For what it’s worth, I followed Len on Twitter/AO3 for kpop fandoms and I think “digital yellowface” is a reach. That Twitter screenshot you posted seems to associate diaspora with Asian-American, which is a false equivalence. Another screenshot mentions incorporating Chinese culture in her fics, but that doesn’t imply Chinese descent either. She did associate herself with West Asia/Middle East, but that doesn’t constitute yellowface (which refers to East/Southeast Asian identities).
Hello!
We had been aware of her using "Asia Minor" while in Kpop well before the post was written, and initially decided not to include it. We also thought it would have been a reach, to say that she had pretended to have been East Asian simply because of that definition, even if it was weird for her, after claiming for years to be an oppressed brown Maghrebi woman both on Twitter and on Tumblr, not to immediately respond that she was Riffian/Moroccan/Maghrebi and brown. She even had a CuriousCat account (the now-deleted @romiosini we used in the post) in which she would talk about nothing but the made-up stories of her life in the Maghreb and how constantly racist people had been to her once she arrived in France (she also neglected to mention that she was born a French citizen on Greek soil and her birth was registered at the French consulate, as she said in 2013 and 2015 when complaining about her name being French rather than Greek).
However, at the time we didn't know how far her bullying behavior and constant racefaking extended. We have received multiple messages and replies from people who said that they, too, thought that she was of East Asian descent, and some have even commented under our post:
While it may be true that Len never explicitly said she is Asian-American, she heavily implied it and made sure that people would not think of her otherwise, at least in that fandom.
It was also in the Kpop fandom that she used this clout to harass people and send death threats.
As of summer 2020, on her other now-deleted CuriousCat (@eightfigures, deleted because she is perfectly aware of just what a horrible picture it paints of her and how inconsistent the stories she would write there about her life were), she was bragging about having kicked a writer offline and often received anons congratulating her for having successfully combatted racism on her own. We were able to speak with the writer in question, who does not feel comfortable sharing their identity because of what Len put them through, but they confirmed that Len had spent 2 years (from 2018 to 2020) harassing them, sending death threats, and mocking their mental health problems, while softening her actions for her followers and excusing them as "a fight against racism". In truth, Len was just being Len; this writer had written a more popular fic than the ones Len was writing, and they stated that it was only after she vagueblogged about this fic's popularity that the writer was first harassed. This is, step by step, what happened in the TOG fandom: Len complained about bloggers being more popular than her, and little after they were attacked until they left the platform and/or the fandom. The author confirmed that they did write a thoughtless and racist tweet years before (nothing worse than Len's multiple rants about reverse racism and brown men being entitled, mind you) and had apologized profusely for it, something that Len has never done. Len went after them anyways, using the excuse of fighting racism, and made their life hell for two years.
In synthesis: Len didn't explicitly say that she was East Asian, but did everything in her power to heavily imply it for fandom points, including in the notes of her fic that she was writing them as a way to get closer to the culture of her ancestors. The pattern of behavior she exhibited in the TOG fandom (pretending to be the only real authority on characters because of lived experiences, ethnicity, or both, vagueblogging about people more popular than her, harassing them until they left, and trying to gain as much of a following as she could) is the same as what she did in Kpop.
Top writing tip: if the oc you create identifies as indigenous, presents themselves as an indigenous woman, puts indigenous North African in their blog bio, claims to be have been raised in the cultural practices and traditions of their claimed indigenous group, presents themselves as an authority on the history of that indigenous group and on their contemporary political struggles, claims to have been raised speaking and to be fluent in a language of that indigenous group, claims to be actively fighting for the protection, promotion and preservation of that language, and writes melodramatic purple prose about how deeply their states attempts to extinguish that language pain them and how much their languages perseverance personally means to them, well then, that character isn’t very likely to be much of a fan of an authoritarian ruler who forbade the speaking of indigenous languages and the practicing of indigenous customs. An authoritarian ruler who determined, and enforced, that there was only one national identity, that indigenous identity was not valid, legitimate or permissable, and that indigenous identity had no place in the national identity being reconstructed after regaining independence from colonial rule.
This might create a plot hole that stands out sharply to indigenous readers and readers of indigenous descent. They may find it confusing, alarming or distressing. They might plant a red flag in that plot hole. Perhaps the character only projects the local issues facing their indigenous community onto other regions of their indigenous community, without being aware of or properly researching the local history and context. Perhaps the characters fervour for decolonization and anti-imperialism outweighs the harm done to their wider indigenous community outside of their own local struggles. Perhaps it’s just the authors tankie love of authoritarian regime leaders being projected onto their oc.
TL;DR: if your indigenous North African oc stans regime leaders who oppressed your indigenous North African oc’s people, your indigenous readers might take note of that because the writing choice implies that the author is full of bull shit
Hello!
We really have nothing to add beside the screenshot, the link, and some ground information on who Habib Bourguiba was.
Bourguiba was the first president of independent Tunisia, and while a proponent of moderate policies and decolonization, he was the definition of authoritarian, to the point that he could be compared to Mussolini. He declared himself president for life 20 years into his one-party rule, and his dictatorship over Tunisia ended only when he was forcefully removed in 1987. His policies, including the idea that all Tunisians were Tunisian alone and should have no other identity, dealt a blow to vulnerable groups such as Amazigh Tunisians, who were deprived of their Amazigh identity and culture, and also of their basic rights. It's important to say that Bourguiba would also have people tortured.
This is not to say that Marwan can't play a negative role, as seen from the movie De Oost, but Len's complete dismissal of the issue at hand shows that she had absolutely no idea of what she was talking about, of who Bourguiba was, what he did to people of Amazigh identity, and the consequences that his actions have to this day.
It makes little to no sense that someone who is supposedly such a proponent of independent Amazigh identity (to the point of calling for the "death of the Makhzen," meaning the contemporary Moroccan state, in favor of demands for a Riffian Amazigh republic) would want someone like Bourguiba to be immortalized in a movie and be played by Marwan. This would undoubtedly lead to people perceiving Bourguiba and his cult of personality as less horrific than they actually were, a tendency visible even now in people thirst-posting about Marwan's character in De Oost.
This is, by the way, not to attack people who are writing works and posts centered on Marwan's character in De Oost. However, it is very strange that someone with such strong opinions regarding North African governments would even suggest the idea of a movie about Bourguiba being made after what he did to his own people and knowing how such movies are perceived by outsiders.
A Clarification Regarding LGBTmazight's Exposé and Bloggers Claiming there is Proof of her Identity:
In the past week, we have received these three questions multiple times, so we are going to answer them here before leaving you for the weekend:
Is the post doxxing?
No, it is not.
We shared only what Len herself put online first, and even then, as mentioned in the main post, we were careful not to include anything that revealed her full name, which she shared online multiple times even as an adult.
We also did not include many other things she openly discussed and posted herself, such as pictures of her family, of her home, and of her car with the license plate uncensored. In 2017, two weeks before before her 23rd birthday, she openly discussed her father's place of work, and since 2011 she has been talking openly about the occupations of her mother and at least one other adult family member. She also openly disclosed text messages between her and her family.
These are details that we would never reveal under any circumstances, and we were horrified at her disregard for her family's privacy and safety.
Are the photographs we used used to expose what she truly looks like pictures of her as a minor?
No, they are not.
