The Pretender Part V: the end of the saga
I am putting Anna Wilding to rest. Here's why.
If you have had your own experience with Anna Wilding over the last 30 years, feel free to get in touch: davidfarrier@protonmail.com
Here is the full Pretender series:
Part I: The Beginning
Part II: Wilding vs The World
Part III: Wilding v Wikipedia
Part IV: The mysterious Matt Obolensky
Part V: The End of the Saga?
Part VI: 25 Years of Making Shit Up
Hi,
Anna Wilding came into my life four years ago, in the form of an explosive DM. There are certain messages you get that set off alarm bells, and Anna’s was one of them.
She’s an interesting character: someone who inserts their narrative into the mainstream to the point where people start believing her narrative. All of it.
It’s been a strange experience writing about her. She’s a bit like an octopus, this constantly adapting piece wildlife that surprises at every turn. One second she’s sealed in a jar, the next minute the lid’s off and she’s using one of her legs to short circuit the alarm system before she escapes the lab for the ocean.
I still remember the day I got a call from the New Zealand Film Commission — an organisation kiwi filmmakers live to placate as they seek funding — telling me that a woman called Anna Wilding had been in touch.
I think this was the first time they’d ever reached out to my directly, and it was to talk about a list of bonkers accusations from Anna Wilding who just kept calling them. “Please make this stop!” was their basic, pleading tone.
She’s inserted herself into my life in many ways since I started writing about her. My colleague and friend Dylan Reeve has been by my side, curious — often caught up alongside me in Wilding’s whirlwind of chaos.
She continues to do her thing — and I realised recently that I could technically be writing about Anna Wilding forever. And to be honest I’m not sure I want to be doing that: 85, lying dying in a hospital bed on a drip, feebly typing out another article about Anna Wilding’s latest scheme.
So this is The Pretender V. I think it will be the last one. I really hope it is.
I’ve handed it over to Dylan, because he knows this story as well as me and has a certain sense of distance and objectivity I no longer have. Thanks, Dylan.
David.
The Pretender V: The End
The most recent instalment of The Pretender was in response to two somewhat unexpected actions by Anna — the first was a phone call and subsequent email to lawyers that have represented us in the past; the second was the appearance of the mysterious Matt Obolensky.
We opted not to publish details from the first thing, but the claims were almost identical to those made by Obolensky.
This will probably be the last time we write about Anna Wilding. Overall the previous articles serve to paint a reasonably clear picture. However, we’ll take this final opportunity to clear up a few points.
Why Write About Her At All?
This is perhaps the most common question, and it’s a really good one. Ultimately Wilding seems mostly harmless. If she’s exaggerating details of her life, why does that matter? And to be honest, this is something we sat with for a long time.
The first time we became aware of her was when she suddenly popped up in the comments of a Facebook post about Tickled by the NZ Embassy in Washington DC. That was November 2017 and was immediately followed by the Facebook Messenger exchange that features in the first Pretender post.
As detailed in that first post, her outburst continued from there with emails to a variety of professional contacts, including the NZ Film Commission (who’d part funded the production of Tickled), and Magnolia films (our US distribution partner), as well as many others.
This put Wilding firmly on our radar and we began to pay attention to her online, as well as dig into her background. But we decided not to write about her at that time, and for years afterwards as — ultimately — she was mostly harmless.
We reassessed our position on that from time to time as Wilding managed to inject herself into mainstream news where journalists would unquestioningly repeat her assertions about herself. In early 2019 she unexpectedly dropped a Harvey Weinstein story which understandably made its way into various mainstream outlets.
Obviously we couldn’t judge the validity of her claim, but the media stories did all repeat her own narrative about her professional history.
It was the next incident she managed to land big news coverage for. In September 2020, with claims that the publisher of Barack Obama’s book had plagiarised her photography, that we finally decided to publish a series of pieces that outlined our research.
Is she causing real harm by convincing journalists to write about her claims? Probably not in most cases, but there is a broader issue when media outlets continue to amplify the self-promotion of fabulists: they then use that publication to further validate future claims.
This was a huge problem in the case of Albi Whale and his super-AI, which David wrote about for The Spinoff in 2018 (pre-Webworm).
Beyond that, we’ve spoken privately to a number of people who’ve been on the receiving end of Wilding’s outbursts. Like us, many have found themselves having meetings with baffled investors, employers and others who are trying to get to the bottom of long emails and confusing phone calls.
And in some cases those people have incurred real costs — thousands of dollars — from lawyers and other professionals engaged to deal with the impact of Wilding’s claims.
What’s Real?
The ultimate question with Wilding remains — what’s real?
In a recent tweet in response to the last installment of The Pretender, Anna posted the following image:
And fundamentally the claims — when boiled down so simply — are true.
Anna has definitely been on TV — that’s easy to verify. She did also found a charity. And she seems to have created Kalon Skincare, a company that sold a bee venom infused moisturiser (although it’s hard to say what sales rank it reached on Amazon, or in what category).
She has made movies and music videos. And she did indeed report from the White House. She has exhibited her photos (and presumably sold some) and is now embracing the world of NFTs.
And, we’ll have to assume, having been present at White House events as a member of the media, that she did indeed pass some level of security clearance.
But those bare claims are seldom the ones she’s making publicly. There’s no point rehashing them all, but the evidence for many of her more dramatic claims is very sparse at best.
Unlike some of the pretenders we’ve written about in the past, it does not seem like Anna is a scammer or con artist. She’s just a very effective self-promoter who seems to have a tendency to exaggerate her accomplishments.
