David Farrier Stephen Fry has publicly backed a Kickstarter project led by Kiwi journalist David Farrier, who wants to make a documentary after his bizarre brush with the world of competitive tickling. “This looks like a kickstarter project well worth popping a few £s into: I have,” Fry has tweeted. The full oddly-compelling ‘tickle king’ story can be found on the project page here. The gist is that Farrier, who generally reports on quirky stories for TV3, was sent a link to a website offering young men from all over the world a paid trip to LA, accommodation in a 5-star hotel and thousands of dollars cash, in exchange for being part of ‘competitive tickling’ videos. It sent is odd-dar pinging, and when he tried to get in touch with the listed organisers things became even stranger. “They told me they’d have to consult with their legal team. I didn’t hear back, so posted on their Facebook page, calling out to New Zealanders who had taken part,” Farrier says on the project page. “Debbie from ‘Jane O’Brien Media’ replied, saying, ‘To be brutally frank, association with a homosexual journalist is not something that we will embrace’": This led to a “bizarre trail of emails” which became increasingly homophobic, “and all over me wanting to do a story about the very straight activity of young, attractive men tickling each other,” Farrier says sarcastically, in light of the homoerotic nature of the tickling videos. “Me and some friends began to dig around, suspecting something was fishy,” he says. “It was … what we found was a strange pattern of shaming, blackmail and online exploitation.” It turns out ‘Debbie’ and ‘Jane’ actually appeared to be a man called David D’Amato, who was arrested by the FBI in 2001 after posing online as a young woman called Terri, recruiting young men for tickling videos. He’d also impersonated people online. D’Amato was jailed for six months and fined $50,000. “Now - more than 10 years later - it seems he’s back,” Farrier says. “I wrote about all this for 3News here in New Zealand ... and as I wrote ... more and more people came out of the woodwork. “Now I want to make a documentary about all this.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Sunday, 18th May 2014 - 9:51am