The earliest picture we shared goes back to February 24th, 2014, when Len was 19 and fewer than 5 months away from turning 20. She shared them openly on Tumblr for a selfie game and was aware that the user who, at the time, was her girlfriend, had reblogged them.
Person X contacted me privately, and told me there is proof of Len's identity and all what you wrote in the post is a lie. Is it true? Did you make everything up?
No, we did not.
You can check for yourself how WayBack Machine works, but you will only find confirmation of the fact that it is impossible to fake entries.
We are curious to know what Len's proof of her identity could possibly be. So far, we've heard shifting stories about people seeing her father's passport, her passport, videos of her, or family photographs. To this we answer: we never denied that her father was born in Tangier and that Len was born in Athens. Regarding family photos, however, there is a great deal of doubt. Around 2016, she said that most if not all the pictures of her father's side of the family had been lost in a house fire, which was why she was unable to show them online (to hear her talk, this is only one of the many house fires that both sides of her family have endured). We have also never denied that her mother's family is ethnically Greek, because it's one of the few things Len rarely if ever changed over the years. Her mother has always been Greek and Len has always been born in Athens.
If she had an actual defense, she would have posted it already. She hasn't, because she doesn't have one. She pretended to speak Darija, pretended to have been poor and lived in the housing projects, pretended to have been a hijabi woman, and pretended to have lived in Morocco. And this is just a taster. She never had a problem mentioning her parents by full name on Twitter when she wanted to talk to Western Twitter users about how foreign and oppressed she and her family were, so the excuse that she has lots and lots of evidence regarding her identity but just can't post it because she would doxx herself is preposterous.
The fact that many Kpop fans are coming forward to say that they thought for years that Len was Chinese/Asian-American shows that this pattern of behavior (entering a fandom and ascending to the role of overly powerful authority figure by pretending to be the same ethnicity and race as the main characters/people in it) is one she has often repeated. We would not be surprised to find that her claims of being ethnically Jewish, for example, stem from Tumblr's celebration of the Jewish roots of the Marvel comics' creators and Stan Lee when the MCU fandom was in its heyday.
In addition, we noticed that none of the people who are defending her by claiming that there is proof of her identity are willing to address her dangerous political beliefs and views.
Len has shown herself to be a constant if not outright compulsive liar. The many pieces of information that she has thrown out over the years regarding who and what she is cannot be put together to create a coherent whole. It is impossible. And there is no defense in the world strong enough to overcome what she did to other people instead of, to quote a current phrase, getting off the computer and touching grass.
Apparently, our original post has now spread to the Kpop side of Twitter, which is not something we predicted, and we received screenshots of tweets regarding that.
Len has spent years being active in and writing for various Kpop fandoms, going by "figure8", "8figures", "8loops", "junmotions", and other similar nicknames. The Old Guard was and still is a very small fandom, and it's very obvious that she took advantage of a space that she could easily colonize. She played up her Moroccan ancestry a couple of months after the movie came out, changed her Tumblr URL, pretended she was fully Moroccan for a couple of weeks, and wrote "informative" posts regarding North African culture.
As we have already mentioned, this pattern of pretending to be a certain ethnicity was not exclusive to The Old Guard. She has been doing it for years, and one of the examples can be found in the main post, namely in the screenshot where she said that her grandmother was of Romani origins so she could lecture people on Dick Grayson's racial identity. She did a very similar thing in the Seventeen fandom, and possibly others.
On Twitter, she said in late 2013 and for some time after that that at least part of the Greek side of her family is native of Smyrna, a Greek city that is now part of Turkey and was destroyed in 1922 at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. She was adamant that Smyrna is not Turkish, and found it offensive when people would refer to it as such, displaying a great amount of pride specifically in the fact that she was descendant of the survivors of the Great Fire of Smyrna (in other words, always made sure that her Twitter followers knew that she is of Greek origins):
(link)
This is why it was a surprise, initially, to discover that on CuriousCat (a second profile called "eightfigures" that she has deleted little after the post was posted) she would define herself as being from "Asia Minor". That definition is often understood to mean "Turkey", and no one who is so proud of being Greek and so against Turkey would normally define themselves as such. It took a moment to realize she was using that convoluted definition because she was in various Kpop fandoms at the time, and was doing the same thing she would do in TOG months later: using fine-print definitions to gain power and school others in how to properly write the culture of the fandom she was interested in. In this case, she tried to pass of her supposed "Anatolian Greek" ancestry she also occasionally deployed to say that she was not "white on both sides" as her being Asian.
For someone who claims to have spent the past years being loud and proud of her North African, specifically Riffian Moroccan Amazigh origins, it sure is weird that she was suddenly shy about this side of her identity to the point of hiding it completely.
However, she didn't stop there. Not only did she use brownface in TOG, but she appears to have used digital yellowface in the Kpop fandom, as these tweets we have received mention. Because of their length, they are under the cut.
Which completely contradicts her note on curiouscat which states she is eastern orthodox growing up in a Catholic country
https://curiouscat.qa/eightfigures/post/872205166
Hello!
We have received your second anon too, but thankfully there are Muslim people in our group too who can agree that what she was saying did not make sense.
First of all, she's described her father as being part of many religions through the years. Before Len got into The Old Guard fandom, according to her stories, her father had been raised by an atheist Marxist father (a shaman in her 2014 essay, before the narrative that her family is Marxist began) who had raised her father to be atheist, and he only converted to Orthodox Christianity in adulthood. She also claimed to be ethnically Jewish, but not religiously Jewish. Once she entered The Old Guard, her father became "culturally Muslim." The tweets we found in @buckyclint often talk about her and her family going to church, but there are no mentions of anything Muslim (mosques, celebrations of Ramadan or other important holidays, etc).
Second, not all women begin wearing hijab at the same time. Some do when (or if) they start their period, others when they get married, some never. Every hijabi's experience is different. Girls wear the hijab from a very young age outside of religious services only if they come from very conservative and traditional families or areas, and it is very doubtful that Len's father is a highly religious Muslim man - or that he is Muslim at all.
Third, just as there weren't any pictures of her with curly hair, she never showed any of herself wearing a hijab or even a headscarf. On @romiosini, she posted a picture of herself at age 14 that we didn't share for obvious reasons. She wasn't wearing one then, and the selfies we shared in the main post are dated to 2014, when she was 19. It is impossible that she began wearing the hijab full-time when she started puberty and did so for 10 years, and yet did not share a single photo depicting herself in it through her whole Internet career. She was simply not raised Muslim, and those tags are another lie. Her pretending to have been a hijabi girl is also extremely offensive.
She also did not grow up in the suburbs of Paris. As she said herself, her family had a house in a suburb in the North of France, and she lived in the 9th Arrondissement (in the city of Paris itself) during high school.
I’ve seen some posts talking about how you must be doing this because you want to be the top of the fandom, or whatever, and while I don’t believe it I am wondering why? Like, is this for fandom like a couple people are aging? I don’t think so, but it’s being circulated so I wanted to ask.
Hello!
We don't doubt that this kind of rumor is spreading as a way to shift the attention from the actual issue at hand.
It is honestly kind of ridiculous, because we are here anonymously and, once the questions we receive have all been answered, this blog will remain online without revealing its sources. This blog will not become a writer/artist/fandom blog, but will stay as is. The earlier posts you can see of aesthetically-pleasing pictures were reblogged solely to make Tumblr realize there are actual people behind this profile and it's not handled by a bot.
