Category: Con Artistry

Last night, a journalist researching Diana Nyad asked me if Nyad ever claimed to have completed an English Channel crossing. I couldn’t remember her saying so, but I recalled her walking right up to the edge.

In a 1977 Minneapolis Star article, Nyad begins a discourse on hallucinations with, “Last summer, when I was swimming the English Channel.” She doesn’t mention that she made three unsuccessful attempts “last summer” and didn’t plan on returning.

Earlier in the article, the author, Rob Tanenbaum, writes about “the perilous English Channel, which [Nyad] has done twice.”

Both statements leave escape hatches. Nyad doesn’t say she finished. Though Tanenbaum does — assuming “done” means she swam “shore to shore” in “squeaky clean, ethical fashion” — Nyad could claim he misquoted her.

The article contains plenty of other lies, including

• she was still working on her PhD at NYU.
• she was an Olympic-caliber swimmer.
• she was “rated the top marathon swimmer in the world.”

But what demonstrates Nyad’s greatness as a con artist — along with her more recent success convincing the press, public, and a handful of marathon swimmers that she swam from Cuba to Florida under her own power — are the first three words of the article’s title: “No-fear swimmer.”

Continue reading →

“I honored the rules,” Nyad told David Adams of Reuters a week after she completed her Cuba-Florida crossing (“Questions Linger….”).

But what rules did she honor?

“Trust me,” she said in a Facebook post, “this dream [is] too important to me to have any slight thing outside the fair, just, ethical and agreed-upon rules of our sport” (screenshot here and below).

We still have no idea what Nyad was talking about.
Continue reading “Disqualified!”

I was so diverted by Nyad’s cinematic machinations in the last post that I missed something important. When Diana finally tells us that she’s not writing the screenplay for Nyad: The Motion Picture, she declares:

I relinquished my position as screenwriter of my life story. (Sung, “Diana Nyad…” )

When she got caught in her Manhattan lie back in 2011, she used the same verb:

I hereby relinquish my title as the first woman. (Nyad via the Wayback Machine)

Continue reading “Diana’s GREAT Surprise, part 2: The Relinquisher”

part 1 | part 2

NOTE: In the following post, I am not questioning whether or not sexual abuse occurred during the Holocaust. It did, and it was probably much worse than anyone could imagine. I am, however, questioning the facts of a survivor story Diana Nyad invented and now exploits for her own benefit. 

The following paragraph summarizes Nyad’s story. It includes details common to most or all of the seven versions I’m familiar with:

At dinner after one of her talks, Nyad meets an elderly woman (never named) who is originally from Krakow, Poland. Nyad identifies the woman as a survivor because she has numbers tattooed on her arm. The woman tells Nyad her story: When she was three years old, the Gestapo came to her home in Krakow and killed her father. They forced her, her mother, and her six-year-old sister onto a train to Dachau. Upon arrival, they were separated. The mother and sister went to the right, the three-year-old went to the left and never saw her family again. The Nazis then sent her to serve as a sex slave to the camp’s SS officers. At the war’s end, a French family adopts the little girl. She goes on to live a life seemingly unaffected by her trauma.

(This spreadsheet provides links to all seven versions and highlights differences between them.)

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After I began to doubt Nyad’s story, I started emailing people who might know if it could be true. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute on the History and Effects of the Holocaust, forwarded my message to Dr. Barbara Distel, former director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Dr. Distel’s response contains everything you need to know about Nyad’s tale. By permission of Dr. Distel, here are the pertinent parts (lightly edited for readability):

1. Dachau was a concentration camp for men only, there were never families or mothers with children. Jewish families in Poland were sent to Ghettos and from there to the death camps, or directly to the death camps in Poland, never to Germany. The description [Nyad gives] refers to Auschwitz. The way she tells it is completely fictional. [my emphasis]
 
During the last years (1943-1945), a large number of subsidiary camps were established where Dachau prisoners worked mostly for the German armament industry. There were some subsidiary camps and work detachments where also women prisoners worked. Shortly before the liberation on April 29, 1945, there were about 67,000 inmates in Dachau and its subsidiary camps, 4,600 of them were women (4,000 Jewish women). There were a number of babies who had been born shortly before the liberation.
 
2. There were no three-year-old children in Dachau. [Unlike] Buchenwald concentration camp, there was no children’s barrack in Dachau. 

I have never heard of sexual abuse of children in Dachau concentration camp.

(Complete email exchange here.)

Continue reading “Diana Nyad’s Unspeakable Lie, part 1”

15 September 2018

Dear Reputable Historians,

You’ll recall that, back in 2011, CNN caught Diana Nyad lying about being the first woman to swim around Manhattan Island. In response, Ms. Nyad posted and quickly deleted a disingenuous non-apology. You can still find it here.

An excerpt:

The history is unclear. The dissemination of accurate information has not followed an empirical path. I am waiting for the most reputable historians of the sport to dig further and publish their research as to their collective best versions as to who did in fact circle Manhattan, when and how.

I write to you hoping that you’ll grab your shovels and resume digging.

Continue reading “Early Manhattan Women Swimmers on Film”