A Response From Anna
After the last part came out Wilding posted an 8-part Twitter thread, which she then turned into a blog post. The entire post is reproduced verbatim below:
“David Farrier
Stop harassing me, stop stalking me, stop writing about me, stop your obsession. I have never met you. YOU were rude & chauvenistic to me 3 years ago. I called you out on it in 1 brief 1 line email 3 years ago. Your ego couldn’t take it as then you attacked me & have had your trolls attack me, like Dylan Reeve & others non stop. You were sent a PRIVATE Cease & Desist letter, you ignored it, called it “cat nip ” for a guy like you, and then published the private Cease and Desist trying to garner sympathy for your wrongdoing. Since then , while I have been tending to ill family members and more, you have TRIED to destroy my reputation & career across multiple sites including on Wikipedia under pseudonyms. For 3 years you have done this.
Three years ! You cant play victim when YOU are the one who caused all the pain and the one doing it and won’t stop. And when my family was dying. Shame on you.You have published private emails where I have expressed genuine concern about your behaviour PRIVATELY to 1 or 2 colleagues in NZ(that’s all) and in defense of the utter BS defamation you are spreading for your personal gain to get subscribers on your blog & clicks. You are playing Victim yet you are the perpetrator. I have never spoken to you. I have not read your blogs but have it on good authority You keep writing slander, defamation, cyber bullying, making things up & then playing victim. When a woman stands up and defends herself against you & your cyberbullying & your trolling you launch another attack.I don’t even know you I don’t want to. I should not have to write this.You were given a Cease & Desist when my father was dying. Leave me alone & go away. For the last time. For God’s sake stop writing about me, you know nothing , nor is it your right to know anything about me. You are the definition of a bully, cyberstalker & harasser.
You breach privacy(marked confidential) harass me, repeatedly write about me, lies and slander, set your trolls on me-this is the definition of obsessed.All because I called you out quickly 3 years ago .You are obsessed & using me for clickbait. & the sickening thing is it is 2021 – the entire world is against cyberbullying & harassment of women except New Zealanders David Farrier, Dylan Reeve & his trolls-who know 0 about my life my career in the United States, New Zealand or anywhere.”
Anna is right. We are obsessed with her in a way — she is a fascinating character.
But her characterisation of our interaction is not accurate. There was no brief one-line email, instead it was an unexpectedly vitriolic response to a meaningless pleasantry. Aside from a tweet at the time, we didn’t mention Wilding publicly for almost three years.
Even in November 2017, before we knew anything about her, Wilding was convinced that she was the target of online trolls and stalkers. It’s unclear who she believed was behind them at the time, but since then she’s blamed us for the perceived attacks she’s received.
This is not a new theory for Wilding, in 2006 she claimed that online stalkers were engaged in a campaign against her as a result of her criticisms of animal welfare issues on the Lord of the Rings films:
As for her claims of our attempts to destroy her reputation on Wikipedia, as noted in Part III of The Pretender, Wilding has a long history of conflict with Wikipedia, where it appeared she or her friends had created and edited articles about her that repeated unsourced claims and were often supported only by things she herself had written or spoken. Her history with Wikipedia goes back a decade before we met her on Facebook.
In short, Wildings claims about us are no different to the claims she’s made in the past about anyone who has dared to question or challenge her mythology. But we’ve gone as far as we can, and frankly she’s right — it is time to stop writing about her.
A Note On Ethics And Confidentiality
In many places, even going back all the way to that first encounter in 2017, Wilding has accused us of breaking confidentiality and acting unethically.
These can be pretty strong allegations in journalism, so it’s worth addressing what the ethical considerations are.
The most important point is that confidentiality isn’t a unilateral construct. You can’t send someone an unsolicited communication and declare it confidential: there needs to be a mutual agreement.
Beyond what’s been published in The Pretender series previously, we’ve received — directly and through contacts — many emails and messages from Wilding.
We’ve opted only to publish those which were relevant to the story we were telling.
And despite her claims, we have not published any of Anna’s emails to private individuals — only those to us and our business associates and, in Part IV, one she sent to every newsroom in New Zealand.
However, far more importantly, we’ve spoken on background to a variety of people and have agreed to various levels of anonymity and confidentiality — commitments we take very seriously.
So with that, we bid Anna Wilding adieu.
Goodbye, Anna.
-Dylan.
David here again. As Dylan submitted that piece, something happened to Anna Wilding’s Wikipedia page. It got deleted.
Too much BS, for too long.
If Anna is reading this: no, we didn’t delete your Wikipedia page.
David.
PS: As a palate cleanser, please enjoy this giant 3D cat billboard in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
PPS: All Webworm Napoleon shirts are sold out! If you picked one up, they’ll start to be sent out this week. International shipping is a little slower than I’d like thanks to Covid, but they’ll get there, much like the first t-shirt drop! I am excited for them to get to you.
*exhales deeply*
I feel really sad for her. What has happened in her life to make her like this? Or what conditions have gone unmanaged such that she behaves in this way? I guess we'll likely never know.
At the same time, due to the very real financial and mental cost to others of her actions, she very much deserves to be held to account. That's what you and Dylan have been doing.
It also really irks me when people claim cyberbullying when it's really not. It diminishes the suffering of people who have actually been victims of cyberbullying. Being held to account is not cyberbullying! If anything, her repeated and unasked for missives to you and others are more cyberbullying than the other way around.