We did not do this to become prominent in fandom, but to warn people that one of the biggest bloggers in fandom was spreading misinformation and was racist herself, while harassing especially other people of color with accusations of being racist, fanatics, etc. Finding out about her hideous political beliefs only convinced us even more that she uses her platforms to harm people, inviting her followers to dogpile onto those who disagree with her, as well as spreading very dangerous schools of thought, and that something had to be done sooner rather than later.
Hi, previous greek anon again. Because I got really shocked when I read the call out post last night and I'm getting more disturbed the more I think about it today (i really don't know if i could trust anyone online again) , I want to state that my previous anon wasn't meant to defend her I just wanted to clarify some things in current greek reality. Also I remembered some more stuff that got me very ??? while I was following her. I'm pretty sure in a post she wrote about Athens she mentioned her grandfather is a lawyer. She had also mentioned her grandparents had gifted her jewelry from a very famous high class boutique/workshop in Athens. I remember thinking of it as pretty contradictory to the "kid of poor immigrants" narrative. I can't find the posts because surprise! she disabled her tags on her blog
Hello!
We have received and appreciated your first ask!
To clarify: we are aware that Greek Communists were indeed treated as horrifically as you have written. However, we were discussing that her specific claim in that situation (thrown into vats of acid in response to a Ukrainian asking teenagers not to use the hammer and sickle without understanding what it meant and the history of the USSR) fit her overdramatic and anachronistic modus operandi to the point that we spent some time researching that very specific notion and weren't able to find anything regarding it, neither in Greece nor in Morocco.
In 2016 she did write that her grandfather left her a vintage Mercedes, supposedly of great value, but she never specified which grandfather.
(link)
There are stories regarding her mother's upbringing that made us greatly doubt what she was saying regarding her grandparents being extremely poor, so we do not doubt that her grandfather could have been a lawyer.
We hope you understand our choice to not publish your previous ask because of its disturbing content, which is of course not your fault.
Ages ago (I want to maybe say 2015 but it could have been earlier) she had a fundraising post for funds to go to uni in Canada, and I'm really hoping that she genuinely needed money because her parents weren't supporting her anymore or something, because otherwise she was literally scamming people out of money. Also, I wonder how aware the people she knows irl are of all this. She talked about her girlfriend and some irl friends a lot on her tumblr and twitter. So do those people know? Do they not know she's race faking online, or has she moved to race faking irl or....?
Hello!
We are surprisingly prepared for the first part of this question, and we think others may have been suspicious of what she was saying, too. At the time we began archiving her posts, some of the pages were already saved.
If this is the fundraiser you remember (she put up several over the course of the years), then it was initiated on May 29th, 2014. At the time, she said she was going to a university whose identity kept changing on Twitter. She was asking her followers to donate $11,000 so that she could keep studying, and said that she had to keep her GPA above 3.8 in order to keep her scholarship (and, on Twitter, her place in the honors college):
(archive, proof that this blog is Len's: bio page. This is the blog that appeared both in @romiosini and @buckyclint).
On Twitter, she claimed in late 2014 that her university tuition was $65,000 and that she had a merit scholarship that covered part of that:
(link)
No college in America had tuition plus fees plus room and board that was so high at the time. This is a list of the most expensive colleges in America during the academic year 2012-2013, and all were extremely pricey private universities, none of which she claimed to have attended. She intermittently claimed to be a Harvard student, but Harvard tuition plus room and board plus fees in 2014 amounted to $56,407. Harvard doesn't have a honors program either.
Apart from Harvard, the two universities she claimed to attend do have honors programs. One requires a GPA of 3.2 to remain in the program, and the other requires a GPA of 3.0. In addition, colleges in America do not typically require a GPA to remain that high in order to keep a scholarship. 3.0 to 3.5 is more typical.
In 2015, she did go to university in Canada and was there for just over two years, with her parents sending her money for expenses while she bragged about being a “first-class baby”:
(link)
She never ended up graduating.
Regarding the second part of your question, since we don’t have access to what she is like in real life, the answer is more nebulous and would involve much more speculation than we’re comfortable with. She may or may not have been friends with the people she mentioned. The photos she used to post on @romiosini showed a largely white group of female friends.
In 2018, she mentioned a group of friends with varying degrees of understanding of Darija (her being one of them), but it has already been established that she speaks neither Darija nor Arabic:
Is she saying the gulag is made up or am I reading too much into it?
Hello! As you may have noticed, as of now she has deactivated her @romiosini Twitter account, therefore we cannot see the post you are linking (we opened the submission box in case any of you wants to send screenshots for further clarification), but no, that is not her point of view regarding Gulags: she thinks of them as having been positive places and can't wait for the revolution to come so she can become head of the party and put people in them.
We gave a more in depth response here regarding her issue with genocide-denying and Gulags.
Under the cut the screenshot of a similar question we received.
I believe you - I can't not after reading the post and provided evidence and seeing how well thought out and long this was - but do you have additional posts about her denying genocide? As someone who's family has been hurt by that, I can't stop thinking about it.
Hello! Yes, we do have more evidence.
Currently, she has deleted her @romiosini Twitter account, but as per Twitter rules, she can still reactivate it within 30 days. We are going to include both links to her account and to the Archive in case she does.
Unfortunately, she privatized her account (supposedly because some anarchists were calling her out on something she said, as far as we can tell) before we were able to archive her multiple Twitter threads regarding the Holodomor, holding the position that it never happened and that she knew who was behind the rumor that it did (like any other conspiracy theorist, Len spent years claiming to know the names of the Nazi Ukrainians that spread this rumor, but never provided any evidence regarding it).
However, we were able to save the many tweets she wrote about how much she despises Ukrainians and mocks them for grieving the millions of deaths caused by the USSR (link, archive), as well as other tweets in which she claims Gulags were humane re-education camps and that she can't wait to become the head of the party so she can put people in them (link, archive).
She may say that she was joking, but this is nothing to joke about. It's estimated that approximately 1.5 million people were killed in the Gulags, and even the Soviet Union admitted to sending over 10 million people there between 1934 and 1947. The actual number of prisoners is likely much higher, and even the ones who weren’t murdered were often brutally tortured (britannica.com, mdpi.com, opendemocracy.com).
On her fan account (@junmotions, still active as of August 13th, 2021, but privatized - link and archive to her carrd to demonstrate the account is hers), she screenshotted the tweet of a Ukrainian and affirmed that they had no right to complain about teenagers who know nothing about Communism but have the hammer and sickle in their bio because her (Len’s) family was tortured and thrown into vats of acid for being Communist. We were unable to find any evidence regarding Communists, either in Morocco or Greece, being thrown into vats of acid in the past century.
(link)
If this weren’t enough, she tweeted this as well:
(link)
If she is calling the inhabitants of Xinjiang terrorists, then (edited 8/17/2021 after receiving some clarification) as well as tankie arguments, Len is repeating the official propaganda lines offered by the CCP regarding this situation: the people in Xinjiang are separatists, attempting sedition, and extremists. They are a risk for the CCP and need to be “re-educated”.
This conspiracy theory can be found on Google, but we won’t link any of it because it is frankly disturbing. However, we can link this post on Reddit, in which a similar viewpoint is mocked and ridiculed by other leftists.
