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  [91]Experience
  [92]Life and style

Experience: I tracked down my impostor

  I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading out a chapter I’d
  written. He was dressed like me. He had even copied my tattoos

  Dr Matt Lodder

  Fri 26 Mar 2021 06.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 26 Mar 2021 12.53 EDT
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  Dr Matt Lodder

  [ ] Dr Matt Lodder: ‘I don’t understand why he chose me.’ Photograph:
  Amit Lennon/The Guardian

  I’ve been an academic since 2013. I am a senior lecturer in art
  history, and director of US studies at the University of Essex. What
  drove me towards an academic career was my interest in tattooing. There
  is a very small group of tattoo historians in academia, so we all know
  one another well.

  In November 2017, [96]Anna Friedman, a Chicago-based academic with a
  similar specialism, contacted me. She had received a like on Instagram
  from an account she thought was interesting. Clicking on the profile,
  she saw it was a duplicate of her page and that the guy had also made a
  copy of her website, including her very specific biography, but under
  his own name. When she looked at his profile on [97]academia.edu, she
  instantly realised that his bio was a copy of mine; the papers he’d
  supposedly written were actually by me. He’d claimed to have given
  talks that I, or others in our academic circle, had given. Anna
  messaged me asking if I knew who this person was, but I had no idea.

  We started digging around, and things quickly became unsettling. I
  found a video clip of him at a conference, reading a chapter I’d
  written. He was dressed like me. Even his mannerisms and speech
  patterns were similar. Then I came across a picture of his hands, where
  he’d poorly copied my tattoos: the flowers on the backs of my hands,
  with the words “know more” and “artefact” written across the fingers.
  This man had been stealing my work and elements of my identity for
  years. It creeped me out.

  We found out that he was a seemingly high-flying master’s student at a
  university in California: he was winning awards, had scholarships and
  was working as a teaching assistant. In fact, when we approached his
  supervisors, they were shocked that he’d been submitting my work as his
  own. As far as they were concerned, he’d been a brilliant student.

  Searching my inbox, I found correspondence from someone claiming to be
  a PhD student, who was this same man under a fake identity. I often get
  students contacting me with an interest in my expertise; I consider it
  part of my job to help them out. For me, it was sometimes easiest to
  share work in progress when someone asked what I’d been working on, so
  this guy had got his hands on my unpublished research.

  We discovered he’d also taken magazine articles I’d written and added
  footnotes to them, stolen catalogue essays I’d authored, and taken
  other people’s work from old books and paraphrased it. I later asked
  what mark he’d got for a piece of my work and was told it had been
  given 95%, which in a way, I was pleased to hear.

  One of the strangest things was the effort he’d put in. Usually,
  plagiarism is a sign of laziness or an act of desperation. I think
  there was something about the thrill of the game and the performance
  for him. Not only was he copying people’s work, but he was regularly
  contacting the original authors, using bits of their life stories and
  weaving them into his own, before presenting it online.

Experience: I found the man who shot me, 46 years later

  Read more

  When we notified his university, it quickly launched an investigation,
  which led to him getting kicked out of his graduate programme, for
  repeated plagiarism. Some of the work should have been spotted by
  plagiarism checkers, but he’d been getting unpublished pieces from me,
  and claiming he preferred to submit his work in paper format as his
  home internet connection wasn’t good.

  After it all unravelled, he changed his social media profile picture:
  first to a screenshot from Citizen Kane, appropriately enough, and then
  to a strange illustration of a pig wearing a mask, which, someone told
  me, was from a Polish children’s book about the consequences of lying.
  Since then, I haven’t been able to find a record of him online. He just
  disappeared.

  I don’t understand why he chose me. I have an interesting niche
  subject, and love what I do, but I’m not the most prolific of
  academics. We never contacted the police, because we didn’t think he’d
  done anything illegal. It was really an issue of academic misconduct.
  The most upsetting thing – copying my hand tattoos – wasn’t something I
  could do anything about. He’s probably still walking around with those
  tattoos on his hands today.

  • As told to Amy Sedghi

  Do you have an experience to share? Email
  [98][email protected]
  Topics
    * [99]Life and style
    * [100]Experience

    * [101]Academics
    * [102]Tattoos
    * [103]features

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