- [Seth] Guys I want to talk about a college basketball
player who thought that he had met a potential girlfriend
online but was in fact getting cat fished
by an entire rival fan base.
(laughing)
- It's not funny it's really sad.
- What an idiot.
- A nightmare.
A nightmare scenario.
- No it's great.
- Okay so the year is 2006.
That's important because we need to
put ourselves in a sort of 2006 head space.
- You mean we need to be more innocent
than we are now in 2019.
- Yes, much more.
- Yeah.
- Gabe Pruitt, who went on to a mediocre NBA Player,
I think he played like one or two years on the Celtics
was a star guard for USC.
And toward the end of the season, March of 2006,
he got an AOL instant message.
A message on AIM.
(giggling)
- AOL instant messenger for the children at home.
- Yeah what's that, it's like the Snapchat of our gen--
- It's basically just texting on a computer.
Its the equivalent of like, DM'ing right now.
- Yeah. - Mm-hmm.
- So he got an AIM message, from an account that
wasn't in his buddy list.
So someone he had never talked to before.
- [Will] His buddy list. (giggling)
- [Seth] There were buddy lists.
- Yeah I forgot that there was a buddy list.
- And the account was 'Sexy Bruin Babe'.
- Sure.
- Sexy Bruin Babe presented herself as a student
from UCLA, hence Sexy Bruin Babe.
She also happened to be sexy and share some pictures,
who was interested in hanging out with Gabe Pruitt
and invited him to a party that Saturday night.
They flirted.
They complimented each other.
They sent each other pictures.
He at one point sent this individual who said her name
was Victoria, a picture of himself wearing a UCLA
basketball jersey as in like, her school not his school,
flexing in front of a mirror.
- [Clara] He's head over heels.
- This is a problem. - Whoa. (laughing)
- Clearly he was really into Victoria.
And they agreed they would meet at UCLA for a party
on campus, that Saturday night.
Saturday earlier, during the day, he had a game at Cal,
so, you know, up in Berkeley.
Then the team would come back, he would go to UCLA
for that night, hopefully after celebrating a win
over Cal, an important rival
right before the NCAA tournament.
The Trojans go to Cal.
Game starts.
The entire Cal student body, everyone in the crowd
is chanting Gabe Pruitt's name.
His phone number.
The name Victoria.
They're holding up signs that say 'Call Gabe"
and have his phone number on them and have images
that he had sent to Victoria.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Oh God, kids are so cruel, it's just--
- But also so great at organizing for nothing.
To organize a cluster of 20 ish year olds,
into a chant of a phone number.
Like there's orchestration that has to happen there,
that I'm pretty impressed with.
- [Seth] Yeah.
- But a phone number is like so many,
it's a long chant.
That seems hard, yeah.
- And we'll get into the person who actually perpetrated
this, but as I'm sure we've all gathered,
there was no Victoria.
He had been cat fished.
- Oh.
- Are you--
(giggles)
- So you're just catching up?
- I wasn't listening.
(laughing)
- You know what, I'm almost glad it was a cat fish
and there wasn't like, a real girl who defined herself
as Sexy Bruin Babe.
(laughing)
It's like what about me, what makes me--
- [Will] What are the three things about me?
Well, I'm sexy.
- [Clara] Mm-hmm.
- [Will] Favorite school is UCLA.
And the third thing about me, I know I've said that I'm sexy
but I'm also a babe.
(laughing)
- Did you ever, in like sort of pre Facebook,
or like proto Facebook era, did you ever find yourself
impersonating someone on the internet,
or falling victim to someone impersonating someone?
- I really didn't.
- One hundred percent. - That you know of. (Laughing)
- But you did Will?
- Yeah, I want to hear Clara talk about her innocence,
her youth.
- Yeah I feel like I missed out on an opportunity but
like, the deceit didn't come easily to me.
I never really occurred that could be happening,
or that I should be doing that.
I don't think I even like, traded photos with a stranger.
I'm proud of myself.
Yeah, this is good.
- That's great. - Good for me. (laughing)
- Have fun in heaven, like I don't know.
- There's a really good article, sort of history
interviewing everyone involved in this from 2016.
From the ten year anniversary.
Jeff Eisenberg from Yahoo interviewed everyone involved.
All of whom are like, cool about this now.
Which is nice, I'm glad nothing bad came of this.
- What did Victoria have to say?
(laughing)
- No.
- I feel like you're still not--
- Dude, if we're talking babes.
(laughing)
- Get a little distracted.
- So the guy who did it, was as you might suspect
a Cal student at the time, and this was his thing.
In the early days of Facebook everyone would just,
privacy didn't exists yet.