Hi! Dunno if it has been asked already, regarding the racefake post, but is there any documentation about the mention that she called Marwan Kenzari a racial slur? The post was very detailed in other regards, but I felt like that point felt rather weak without any documented proof. Other than that, thank you for the very detailed post. Very important, considering what kind of power this person has had in this fandom. Using the way back machine was very smart, also.
Hello! This is the question we have received the most, so we'll write only a single answer for it and include the screenshots of the other questions that anons have asked on the subject. We didn't include the racial slur in the post because it needed context and translations in order for people to understand the gravity of what she said, and we felt like the post was already very long.
You may notice we edited the post to clarify that it's the French version of the slur. This is the post: the slur is in the tags, highlighted.
ok my brother. that is really the look of an 80s sand-ni**er and that's all i have to say (link, archive)
The word she used is an extremely offensive slur meant to insult North African people, so offensive that even MENA people rarely joke about it. She was pretending to reclaim the insult, but clearly was not personally aware of the story behind it or how offensive its implications are. She was trying to act like a Black American reclaiming the "n-word".
She is now perfectly aware of just how awful this word is because in the Oppression Rant (archive), she claimed that this insult had been hurled at her father, and that the experience was extremely demeaning and humiliating. She either decided to use it anyway, or had no idea of how awful it was before doing some research for the tear-jerking story regarding her father.
What we can say is this: if her father had truly been called that word by his own students' parents, she would have never used it as a "fun" insult, especially not in a public online space. It doesn't matter that she censored it with an asterisk; the intention was clear, and every French-speaking individual who looked at her post knew exactly what she meant.
If you do not trust us regarding the translation of this term, this is how it is contextualized and translated both on Context.Reverso and WordReference. It is a term born out of the mouths of French colonizers.
Race as Social Capital: LGBTmazight’s Blatant Racefaking for Fandom Points
The Old Guard fandom has its own HIVliving, MedievalPOC, Rose Christo, white girl who is totally a Cherokee Princess because she did a test and found that she's 1% Native American, and the charade has been going on for too long.
This post is about Len (better known as LGBTmazight, romiosini, figure8, junmotions). The information compiled here has been found and organized by people of many ethnicities, including those she pretends to be (namely two Moroccans, one of whom is Amazigh, who were raised in Morocco and speak the language), who are now exhausted by her uncontrolled racism. This post is not an invitation to send her hate: it’s a compilation of her unbridled racefaking for internet points, and comes with the invite of blocking her and not using her as a reference when it comes to information regarding MENA countries. 99% of what she says, she copies from Google and often attributes to the wrong country.
As of summer 2021, Len is claiming to be a brown Maghrebi-Greek woman who comes from poverty and whose parents weren't able to afford to give her an adequate education, works in manual labor, was raised between Greece and Morocco for the first seven years of her life, is dark-skinned enough to get harassed by the police everywhere she goes, and has learned pride in her heritage from her Muslim Moroccan father. She claims to be able to speak, among other languages, Darija, Arabic, and Tmazight.
However, in her internet career Len has also identified as being: white, white-passing, brown, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, animist from a family of shamans and in line to become the next "Darwisa", French, Spanish, Peloponnesian/Pontic/Anatolian Greek, Sephardic Jewish, Jewish with family “in Europe during WW2", partly Romani, Moroccan, specifically Riffian Moroccan with solely Amazigh descent, and with "close ties to Asia Minor". Her economic status has shifted from being able to live in the world's most expensive neighborhoods and attending fancy private schools during the Global Recession to having to ask her followers for change. According to her stories, her family has been at the center of every tragedy that happened in North Africa and Europe since the beginning of the 1900s.
This to say: Len, LGBTmazight, is a racefaker on the same level as HIVliving, a parasite who latches onto racial stereotypes and applies them to her person to give herself, as well as her followers, the right to harass, abuse, and send death threats to people who do not follow or support her narrative. It will be brought up later, but the Moroccan Amazigh person who participated in writing the post, as well as other MENA individuals, were appalled by the blatant racism, Orientalism, antiblackness, fetishization, and White Savior Syndrome displayed by Len, as well as her open disrespect for actual Moroccan traditions, people, and culture. Although this began as a light-hearted research, it soon became clear that Len's racism, xenophobia especially against Italians and Ukrainians, antisemitism, and downright disgusting behavior are incredibly serious issues, to the point that one of the MENA individuals behind this post became physically ill from seeing what she puts online.
None of the information compiled here is a product of doxxing: it is a collection of what Len herself has put online over the years, and let it be known that we were gracious enough to not post her, her parents', and her sister's full and legal names and faces despite the fact that Len has shared them multiple times.
As an appetizer, here’s the face of the “racialized” brown woman who claims to be constantly abused and racially profiled because of her dark skin and North African features:
(link, archive)
Although in the past she identified as they/them or he/him, on her current Twitter her pronouns are she/her. This account will do the same.
And here is what she thinks of Black and Jewish people: they are obstacles to the attentions she should, in her opinion, receive for the made-up abuse she rants about online. Her platforms were never about defending, representing, and protecting minorities; it was always a stage for her to grab the attention of well-meaning people. About actual minorities, she couldn’t care less and considers them a nuisance:
(link, archive)
(In these tweets she is talking about xenophobia, something she has said is only ever brought up as a way to shift the conversation away from racism. How the tables have turned, Len.)
A summary of the contents of the post: Len is 25% Moroccan at most, was born and raised in Europe, never lived in the Maghreb, doesn’t speak the language, didn’t learn about Islam from her father, never suffered any racially-charged abuse, and never lived in poverty. Her father is a tenured professor and has been one since the 1990s, and her mother is also an extremely well-respected professor; they have dozens of publications between them, and her mother seems to have written the text for her field. Although we have no certainties regarding their monthly income, it is easy to say they are wealthy: both Len and her sister were sent to private schools all their lives, her family could afford to own/rent multiple residencies at the same time, drive around in expensive cars, go on vacation often, and buy Apple products immediately after release. Everything she has said since she started looking for fandom clout is a lie and she has used your desire to be good people to her advantage. Extensive proof is below the cut, and mind that this is only the tip of the iceberg: we have more and it only gets worse.
Hélène, we were initially open to dialogue, but after seeing that you’re a genocide denier who keeps inventing stories of abuse to get pity from people while you spend your time harassing actual PoC and other minorities, as well as being someone who has no problems calling Marwan Kenzari the French version of the insult “sand-ni**er”, we realized you are not redeemable in any way.
We already know she’s going to screenshot this and whine about it on Twitter, because even if she likes to portray herself as a great debater, she has never been able to hold a single online conversation without first victimizing herself and crying about being abused, then screenshotting and asking her followers to harass the people who disagreed with her. We are not doing this for her; she’s neither important nor special enough for that. We are doing this to get rid of the racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and fetishization of MENA people that she has spent a year aiding.
Asks are open with the possibility to leave anons.
