote after the conference call of September 10, 2013, in which Diana and her team answered questions from a panel of marathon swimmers and administrators (including myself):

While many questions about Diana’s swim remain to be addressed, I have not yet seen any evidence to suggest that Diana did not do as she is claiming — swim from Cuba to Florida. However, because of the repeated physical contact with her crew in putting on her stinger suit, I consider it an ‘assisted’ swim – the third after Walter Poenisch and Susie Maroney.

Some may find this surprising, but my general view has not changed from 10 years ago — except now, with far more documentation, far fewer questions “remain to be addressed.”

He was right that his general view hadn’t changed for a decade; he spent the 10 years after Nyad’s 2013 crossing questioning her claims and supporting other skeptics. Arguing the opposite transcends hypocrisy — “surprising” doesn’t come close. It’s as if Greta Thunberg began saying that climate change was a hoax, Jane Goodall turned out to hate chimps, or Kermit the Frog joined the Proud Boys.

Evan Agonistes: The Anatomy Of A Betrayal

Evan Morrison didn’t begin defending Diana Nyad’s Cuba–Florida crossing until the summer of 2023. The timing suggests he betrayed his sport for reasons other than high-mindedness.

November 4, 2023, Facebook message from Evan Morrison to Stuart McDougal. Morrison writes, "I started defending Diana's swim, once she and her team provided convincing documentation of the feat - which they did in late 2022.
"I base my beliefs on evidence, Stuart. What do you do?" — **Above:** From a Facebook discussion about the Diana Nyad biopic (archived reply and discussion).

The World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) posted its “Diana Nyad Cuba–Florida 2013 Swim Report” on August 21, 2022. Not until the Nyad biopic’s publicity push began a year later did Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder Evan Morrison begin publicly defending Diana. I’ve gathered data from multiple online sources to pinpoint when Morrison flipped. What follows uses Morrison’s 2013 post, “Nyad Agonistes: The anatomy of a social media campaign” (archived), as a model.

Che And Fidel On Horseback, “The Same Dedicated Team” For All Five Attempts, And Other Proof That Diana Nyad Deserves A Nobel Prize For Lying

Six recent acquisitions show Nyad up to her lyin’ eyeballs in new fabrications. Time, space, and scientific proof can’t overcome her determination to deceive.

Sources:

B&B – “Finding a Way with Diana Nyad,” Books & Beyond podcast, Episode 9, Winter Park Library in Winter Park, Florida, host Michael Werner, 2 Jul 2024.
Blaine – “David Blaine and Diana Nyad on the Art of Endurance,” Outside podcast, 9 Jul 2025.
CTF – “Diana Nyad: The Courage To Fail,” The Terryberry Co., host Ashley Owen, 5 Sep 2024.
LIF – “A Lesson In Fortitude,” Aspire magazine, Spring 2021.
SEC – “The Secret Behind Diana Nyad’s Incredible 53-hour Swim,” Big Think, 22 Jan 2025.
UNS – “Unstoppable Spirit: A Conversation with Diana Nyad on Resilience, Dreams, and the Power of Perseverance,” Authority Magazine, 3 Jan 2025.

Diana’s Biological Threat Assessments

My Jelly’s Meaner And Faster Than Yours

Nyad says that the box jellyfish can kill with just the touch of a tentacle. Not so the Portuguese man o’ war:

Nobody has ever died from the Portuguese man o’ war sting. (B&B, 57:50)

Nobody in the history of mankind has ever died directly from a Portuguese man o’ war sting . . . And it swims faster than a human, the only jellyfish that swims and propels itself on its own. (CTF, 32:50)

In other words, she battled the Diana Nyad of jellyfish, the most stupendous jelly on the planet. In a later interview, Nyad says, “They call [the box jelly] the perfect killing machine.” “They” is Diana Nyad, the same singular “they” who calls the Florida Straits the Mount Everest of the earth’s oceans. The plural “they” can’t decide on a perfect killing machine. I found votes for sharks, mosquitoes, saltwater crocodiles, and cats.

Deaths from Portuguese man o’ war stings are rare, but they happen. Bonnie may have googled it for her BFF; in the “perfect killing machine” interview, Nyad says that Portuguese man o’war stings are “not usually fatal.”

Most jellyfish species propel themselves. But not the Portuguese man o’ war. That boneless lazybones has a sail and goes wherever the wind takes him. And he’s not even a real jellyfish!

On “What’s The Rusch?” Podcast, Marathon Swimming’s Master Magician Makes Truth Disappear

In an interview during this year’s Outside Festival, Diana Nyad debuted new fabrications, touted her Florida State Historical Marker, and denigrated all athletes not named Diana Nyad.

**Above:** Diana Nyad prepares to swim around Manhattan, Oct. 6, 1975. Nyad’s right arm blocks the face of her publicist, Chuck Jones. Reporters and photographers line the seawall. In the 1990s, Jones gained notoriety for handling the publicity and shoes of Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s second wife. Image via The New York Times.

At the end of May, two expert illusionists — David Blaine and Diana Nyad — met onstage at the Outside Festival in Denver, Colorado. During the festival, Nyad also sat for an interview with off-road cycling champion and founding director of the “Be Good Foundation,” Rebecca Rusch. Nyad proved that, after half a century of lies, she can still come up with breathtaking new ones.

Finally, An Honor Worthy Of Diana Nyad: The Pushkin Prize

I proudly nominate Diana Nyad for the George Santos Memorial Pushkin Prize For Egregiously Deceptive Self Promotion.

Author, speaker, podcaster, and omnipresent raconteur Malcolm Gladwell created the Pushkin Prize two years ago “to honor the giants of the American education system.” Columbia University won the inaugural Pushkin for manipulating data to help the school go from #18 to #2 in the US News College rankings.

It’s time for the Pushkin Prize to recognize a scholar-athlete. The following nomination uses the criteria Gladwell extracted from George Santos’s claims. (For details, listen to the Pushkin Prize episode of Gladwell’s podcast, “Revisionist History.”) Diana Nyad has been egregiously promoting herself for over 50 years. Let us no longer deny her the recognition she deserves.

**Above, left:** Marathon swimmer and serial liar Diana Nyad flexes at Barnard College. **Above, right:** Convicted felon and serial liar George Santos’s official Congressional portrait.

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