Remember Bruce Hay? He's the Harvard Professor who was the subject of the hilariously headlined story "The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge". I'm sure there's been previous discussions of him here, because the story is one of the juiciest blockbuster in recent memory.
It's hard to summarize this, so I just recommend reading the story because it is fucking bonkers. But basically, this French cis-woman, Maria-Pia, was dating an Indian-Pakistani trans woman named Haider (together, the Shumans). The two appear to have been running an extremely elaborate paternal scam, where Maria-Pia would pick out various hapless men around Cambridge, have unprotected sex with them, then tell them that they got her pregnant and then ask for support/reparations/whatever (in all likelihood, Haider was the "father"). The story was kind of insane because the couple seemed to have expended a ton of time and energy but did not gain that much financially, so the suspicion is that their primary motivation was a bizarre power trip. Bruce Hay was one of the hapless men caught up in this story.
Here's a quote from the story:
Zacks pushed Hay to ask for a paternity test, but Hay wouldn’t have it. Not only did he trust Shuman, he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she’d had sex with other men. He believed her when she said her sexual relationship with him was an exception.
And another:
In early December 2016, Haider and Shuman tried to reach Hay on his landline and discovered Zacks had blocked their number. They left a message on his cell: Tell Jennifer to unblock us or we’re coming over. When he didn’t respond, they showed up at his house and had their first face-to-face encounter with Zacks while Hay’s oldest son filmed the incident on his iPhone. It was night and the video is dark, but you can hear Haider shout at Zacks in a harsh staccato: “It is not our fault that Bruce got her pregnant! Do you understand that?” as Hay’s younger children cry in the background. Shuman berates Hay for “yelling at us” instead of at his older son, whom they order to stop filming. Hay then moves toward his son as if to block the camera, and you can hear Hay sigh. “Listen, they aren’t well,” Hay tells him. The confrontation ends when the police arrive; no charges were filed.
The women returned to the house again just before Christmas. Zacks again called the cops. The next day, the women sent texts to Hay calling him a “rapist” who needed to be reported to authorities. He started receiving texts from an unknown number: “You will not get away with rape.” Once more, he was able to calm them down, and they reconciled long enough to spend Christmas together at Shuman and Haider’s house.
There is now a follow-up. Bruce Hay is suing the author of the article and the newspaper. Is it because the author lied, misquoted him, or otherwise misrepresented him? Nope. Hay is suing the author because she reported his account precisely. Read the complaint. Hay is apparently upset that the author of the piece didn't do enough investigation to find out that Hay was completely wrong about the story, and that he was just inadvertently pushing a noxious narrative of misogyny and transphobia, and that Maria-Pia and Haider are the real victims in this case.
Hay, again, is a civil procedure professor of law at Harvard. Those credentials do not stop him from including passages like this in his complaint:
¶90 [Author] would don the mantle of investigative reporter, would "expose" the Shumans as dangerous serial predators, and get them prosecuted and imprisoned; this would make her a bestselling author, would lead to a Hollywood deal, and bring her fame and fortune. No longer would she be a failed middle-aged writer that no one had ever heard of, nursing an inferiority complex about her Rutgers education, supporting herself with a dead-end job as a copy editor at New York magazine.
and excusing the behavior of Maria-Pia:
¶ 43 Maria-Pia continued to see other men in March and April 201 S. By then she knew that Plaintiff had a pronounced jealous streak, and was only Interested in sexually monogamous relationships. Fearful of driving him away, she did not disclose to him that their relationship had not been sexually exclusive from the beginning. When she told him in late May 2015 that she was expecting a child, he assumed that he had caused the pregnancy.
I think it's fairly clear that the Shumans are involved in getting Hay to repudiate the narrative about them that went viral and painted them in a very bad light. I would not be surprised if they were responsible for writing entire portions of this very very bizarre complaint.
The term "beta" and "simp" gets thrown around too carelessly, but I have never seen a better paragon of this accusation than with Bruce Hay. He's a victim in some ways; he's repeating what I often see as inexplicable behavior on the part of domestic violence victims where they bend over backwards to try and excuse or explain their abuser's behavior.