We have no doubt that Len is going to cry online about being persecuted because she is a WoC, about how this account is spreading lies about a woman whose only crime was to educate people in fandom about the racism both she and Marwan Kenzari suffer from (only when she’s not calling him slurs, of course). We have no doubts that she will loudly begin speculating about who might be behind this account, will start sending anon hate again (possibly death threats), and will bright out a fabricated family history in order to insist that everything makes sense when you really look at it. She will post selfies with filters, artificially curled hair, and/or a deep suntan (she is able to spend long periods of time on prolonged vacations, and has plenty of time to sunbathe), but if those were the criteria to be considered PoC, then the Kardashians would be Black women too. Don’t believe a word of it: what we have compiled here is nothing but what she has been putting online for the past ten years, and if most stories contradict each other, that’s on her and not on us for noticing.
Before she gets a chance to do it herself and twist things, we will say: the issue is not and never will be that she feels unfairly divorced from a culture she never knew. If she had consistently admitted to having one Moroccan grandparent and was raised privileged and functionally white but wanted to know more and had a lot to learn, that would have been fine. What pushes this over into full-on racefaking is her digging her heels and actually brownfacing and pretending to have grown up in a culture she clearly knows nothing about, and harassing and mocking the people who actually do. It doesn't matter if she has a non-white grandfather: DNA means nothing and neither does her last name. What she has done is still racefaking, and no amount of "but pale white-passing mixed people are still POC" is going to make it right. She knows perfectly well what she did: she has spent years invoking the one-drop rule, a white supremacist concept, to make herself look better online. Furthermore, she is no better than Elizabeth Warren for having done it. The proof is in her escalating lies: she went from having a half-Moroccan, Christian father who was raised in Spain to having a Muslim, fully Moroccan father who left Morocco only in adulthood. If that single Moroccan grandparent had been enough to make her a WoC, she wouldn't have escalated things to the point of saying that she lived in Morocco herself.
Proof that the @buckyclint account is hers: link to her old blog on @buckyclint (archive), link to her old blog on @romiosini (archive).
You will notice that most of her lies come after 2013, when she permanently switched from her @buckyclint to the @romiosini one, which is the one she uses for her “activism”, and that everything she used to post before that year greatly contradicts what she began writing afterwards. This is not because she got closer to her heritage or was able to free herself from the “internalized racism” she claims to be a survivor of: it’s because in 2013 she moved to the US and within a year or two ditched most, if not all, of her IRL friends (all in very public Twitter tantrums, and then blocking them), meaning that there was no one who would’ve been able to hold her accountable for the lies she was telling.
But what made her switch accounts and kick-started all of this in the first place? Here are the tweets in which she is pissy because, in her opinion, not everything is about PoC and social justice, and she wrote a post about reverse racism people rightfully didn’t like:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
This is when she began receiving criticism for her tweets and the possibly multiple posts about reverse racism (posts she has deleted since then), and her response was to immediately begin writing that she is a “white passing PoC” and therefore no one is allowed to tell her anything. This is a pattern she has used many, many times to defend the horrible things she says, from racism to antisemitism. Up to you to decide if those are the words of someone who has gone through racial abuse all their life.
Once again, this is the face of the woman who keeps claiming to be brown, with a need to straighten her hair, and who is constantly targeted because of her race, with people being able to recognize her as Moroccan, Arab, specifically Amazigh, or even “read [her] as Muslim,” whatever that means:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
These pictures were not chosen because of the faces she is making or how she’s dressed: they are some of the few in which she didn’t apply heavy filters or positioned herself in the shadows/weird lightning to make her skin look darker. She stopped posting selfies the moment she began pushing the narrative that she is a brown Moroccan woman.
For comparison, this is how she portrayed herself in a recent picrew.me: with a skintone that is three shades darker and Afro-textured hair:
(link, archive)
She also posted one in which she defines the hijab, religious garb of a faith she’s never practiced and knows nothing about, as being part of the “Len gender spectrum”, and in a different one portrayed herself as wearing cornrows.
Len would not be racially profiled in France, North America, or anywhere else: she looks white, she is pale, and she has naturally straight hair (wavy if we’re being generous. Despite her claims that her natural hair has 2C/3A curls, there is photographic evidence that she had straight hair by age 6). In a full decade of online presence, Len has not posted a single picture of herself with the curly hair she supposedly has, and all the members of her family (parents, sister, maternal grandparents) have straight hair.
She insists that because of these looks she is “brown and MENA”. To us, including the people who are actually Moroccan, she looks at best Greek (even when she’s heavily tanned) and most definitely not someone who would be racially profiled and targeted.
There is no gatekeeping behind the assertion that Len is white rather than being a “white-passing PoC,” as she defined herself at some point: light-skinned MENA people absolutely exist, but Len is just not MENA. Before she began this charade of being an oppressed person of color, she used to say that she was proud to be half-Andalusian (South Spanish), and admitted that her father has been raised in Spain, considers himself Spanish, and that at the very least her grandmother is Spanish too:
(link, archive)
@Capet_Ier my dad is spanish :) (link, archive)
(link, archive)
Her grandmother being from Seville means she was Spanish, and even if it were true that they were “not sure” about her being Romani (as of 2016 she was obsessing over Dick Grayson and attempting to school people on his racial identity - sounds familiar?), it still means she wasn’t anywhere close to the culture, confirming she was not Romani in any significant way. Keep in mind that the second tweet was posted in 2014, long after she had supposedly stopped “lying” about being white.
Going by her own admission, her father is at most half-Moroccan and, by consequence, she is at most a quarter Moroccan. She has never lived in the country and therefore, even if part of her blood is technically Moroccan, Moroccan people see her as a foreigner. She was not raised in the culture and never put any effort in educating herself, and is white and privileged enough to be breathtakingly racist against the people she is now claiming to be a part of.
Her lack of knowledge regarding the culture she claims to be native of has nothing to do with “internalized racism”: not only she has mentioned that she began “re-discovering” her “roots” and unlearning this internalized racism at age 18 (2012) or 19 (2013), but in 2011, in the year she was still supposedly hiding this MENA identity, she was sharing that her father had been born in Morocco and spoke Arabic at home. She considered these notions to be exotic nuggets of identity that held no weight in her day-to-day life:
@Scouthy @samyyy_ Morocco, he was born in Tangier like my dad *-* (link, archive)
My dad who speaks arabic is awesome. It makes me want to learn. (link, archive)
As of 2016, she was still writing about having been born and raised in Europe for the first six/seven years of her life:
(link, archive)
In 2014 she admitted that she had been to Tangier once, as a child, and in 2016 said once more that she had no firsthand knowledge of North Africa:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
In 2018, when the narrative about her tragic past presented a more solid base, she began saying that she had been raised between Morocco and Greece for the first seven years of her life. She then added that she lived there long enough to speak French with a “Maghrebi accent”, which brought much abuse to her. North African people do not have a Maghrebi accent when they speak French: they are taught to speak French with a Parisian accent. Len also seems to have spent a long time under the impression that “MENA” and “Arab” mean the same thing; if she had truly been in contact with Imazighen or even MENA people, she would’ve known that that is not true and also extremely offensive:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
As of 2016, the accent she had to get rid of was Belgian:
(link, archive)
She cannot have had both accents, and all clues bring to the Belgian accent, as being the one she actually spoke with.
Despite having been online sharing her every breath for five years, at this point, it is only in 2014 that she began forming the “I’m so Moroccan” narrative, and did so by talking about her grandfather’s death. Except t
he language she mentions him speaking is not spoken in the area which she pretends to be from
: Tashelhit is
not
spoken in North Morocco, but south of Marrakech. Years later, her grandfather was no longer from Tangier but from a village near Chefchaouen, a city that is
still
in the North.
