![]() ![]() The story made its way to major English tabloids including The Daily Mail, the Mirror, and the New York Post in 2013, and it picked up some juicy new (fake) details, including a name for the husband (“Feng Jian”) and a court-ordered payment of $120,000 for “marriage under false pretenses.” Even my then-boyfriend’s friends would ask about it.” “When I first heard about this from a friend, I thought it was just a one-off rumor,” she told the BBC, “Then I realised the whole world was spreading it and in different languages. In 2012, the BBC reports, a Chinese tabloid attached the photo to its version of the story, which is where it first came to Ms. Once it was online, the photo recombined with the old “man sues wife over ugly children” legend, which became even more viral now that it was backed by photographic “evidence.” Bu she alleges the ad agency, J Walter Thompson, allowed another clinic to use the ad online, and that the original clinic also posted it on Facebook. Yeh says the image was only for that clinic, and was only supposed to be published in newspapers and magazines. The children were photoshopped to make their eyes look small and their noses flat, and the original caption read “The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids.” Heidi Yeh took a gig for a Taipei plastic surgery clinic in 2012, and posed for the now-infamous photo. The story has been debunked numerous times, but not before it wrecked the life of one actual Taiwanese model.Ī week ago, the woman in that bizarre family photo you’ve probably seen-two conventionally gorgeous parents posing with three unattractive kids- told the BBC how modeling for a plastic surgery ad turned her into a meme and destroyed her career. ![]() Her secret was allegedly revealed after she gave birth to “ugly” children who didn’t look anything like her, and the couple divorced over the incident. Here is how BuzzFeed's staff will remember Gawker.There’s a persistent urban legend-it’s been around since at least 2004-about a Chinese woman who’d had plastic surgery, unbeknownst to her husband. It's ironic, but also somehow fitting, that it was brought down by one of the very people who most needed to be kept in check. Still, the DNA of the original site (and its early editors) was never really lost Gawker always saw its mission as being not afraid to speak truth to the most powerful. So it wasn't that surprising that when we asked BuzzFeed staffers for their favorite Gawker posts, many of them - Caity Weaver on TGI Friday's, Adrian Chen on the most notorious Reddit troll, Kiese Laymon on racism in America - were from the last few years, a time when Gawker had moved far beyond its original ambitions. ![]() Even so, traffic eventually plateaued - it turns out that there is a limit to the number of people who care about media gossip and mocking socialites - and sometime not long after I left, the site's mandate grew much broader. But Gawker was (arguably?) the most widely read. I only lasted 10 months before taking a job at the Observer, where the snark was a little more subtle.Ĭertainly Gawker was not the first publication ever to do this there was Spy, and there was, and there was Might Magazine, and there was the New York Observer, which (believe it or not) used to actually tweak the rich and powerful. We were never explicitly told to be "snarky" or negative, but it was understood that that was the default posture, and it turns out that doing it day in and day out is exhausting. Because at the time, Gawker was explicitly a New York and media-centric blog anything outside of that world was considered off-limits. What's funny about this email, nearly 10 years later, is that there was no question at the time that the post had news merit - it was that it did not have the right news merit. Unless there's NYC/media-gossip hook I'm missing." The post was titled "Barbara Bush, Committed Drinker," and it published some photos with commentary of the former first daughter throwing a few back at Yale. the Barbara Bush post/photos, while amusing, are off-topic. I was two weeks into the job when I got an email from my boss, Chris Mohney, about a post I had written: "The one commenter has a point. When I was offered a job there as a writer in the fall of 2006, it seemed like I had unlocked some kind of door into a secret club. For those of us who came of age in the early to mid-2000s with vague aspirations to work in media, Gawker pulled the curtain back on a world that seemed at once alluring and opaque. ![]()
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