Frischling Refuses Verification of 'Anonymous' Sources by Huff Post

Fraudulent blogger Steven Frischling wrote an entire blog post dedicated to us and just flushed his sorry career down the toilet! (He apparently wanted our traffic to spike as well - thanks for bringing us new readers!)

Before we get to the point by point we were writing, we need to discuss our astonishment at the update he just added. "The Huffington Post," which yanked the article reporting on his fabricated quotes from 17 TSA agents, asked to verify his sources. He refused:

This is essentially the smoking gun that he is lying. These people do not exist and he fabricated them all.

Do not fall for his supposed journalist credo that he will not reveal his sources because he swore he would protect their identities. Having an anonymous source's authenticity verified by a professional editor is not "revealing" anything. In journalism, it is standard practice to have an editor verify the existence of an anonymous source. Until we came along, Frischling didn't know that because he has no education and no real professional experience as a journalist. He thought he'd never get caught.

Further, when we first began challenging him on the suspicious quotes -- and informed him verification is standard journalistic practice -- look at how he responded!

"Perfectly fine journalistic thing to do?" Yet three days later, when someone actually wants to review the quotes and is ready to show up on his doorstep and take a look at them in his inbox, he hides behind "protecting" sources? What does that tell you?

He is not concerned about protecting anyone but himself. The only thing he would be revealing is that these 17 agents don't exist.

Smoking gun: Frischling kills his own "career"

Considering his track record of dishonesty in business, forgery when its suits him, that all the quotes sound oddly similar and do not seem authentic on their surface, the only way he could save himself was by getting those quotes independently authenticated. He could have shut us down by letting the editor review them (if they were real). And he refused, not because he has wonderful ethics, but because he had no choice in the matter. The emails and their authors don't exist, except in his head.

Well, after the way he just torpedoed his "career" and his last shred of credibility, it's not really necessary to continue tearing him apart. But since we already wrote it, here it is!

Re: dedicating an entire post to us: This is extremely unprofessional (so we're not surprised). No legitimate journalist would do such a stupid thing. Why not? A honest journalist, if faced with such an assault upon his or her credibility, immediately would attempt to take us to court for libel/defamation of character. But Steven has not even made a peep about threatening us with a libel suit, for three reasons: 1) He doesn't have two nickels to rub together to hire an attorney, get the warrants needed to track us down and take us to court 2) he knows that everything we've said is true, and truth is an absolute defense against libel and 3) we know a whole lot more than we're posting here. And he knows we know.

First, regarding our accusation that he invented his hospital heroics, he produced a blurry photo of two segments of a supposed discharge paper. First, the paper does not look particularly authentic, has no hospital logo and of course has no doctor's signature. Second, with all his supposed fantastic photo equipment, why couldn't he take a decent picture of it? Because it's forged? Third, who the hell cares? Even if he could prove that he was in the hospital, we call BS on his claim that he yanked his own IV and walked (a story he's been circulating for years).

And continuing point No. 3, if he really made up that story, that is hardly the worst thing we accused him of. Why did he not respond to our post reporting how he forged a personal reference from a former coworker? That is seriously damaging. Oh wait, he's too busy tweeting about donuts to respond to that one.

Then he briefly and vaguely explained why he stopped blogging for KLM after only three weeks, in response to our accusations that he did something wrong to warrant being fired from the gig. He writes, "When my contract for this project was up, I ended it in a way that was agreed upon between myself and KLM." What does that even mean?

Then he goes on to "admit" he was a bad wedding photographer, only because he's up against a wall here and there is no point in trying to deny this. There are court cases on the books, and complaints all over the web from dozens of pissed-off couples he defrauded. Yes, he defrauded them. He did not "do a bad job" by turning their photos in late. He took their money, never gave them their photos and tried to cut off contact with them. To this day! Why do you think they are so furious? Was it because his photos arrived a day late? They didn't like the lighting? No, it's because they never got their wedding prints and albums for which they paid him thousands of dollars. Put yourselves in their shoes for a moment. Now imagine how disgusted they were when he claimed he had cancer, only to discover from his own blog that he was really out shooting other weddings.

It is odd that Steven is doing a mea culpa now on his train wreck of a photography career and saying he has admitted this all over the place. In actuality, only a few days ago he was claiming these women were basically bridezillas, that there were only three of them and that they even stole another person's name and used it to post a false review (which is what he actually did with unsuspecting Seth Gerard!). He also claimed there were "real" reviews that we ignored (which as we pointed out, he wrote himself) and that he "proved" a review wrong:

Look at the date -

Yet now he's pleading that he was just a bad business man. Please read the following letter from one of those brides, who felt the need to publicly respond after seeing his "so what" blog post today. Notice that he even blocked her on Twitter recently so this poor woman could not contact him there to beg for her wedding photos: My comment to Steven Frischling @flyingwithfish

This behavior and dishonesty was not 10 or 20 years ago. It was not something he did as a kid before maturing. He continues to lie even today.

Frischling claims that his documented history of dishonesty, outright fraud and forgery has no bearing on his new role as an independent "journalist" who uses anonymous sources that he refuses to let anyone verify.

We disagree.

Furthermore, we wonder how the other bloggers at BoardingArea.com feel about having their blogs listed alongside his? Can any idiot get a blog on BoardingArea?