(link, archive)
There is a clue, here: at this point in time, she had clearly decided that her grandfather had to be Moroccan-from-Morocco, but she hadn’t yet chosen his ethnic group. So she picked the first exotic-sounding language she was able to find when looking at a list of languages spoken in Morocco.
In the same Twitter thread, she complains about her father not teaching her the language:
(link, archive)
In the same year, she said her father is Sephardic Jewish and that he spoke to her in Yiddish. Jewish Moroccan people do not speak Yiddish.
(link, archive)
Two years later, she made a list of the languages her father spoke and Tashelhit and Yiddish are not featured. Darija, a language she would complain about having spoken as a child but having lost as she grew up, is not mentioned a single time.
(link, archive)
In the same thread she adds that he speaks Italian, English because he went to an American school, Swahili because he traveled through Africa in the 1970s, and Hebrew because he was raised by a rabbi (Len seems to be under the impression that Jewish people outside of Israel normally talk in Hebrew. That, or she has no idea that Yiddish and Hebrew are two different languages).
Her linguistic ignorance had the occasion to shine in the TOG fandom, as she seems to be under the impression that Joe (who, historically speaking, is an Egyptian Fatimid and that Netflix has canonized as being Tunisian) would actually be a Moroccan Amazigh man, and her need to prove that she is just like her headcanon of him led her to make some foolish choices, such as using Darija-English forums.
She seems to be under the impression that Tamazight, which she is now claiming as her native tongue, is a dying language due to European colonialism, and that Amazigh people are going extinct. Both notions are untrue: according to the 2016 census, there are 20 million Amazigh people living in Morocco alone and Tamazight is a language spoken by 30 million.
In April 2021, she penned a poem about her woes regarding this (imaginary) loss:
(link, archive)
She writes that she “witnesses the attempted murder of her language” and that she looks so Moroccan that an old lady with a “toothless grin” offers her fruit because she recognizes her as one of them. It doesn’t take much to realize that this is an incredibly racist depiction of Moroccan people based only on what Western medias portray of the country.
These are the thoughts of an ignorant tourist who still believes in the made-up innocence of the old world. This is the definition of fetishization and Orientalism.
Notice how she implies that her grandmother came from a community that wears siyalas, a traditional Moroccan tattoo given only to Amazigh women who live in extremely traditional and often isolated communities, when Len herself stated that her grandmother on her father’s side is Spanish.
Further proof that she has never been to Marrakech is that she describes the city as having “blue doors” (Marrakech is known for being a red city), states that the soldiers came from the sea (Marrakech is surrounded by land), and somehow in her vision of Morocco, Marrakech and Tangier are two neighboring cities (there is a distance of 502 km, 321 miles, between them).
Of note, the “toothless old lady” episode is reused: she initially wrote in her TOG fanfic “as an ancient city”, posted in August 2020. In the notes, she never says that it is based on her actual experiences, and, to make things worse, Joe is gifted a fruit that grows only in Nigeria, Southern Cameroon, Ghana, and Congo. Len thinks of Africa as a country, rather than a continent, and placing such fruit in Morocco demonstrates that she has never been there.
On various occasions she has used the word “tbarkallah”, Darija for “God bless,” in a way that Moroccan people do not use it. She chopped off the ubiquitous “3lik/alik” and used it as an American-style mic drop, ignorant of the fact that MENA people use it as a compliment:
(link, archive)
She has also recently used the word “inshallah”. That word isn’t in Darija, it’s in Modern Standard Arabic. If she truly spoke Darija, she would have written it as “nchalla”, and it’s likely that she put it there to, once again, show her followers how culturally Muslim she is:
(link, archive)
And then there is this list of tags:
(link, archive)
“Che3ndek al3yel” means “What is wrong, (male) child?” or “Do you have kids?”. In the context Len used it for it means nothing;
On the same page of the forum Darija-English Forum where she found “che3ndek al3yel”, she was able to find the word “tla7″, which means “leave” or “get out” and which she also used incorrectly.
She copied and pasted these words from this page, blindly trusting the English translation to be correct. It wasn’t, and these aren’t the mistakes of someone who is re-learning a language as an adult, these are the mistakes of someone who has never heard a single word of it. What she wrote is nonsensical gibberish.
You will notice that the word “hlm” can be spotted. If she had the intention to use it as the Darija word “dream,” then she conjugated it incorrectly; if she meant it as “HLM,” then she was referring to Housing at Moderate Rent, a form of low-income housing that can be found mostly in France and where she claims to have lived much of her life.
At this point anybody who is reading has already guessed that this is a lie too: Len’s parents, and by consequence her too, as she still lives with them, are filthy rich. Len spent her teenage years living in the expensive 9th Arrondissement of Paris, went to an international private high school whose tuition goes from €10,000 to €16,000 (she was in high school between 2008 and 2012, the years of the Global Recession), drove around in a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and had multiple residencies (an apartment in Paris, an apartment in Athens, a house in Lille, a house in Washington DC provided by her parents’ job, and possibly a villa in Seville).
I love living in the 9th [Arrondissement] because you meet half of the Parisian political life when you go out to buy bread. (link, archive)
I dared to remove “Cours Hattemer” from Facebook. I put Panthéon-Sorbonne. I am scared. (link, archive)
(link, archive)
@scouthy the campus is CRAZY, it’s not the first time I’ve been there. Did you know we have a villa across from the Clintons? (link, archive)
@RomKP too easy too :) Do you live in Lille really or in the suburbs? I have a house in Villeneuve d’Ascq x) (link, archive)
(link, archive)
20 degrees in Seville tomorrow. I have a villa there. I have decided, I’m going. (link, archive)
Her biggest problems in life? That she couldn’t have the new iPhone now now now (when she already had one), and that she had to bring 50 kg (110 lbs) of clothes to the US:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
She was also prone to referring to her parents as “rich assholes” and to saying that her wealth didn’t make her life better:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
Unless her parents suddenly got rich as the Recession hit and then lost everything within less than ten years, Len has never known poverty in her entire life. She has never lived in the HLM, never had to wonder where her next meal was coming from, and most definitely wasn’t raised by a Marxist-Communist family with her exact views as she is now claiming. We had the occasion of chatting with some ex-friends of hers, and they all confirmed that Len grew up in privilege and while it is technically possible that her parents lived in poverty in their younger years, “[B]elive me, she never did.”
Including all the screenshots would take too long, but it takes a quick tour of her Twitter to see that, while she was crying poverty and saying that she worked awful manual labor jobs, she would spent every summer in Greece. Anybody who has travelled internationally knows that flying from the US/Canada to Europe is very expensive, not to mention that no person who is as poor as she claims to be would be able to afford to leave their jobs to go on vacation for weeks on end, nor would the job they abandoned be waiting for their return.
