Meet the drag queen behind ‘Shelley Garland’

The jig is up. It’s finally been revealed that the real Shelley Garland is in fact Marius Roodt. Under the pseudonym of Garland, Roodt penned the blog Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?, which was published amid great controversy on the Huffington Post SA last week.

Roodt (37), is a researcher at the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), a prestigious think-tank in Parktown, Johannesburg. When confronted with a profile picture of one Garland on Wednesday afternoon, he said: “Yes, it was me.”

He quit his job this week in the wake of the controversy. He was identified after the email address he used was digitally traced back to him and his identity was confirmed with facial recognition technology.

Roodt claims he wrote the piece to show that fact checking in newsrooms across South Africa were slack. To do so, he used a picture of himself in heavy make-up to sell the image of Shelley. According to Roodt it was from a party he attended a while ago.

As it turns out, it was drag persona and make-up artist Starr Wood was responsible for the look.

Starr revealed yesterday on her Facebook page that she was indeed the woman who did Roodt’s makeup. But this is certainly not her finest work. Check out these images of Wood from her social media feeds.

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For Roodt to turn into Shelley also didn’t come cheap. Wood’s rate card starts at R450 for trial make-up and customers can expect to pay up R850 for her services on their wedding day.

The Huffington Post SA found itself embroiled in controversy after it emerged it had published the opinion piece by a fake writer.

The piece advocated for white men to lose the right to vote and was very popular on the site. However, when Cape Town editor and writer Laura Twiggs investigated the supposed author, Shelley Garland, it eventually emerged she was Roodt’s fake online construction.

Garland had earlier been described as an “MA Philosophy Student” and her Twitter bio said she was a “Perpetual Feminist causing the retreat of patriarchy”, and lived in Auckland, New Zealand.

Roodt told HuffPost in an interview on Wednesday: “Twitter mobs amplify anger to where it doesn’t need to be and I think that’s a problem. Maybe I did raise some good points about journalism in South Africa. I’ve seen some journalists saying it should never have been published because it was a silly piece, and it was a silly piece.

“All I can do is apologise. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect to be exposed … but I didn’t expect HuffPost to take the blog, to be quite honest. I sent it to Daily Maverick. They didn’t reply.”

He told HuffPost his mission was to see “what was the most outrageous piece he could get published – and his next effort was to have been a blog titled Why The Khmer Rouge Weren’t All That Bad”.

“I want to see what is the silliest thing I can get published.”

He said he did not want to see the website’s editor, Verashni Pillay, lose her job for publishing his fake opinions.