Someone Invented a Fake Therapist and Got "Her" Quoted in Tons of News Articles

A so-called relationship therapist quoted everywhere from Newsweek to The Independent appears, per a new investigation, to be completely made up.

As writer Ashley Abramson reports in a captivating investigation for Allure, a purported therapist named Sophie Cress set off alarm bells almost as soon as she pitched the Abramson using the now-defunct Help A Reporter Out (HARO), a service that connected journalists with potential sources.

Though Cress set off alarm bells for Abramson — not least because her email address was associated with the sex toy review site SexualAlpha.com — the journalist eventually decided to respond to the would-be therapist's second pitch. When Abramson insisted that she could only conduct interviews over phone or video call, however, Cress ghosted.

After digging into Cress' background and alleged qualifications Abramson discovered why: Sophie Cress strongly appears not to exist, a fabrication made up by the Latvia-based owner of Sexual Alpha to drive traffic and search ranking to his site.

That owner, Dainis Graveris, never responded to any of Abramson's requests for comment, so she had to rely on her own sleuthing to get to the bottom of the Cress story.

She not only looked into whether anyone by the name "Sophie Cress" or any similar monikers was licensed to practice family and relationship therapy in Cress' professed state of North Carolina, but also into whether someone using that name actually held the degrees she claimed to have or was certified for Prepare/Enrich and Gottman Therapist specialties, which her onetime website claimed she held.

The North Carolina Marriage and Family Therapy Licensure Board was unable to find any such therapist, and representatives from Prepare/Enrich and Gottman couldn't confirm that anyone with Cress' name was certified with either organization. Because there was such limited information on the "therapist," Abramson was also unable to confirm whether either her bachelor's or master's degrees were legit.

Another nail in the coffin was even more mundane: Abramson traced Cress' headshot back to a stock photo website, where the woman in the picture doesn't share her name.

When Abramson reached out to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy to ask if it had ever heard of a case of a brand concocting a fake therapist to pitch to journalists, its executives said no — but not because it wouldn't be possible.

"The barrier [to do that] is very low," James Punelli, the association's director of ethics and legal affairs, told her.

Needless to say, most journalists contacted by Cress didn't do all that homework; her operators appear to have duped everybody from Mashable to the Daily Mail to the New Zealand Herald.

Though HARO is no more — it was eventually acquired, rebranded and shut down by the tech outfit Cision — it has a sludgy history of being used to dupe journalists, including a prankster who used it in the early 2010s to get himself featured as an expert on obscure topics in publications ranging from the New York Times to CBS to ABC.

And Cress just might still be at it: while HARO is no more, Futurism found that Cress still has a profile on the imitator site Qwoted that links back to Sexual Alpha, suggesting that what's left of her mostly-scrubbed online persona is still churning out traffic for the sex toy site.

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