Why believe this rather than her current narrative? Because for all of these early claims, there is proof (the schools she went to, her parents’ prestigious positions, expensive trips and restaurant outings, photos of her shopping trips with friends, the house her family owns in France), compared to none for the “political activism” she claims to be a part of, nor of the poverty, nor of the notion that she’s brown. During this time, Len would also proudly boast about her inconsiderate behavior at pricey bars, breaking glasses and finding it funny. Len herself admitted, before she started this narrative of being oppressed, that she lived a privileged “Gossip Girl” lifestyle:
(link, archive)
Her identity of MENA woman living in poverty is also completely debunked by how she would joke about committing terroristic acts with her dad:
@_Mayda with my dad we look at where [politicians’] apartments are and plan to put bombs in them later (link, archive)
These aren’t the words of people who could be arrested if they make such statements in a public place. These aren’t the words typed by someone who knows that their father gets racially profiled and lives with the constant danger of being harmed by the police.
The point is, despite the stories Len has told about how her father had a gun pointed at his face while she was in the car with him: (link, archive - read at your own discretion and we won’t use screenshots of this because what she says is based on disgusting racial stereotypes. From this point on, we will refer to this post as “Oppression Rant”), they never happened. They are a fantasy: her father is a well-off man with tenure, someone who has contacts in multiple countries and probably friends who are lawyers, and who, with a single phone call to the press, could raise hell; he looks like he is Southern European and is not someone who would be automatically profiled as “Arabe”; in 2013, she was tweeting about asking cops for help; in 2014, she quoted her mother as saying “The cops at home don’t shoot people” during the first part of her “I’m a brave protester” narrative:
Can we talk about the fact that I had to ask the cops to escort me in Pigalle because I was being followed lol let’s stop for a moment (link, archive)
(link, archive)
Are these the words of someone who has been terrorized by the police since they were a child? Are these the words of someone whose father or husband has been held at gunpoint? And if her defense is that the first or even second tweet were made up, the question is: why would someone LARP as liking the police after such horrifying experiences?
This is because she hadn’t yet formed the narrative that she was oppressed by the police. In October 2014, she said that her father had always taught her to “never get arrested” (archive), but the story of how she was in the “beat-up” family car with him didn’t form until 2021.
During almost all of 2014, she was a big fan of Shonda Rhimes’ show Scandal, which centered around a Black female character and dealt heavily with Black issues (the Scandal tag on her blog: link, archive): she was in the middle of her Scandal phase when she started posting about how she was a person of color and in danger from the police.
The 2021 story of how she was in the Toyota with her dad is clearly ripped from the 2016 murder of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man who was killed by a police officer named Jeronimo Yanez while his girlfriend and her daughter were in the car. Like Len says she was, the child was specifically in the backseat. In Europe around the time Len was growing up, children her age usually sat in the front.
Appropriating Black people’s culture and trauma is nothing new, for Len: she now refers to herself as “afro-centrée”/“afrocentric”, a definition MENA people do not use to define themselves, and that is not used in MENA countries. It is a concept that is almost exclusively used by Black Americans who are reclaiming their West African heritage.
In a poem written in 2016, she mentions that her father told her “You need to be twice as good for half of what they have”:
(link, archive)
That is not a quote from her father; it is a quote she took from Scandal, season 3 episode 1, It’s Handled (aired 2013) and that she doctored hoping no one would notice. It is a racially charged motto written by Black writers and meant to talk about the experience of Black people in the US. The expression is used almost solely by Black Americans - usually Black women.
Her taking it for herself and pretending it was invented by her father is yet another example of appropriation and antiblackness.
Notice how she mentions having always been taught that cops are not to be trusted and having been to her first protest at age 7 (2001). In 2014, in the tweet right above this screenshot, she stated she began going to protests in 2009 (aged 15), and we were able to find another tweet in which she said that she began going to protests aged 16 (2010). That is definitely not how the story goes.
Before going back to her using Black people’s culture to give herself a background, we want to open a parenthesis regarding protests: it is fair to say that Len, despite her supposed activism, has never taken part in one and took no more action in her whole life than any ordinary student.
In this thread she mentions that she was at the 2011 protest:
(link, archive)
Usually, “protest of 2011″ means the Global Protest that took place on October 15th. Not only was this protest almost nonexistent in France (3300 people participated in the whole country), but that day she was at home watching the Chelsea Football Club lose to Everton:
Vellios scored against Chelsea. OMG boy I love you (link, archive)
But what if she meant another protest that took place in the same year?
On November 4th there was another protest in France, Occupy la Défense, organized by leftists (for ideals Len supposedly supports). She had no idea of what was going on and joked about seeing cops as they walked by her:
The 15 cops armed to the teeth that just walked by behind me worry me a little, haha. (link, archive)
La Défense is located in the 2nd Arrondissement, while she lived and went to school in the 9th. The 2nd and 9th Arrondissements are neighboring, and it wouldn’t be too big of a stretch to say that the cops were going to sedate that protest. She had no idea that only a couple of streets over there was a protest.
For the entirety of 2011, this woman who tweets every single thing she does didn’t write about a single major protest, and the same thing can be said for the previous and following years. She never went to one and wasn’t even aware of them.
This is further validated by how, in the Oppression Rant, she describes the “MENA and Black boys” (what happened to the girls? Was she the only one brave enough to go?) who were supposedly her friends as stereotypical “thugs” with “shaved hair, beards, and wearing golden chains”. This imagery of MENA and Black men comes directly from Majid, a character played by Marwan Kenzari in the movie Wolf (picture 1 and picture 2). The “boys from the hood” stereotypes that she used are virulently racist. Her ex-friends mentioned above also confirmed that those “MENA boys” never existed.
Who was she actually friends with? With the grandkid of the president of the French Football Federation, of course!
The president of the FFF is the grandfather of one of my friends. (link, archive)
And to end this parenthesis, in the Oppression Rant she mentions going to a “Hands Off Syria [demonstration],” grabbing a megaphone, and making a speech (what did she scream, no one knows - and probably she doesn’t either), and someone began targeting her. Not at the protest, but through magic ways this person was able to find her name, email, and phone number, and, according to her, began sending her pictures of the dismembered bodies of Kurdish women for weeks with the caption “You’re next”.
The group “Hands Off Syria” has a big social media presence. Per their Twitter header, this group is against “Zio-Imperialists and their collaborators in the Middle East”. The word “Zio” doesn’t mean “Zionist” or “Israel”, it means “Jews”, and it’s a dog whistle that further means “Jews control the media and the world”. This is an openly antisemitic organization that takes pride in it, but no one should be surprised that Len is interested in groups with these ideas regarding Jewish people: even as a teenager, she was a 9/11 truther and talked about the “blood of the New World Order,” another Illuminati-like antisemitic dog whistle (link, archive).
What is worse, at this point? That she pretended to have gone to a protest and then used the horrific pain and death of brown women to make herself the victim, or the fact that she was proud of supporting an openly antisemitic organization and still pretended to receive those pictures*? Or perhaps, worst of all, that she seems to have posted this Oppression rant filled with gory, unnerving, tear-jerking, attention-grabbing stories to distract from the fact that she was in the middle of receiving accusations of being antisemitic and defending a friend’s antisemitism, and had just openly and dismissively claimed that a Muslim woman of color was benefiting from white supremacy (link, archive)? Or that, as she was playing victim on Tumblr, she was bragging about “being cancelled on tungle dot hell,” downplaying what she had done in order to receive support, on Twitter (link, archive)?