No one had considered that.
We all had our phone numbers on there
and our AIM screen names.
- We were too dumb to use the internet.
I definitely put my phone number on Facebook
and definitely had a thought of like, babe might see.
(laughing)
- What, I thought you were going to say a thought of like,
this is a bad idea.
- [Seth] No.
- No have you heard any of the things I've said?
- Have you never been a 15 year old boy?
I don't understand.
The other thing about Facebook is that you would just
friend whoever.
If someone friend requested you, you were like yeah sure.
And like famous people would be on Facebook
and if they were our age and kind of dumb and didn't have
agents yet, they would put their phone numbers
and friend whoever.
So in college we used to always invite
Roy Hibbert to our parties.
Cause he was like, yeah he friended all of us.
He never came to the parties but.
(laughing)
You know, he went to a much better school than I did,
so Roy Hibbert you're a smart guy, you're still
invited to all my parties.
The Cal student who perpetrated the thing,
this guy would friend players from opposing schools
on Facebook, and then he would like, you know
print out pictures that they had posted there's like a
story that he held up pictures of Robin and Brook Lopez
who were at Stanford at the time, and like they dapped
him up after the game.
They're like that was funny.
- Oh yeah.
- Other people got mad at him. - Yeah.
- But he would do this kind of stuff.
So he made the Sexy Bruin Babe account.
Invented the persona Victoria.
I think he used the photo of like a Cal student,
just like someone he knew,
and he tried to do this to Jordan Farmar.
Another future NBA player who was at UCLA at the time.
And Jordan Farmar, who I will point out, had a longer
and more fruitful NBA career than Gabe Pruitt,
may or may not be related,
was like, no, not interested.
So undeterred, he moved on to the next game, or whatever
the next rival USC and everything went great.
Gabe Pruitt bought in completely.
And so, after getting texts and photos and stuff
from Gabe Pruitt, getting his phone number,
sent all this stuff to his friends,
figuring that a few of them would chant at the game
and they would like, hold up signs or whatever.
But it spread like wild fire and so literally the entire
crowd was chanting Victoria, Victoria during
the national anthem.
- That's a good name to chant.
- And there is no question
that's what you're doing. - Right, right.
Gabe knew immediately and had to then explain it
to all of the teammates who didn't know that he had
a date that night.
- But did he use that as a way to unite the team
and fight against a larger enemy than intended.
- Yeah, no great question.
(laughing)
- [Seth] Cal destroyed USC.
Gabe Pruitt shot, I have it here.
He shot three of 13 with six turnovers which is a
very bad game.
- You can't blame Gabe though.
He just found out babe not real.
(laughing)
- By a large group of people.
The fact he played, I would have left.
Star basket ball player I would have gotten my bag,
they take a bag out, I don't know, gotten my back pack
that I bring out to the court,
and just like left.
And transferred.
Never seen again.
- This story does not look like this in 2019.
- [Will] No.
- Or anytime in the last ten years.
And I will add that like, the guy who did this to Gabe
Pruitt, afterward, he had to use the Sexy Bruin Babe
account to contact him, but contacted him and was like
listen man, like that went too far and like,
appendicular, I'm sorry that your phone number--
- Well he's the other thing, he didn't have to use the
Sexy Babe, he could have texted him.
He could have called him--
- Why wasn't Sexy babe blocked at that point.
- Okay, okay.
Dude was an asshole.
(laughing)
- That fact that he went back to,
cause that's the moment of like, oh your loved one died
but how are they still contacting me.
(laughing)
- Oh Victoria.
- I think the like meanest thing I actually did,
was just cyber bully Smarterchild.
If you guys remember Smarterchild.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Wait we need to maybe explain Smarterchild
to the audience.
- It's maybe like, the first bot that's ever existed.
So kind of almost like a google instant messenger.
- Yeah it was kind of a clippy for--
- Yeah and it had a personality.
It was like a genius child.
- [Clara] Yeah. - It was a smarter child.
- Which I think is what brought out the cyber bullying,
it's like just in it's screen name, Smarterchild,
you think you're better than me.
(giggles)
- And so you harassed the bot?
- [Clara] Oh yeah.
- I did this also I'm just gonna--
- Yeah I don't know, just like strings of curse words.
I remember it would always say like, that's not very nice.
If you ever put a curse in, even if it was nice.
You're looking fucking great today Smarterchild,
that's not very nice.
Well actually is it. - [Will] Well it is.
- Who's so smart now?
- It is nice.
- That, whoever made it, was definitely using it
to harvest our personalities and build the thing
that will eventually kill all of us.
- That Smarterchild, grew up to the be Steve Google.
(laughing)