Michael Lohan Safe after His Twitter Impersonator Fakes Suicide (Updated)
After tweeting his good-byes and threatening to leap to his death off the Brooklyn Bridge, Michael Lohan's purported Twitter account abruptly went dead early Monday morning. What just happened? (Updated)
UPDATE: Shabooty says it's not true, and that @TheMichaelLohan is in fact an impostor. Here's the email Lohan sent them:
This is not not not me. I do not have and never had a twitter and twitter's corporate office confirms that. My lawyers are investigating.
Adrian and I briefly contemplated dropping everything and rushing to the bridge for the first-ever Gawker night editor suicide intervention to save Michael, but transport to the Brooklyn Bridge from our respective apartments is sort of a bitch, and while we were haggling, @TheMichaelLohan's tweets all disappeared. Here it is before the mass tweletion, from an Allie Is Wired screengrab:
And after:
Twitter hack? Drunk texting? Honest-to-god near-death microblog experience? A few initial points of inquiry:
- 1. If he was en route to the bridge, why did he send the tweets "from Web," suggesting he was seated at his computer, as opposed to on his Blackberry in a car?
- 2. Why would he only say good-bye to Lindsay?
- 3. Can a user delete all their tweets at once without deleting their user page? Their simultaneous disappearance of all of Michael's tweets suggests something more drastic than individual deletions.
- 4. Tweeting a suicidal cry for help must be the most tragic use of 140 characters in the history of human literacy, a floundering grasp at the lonely nothingness that is the artificial comfort of virtual communities. That's not an inquiry, just a point to be made with a sigh.
Were you on the Brooklyn Bridge a little after 2AM? Are you the pipsqueak who hacked Papa Lohan's account? Tell us what you saw or know.