*Because we like to be thorough and truthful, we looked at her Twitter to see if she had really complained about receiving those pictures, and we discovered that:
She first complained about receiving those photos as a response to another person complaining about it. It’s safe to say she was jumping on the empathy train;
She said that the person sending them was an “unblockable” Twitter troll, not someone who was stalking her IRL;
In 2018, the nearest “Hands Off Syria” rally took place in NYC. At the time, she was living with her parents in DC;
The post in which she complains about those pictures is dated April 1st, 2018, two weeks before the NYC “Hands Off Syria” rally, which took place on the 15th (link, screenshot);
Less than three weeks after these supposed attacks, she was posting (highly filtered) selfies again (link, screenshot), and openly sharing her position.
In the Oppression Rant she claims to have been afraid for her life, terrorize by this man (who she implies is white and not, as how it would have most likely have been, in order to have access to those pictures, a member or sympathizer of DAESH/ISIS), in truth her worst was that she would’ve had to create a new Twitter account and would have lost her followers. All the information regarding her family, including legal names and photos, remained on her Twitter; she never thought of deleting them as a security measure. While she may have started a fight with an edgelord, it is extremely doubtful that she actually received those pictures. She was never afraid for her life or her family’s.
This said, we can go back to how Len appropriates Black experiences and move onto religion.
Because she can not make her mind regarding the religion her father has supposedly spent his entire life practicing, she goes on to say that they have “grigris” lying around. Gris-gris have nothing to do with Morocco: they originated primarily in West African countries and made their way to the US because of slavery:
(link, archive)
Her grandfather was also supposedly “animist from a family of shamans,” coming from a family that never converted to Islam, and she would have been in line to “become the next Darwisa” if her father hadn’t left Morocco:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
To quote the immediate reaction of the Moroccan Amazigh person behind this post: “There’s no shaman shit in Morocco LMAO”, “There’s no such thing as a Darwisa”, and “We have witchcraft [...] [It’s] not something we’re proud of and pass from generation to generation. And even if it were[,] a father wouldn’t pass it to a daughter but to a son. Which still doesn’t happen.”
Len took her idea of Morocco being filled with shamans and Darwisas (which is a normal name, like “Anna” or “Bethany”, and not a title) from this blog: Woman Shamanism. It is not peer reviewed and the author is now known almost as a con artist because of the lies she writes. And, not only does this article about shamanism and Darwisas not say a single true thing, but it’s also about Tunisian “cave dwellers,” not Morocco! You can open the article and see that she has copied it word for word.
It is also impossible that her grandfather lived in a place that was never touched by Islam: her last name is specifically of Muslim origins, and it’s the only Muslim thing about her. In the same Twitter thread, she also misspells Aisha Kandisha, as Moroccan people spell it as “Aïcha Qandicha/Kandicha,” and classifies her as a “water spirit”. Aïcha Qandicha is a genie, a jinni ( she is ignorant of the fact that “jinni” is singular and “jinn” is plural). Why these misconceptions? Because she read the Wikipedia page and didn’t understand half of what was written.
And on a further note, she claims that her grandfather was Riffian, born and raised in a small village. People in those areas were illiterate, so it would be fascinating to know how this man was able to discover Marxism.
So far, her father has been: the animist son/grandson of a shaman, raised atheist, Sephardic Jewish, but there’s more! In 2018, her father was Orthodox Christian, and had converted from atheism because he loved Len’s mother so much:
(link, archive)
In 2013 too she would define herself as being Orthodox Christian and celebrating holidays according to the Orthodox tradition:
Being orthodox is cool. You get gifts for Christmas thanks to capitalism and gifts for the New Year because of the tradition. (link, archive)
But according the Oppression Rant linked above and to her most recent posts, her father is currently Muslim and was raised culturally Muslim, and even taught her “the first lines of the Quran” (she really likes to pretend that Islam is a forbidden religion and they have to practice it in secret). This story isn’t new either: just like how she recycled her fanfic into a poem about her lives life, in 2018 she was saying that it had been her mother who had sat her down and had taught her the Bible in Koinè, an ancient Greek language:
(link, archive)
These facets of his persona cannot exist all at the same time. He cannot be Muslim and Orthodox Christian at the same time, he cannot have a last name of Muslim origins if his family never converted to Islam.
But how and why did this delirium start in the TOG fandom? Well, because she saw people who were actually Mena who were enjoying a good amount of success, and she just couldn’t bear to not be at the center of attention. It was around this time that she changed her blog’s name to “lgbtmazight”, removed “Canada” from her bio, and pushed even more this charade of being a “Maghrebi woman”.
This is how she referred to them: “anti-Arab fanatics” and “rabid nationalists”:
(link, archive)
(link, archive)
Because clearly this woman who went to Morocco once and grew up not speaking the language nor practicing the religion is more knowledgeable than people who have actually lived in North Africa all their lives. Even if she wasn’t the one directly behind the vicious harassment these bloggers went through, despite it fitting the pattern she always follows when she wants to become the top dog, she vagueblogged about them, laughed at their misery, and supported the people who were harassing them. She took the side of Americans and Northern Europeans rather than the people she claims to share roots with because she wanted them gone. She allowed a “fellow” Moroccan man to be run out of fandom after receiving death threats for a month, a time period that curiously began when she first posted those tweets. In fact, even if she was not the one behind the harassment (which seems less and less likely), she still allowed it to happen, never said a word regarding it, and gloated at the idea of having the stage all to herself, ready to be filled with fake history facts and wrong translations. It has also to be said that the Moroccan man contacted her privately and she never answered. Immediately after, the harassment he went through became even worse, and when he left the platform, she didn’t write a single word about how the evil racists had pushed a “fellow” Moroccan off of the internet. Again, (make-up) oppression for me, but not (actual) oppression for thee.
She is disgusting, and if you have made it this far into the post, we commend your patience and the strength of your stomach.
Maybe the goodness of your hearts is still saying that perhaps she has changed for the better, that she is not the same spoiled girl who went to Cours Hattemer and touched elbows with elites. The only advice we can give is: don’t.
Don’t feel pity for her, don’t feel mercy for her: she is a 27-year-old woman who is racist, antisemitic, and a genocide denier. She doesn’t believe that the CCP is oppressing Hong Kongers (link, archive), is pro-North Korea (link, archive), and fully believes that the Holodomor didn’t happen (link, archive). If she could get away with saying that the Holocaust never happened and that it’s American Propaganda, she would, and the fact that she’s advertising openly antisemitic associations and websites as being “unbiased” is enough proof of the antisemitism she sometimes tries to hide by saying “But my dad is totally Jewish when he’s not atheist, Christian, or Muslim!”
She is the definition of a tankie, but we all know that the only place where she is a “Marxist Communist” is Twitter, as she doesn’t go to protests and is not active in any other way: on the internet she pretends to be a radical leftist, and then uses her parents’ money to go on expensive vacations, tote around designer bags, and buy pricey cocktails.
And always remember that, if you were harassed by her for what you wrote or said, with her calling you racist, this is the face of the “racialized” brown woman who called Marwan Kenzari racial slurs and whose entire “I’m a PoC” identity stems from having at most 25% Moroccan ancestry, and her inability to handle that people found her posts about reverse racism and the fact that she felt oppressed because she shipped Sterek to be tone-deaf and offensive:
(link, archive)
By the way, her legal name is Hélène and her dad’s name is unmistakably Spanish. Hers is the whitest story of all, and to quote Len herself and her mangled and ignorant use of Arabic, tbarkallah.
