You Think You’re Following Barbara O’Neill? (Not Likely)

The single most astonishing thing I’ve seen on social media is the stolen identity of Barbara O’Neill.

If you’re a health nut, and you’re on FB, you’ve likely been served dozens of videos of this 70-year old Australian lady, teaching a class, at a chalkboard.

You probably saw that 100K people had engaged on them, which makes you think, “Hey, this must be good!”--so you watched.

Then, Facebook shows you more and more of O’Neill content. If you watched for a few MINUTES, they will show you more and more of the same.

Because they’ve marked you as being interested in it, in their AI.

Be aware that someone paid a lot of money to get videos of O’Neill going viral. With that, they built four groups, two of them over 600K on FB. They did similar things on other platforms.

And they didn’t do it for her, or because they know and like her. And they didn’t do it for fun.

They did it for money. They put up the intellectual property of a 70-year old woman from Australia, even calling her “Dr Barbara O’Neill” in one group, despite her having no graduate degrees--

--to build huge ad-retargeting groups on Meta.

I personally joined one of her groups, scrolled posts for 5 minutes, got disgusted by the clear theft of her identity (clearly English was a second language in all the posts with recipes for junk food)--

--and unfollowed. Yet, I’m still served the scammers’ “Barbara O’Neill” ads.

The scammers probably started several groups, to diversify, knowing that one of their pages might get taken down.

If the real Barbara O’Neill complained, or people joining the groups reported them to the platform.

I know that O’Neill has known for months that someone is using her identity on Facebook. She said several months ago, “I’ve never been on Facebook in my life.”

But it probably hadn’t occurred to her how lethal her sudden fame could become. She’s aware now.

I have an employee who follows everything Barbara O’Neill says and does. When I took 43 people to Switzerland recently, I asked “How many of you know who Barbara O’Neill is?” All but one of the 12 at my table raised their hand.

Then I said, “But did ANY of you know who she was a year ago?” They all shook their head, no.

Neither did I.

Recently, the scammers using O’Neill’s name and short pieces of her classes, as “bait” on Facebook—

--got so bold that they’ve actually started selling O’Neill’s own book, that they had printed! So she has self-published books with a very small distributor in the U.K.—she was likely making next-to-nothing on her books--

--and now a scammer in another country has re-printed her book, and is selling it to people who believe they are following and buying from Barbara O’Neill! Just sit and think about that for a minute.

How outraged would you be? What is your recourse? What would it cost to pursue the perpetrator of the fraud? How would you find the scammer in some other country?

I had been telling my employee, who was contacting O’Neill’s husband, that it may be fun to be suddenly famous, and the in-person classes she taught at churches and holistic health centers were suddenly packed with a few hundred people, wherever she went--

--but that her life could be destroyed, by people selling scammy products using her name, or any number of other ways they could game her.

And then it happened.

(It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone would steal her book, and print it themselves, and sell it.

Even though I should have thought of that, because someone did that to me. Selling my 2007 book with my exact book cover and my name as author, on Amazon! Calling it The Green Smoothies Rx. My real book is The Green Smoothies Diet.)

I’m no stranger to people impersonating me, so I really feel for O’Neill.

In 2019, a group of pro-vax people loosely organized on the web, with a lot of time on their hands, put up an Alt GreenSmoothieGirl page.

Facebook refused to do anything about it, except they did make them remove the snake that was my head, because it’s against their rules to deface someone’s image.

Apparently, it’s not against their rules to have a page dedicated to absolutely nothing but trolling and harassing a public figure. You’ve probably seen a variety of “Alt” pages doing the same to various people who are well known.

This group of about 30 people or so, who hang out in a FB group and make a sport out of harassing people who don’t agree with “safe and effective” narratives, got media outlets involved.

They get insanely mad at anybody who questions the vax industry.

One of them was an obese lady with purple hair who DM’ed me in response to my seeing her fake review on my professional page, and sending her a Cease and Desist--

--to tell me that her greatest accomplishment—she showed a clip of her on CNN, extremely proud—is harassing parents whose babies died after a vaccine.

All of these people are blocked on my personal and public figure page on Facebook, now. At the time, though, they went on my public figure page and wrote reviews saying, for instance, that my products put them in the hospital with cyanide poisoning.

Facebook did have them all removed. There were 33 of them by the time I discovered it.

All of this hate happened due to a short post I wrote about how the flu vaccine is created every year, in 2019. All that I wrote was accurate, and I stand by it, to this day.

I didn’t come back to FB till several hours later, at which time, I found 1,600 comments, and a troll leader who was telling the crew she’d sent to my post to go write negative reviews on my public-figure page and on my books, and more.

A Chicago lawyer in the troll mob even wrote an almost entirely false media hit piece on me and got it published in a large tech magazine, read by approximately no one who follows me online.

At one point, one of them got a major media outlet to do a hit piece series that had billboards all over Utah “investigating” “Utah Business Owner GreenSmoothieGirl.” (Two years after I’d moved to Florida.)

Anyway, they were all pro-vax activists. The angle they took to the media is that I did not finish my PhD 30 years ago.

(Which I do not claim I did, and this is very evident on my various books and in the hundreds of blog posts on my site. I dropped out due to a flu vax injury I got while getting my master’s degree and working in a hospital that required me to get that injected product.

And at the time I didn’t know about exemptions, or I would have gotten one. I was just too sick, with two little ones, to finish my academic goals.)

Their fervor turned against the media outlet running the hit pieces, as our social media following grew by over 1,000 in the 24 hours afterwards, my staff said. After the “story” aired, people who know or follow me defended me against the shoddy work where they had a former employee of mine against a green screen.

I’m not sure what she said, because I refused to read or watch anything they published. I just don’t choose to give my energy to it. But I know bits and pieces from what people calling me said.

Anyway, I feel for Barbara O’Neill. She really needs to go to Meta and ask them to take down all the fake pages and the ad account and all the fraudulent use of her intellectual property.

Unfortunately, she may spend months PROVING that it’s her intellectual property.

Also, the fame gravy train she’s only benefited from, till recently, will dry up, fast. She doesn’t have a team of people to make content that converts, and deep awareness of internet marketing, to do what the scammers did.

Still, sliding back into obscurity is better than people blaming YOU when they get a shoddy product or no product at all--and they think it’s your fault!

Basically she may have her Australia experience all over again, with slight tweaks. O’Neill was attacked by Australia’s version of the FDA, for making false claims.

She fought the battle in court and won. The government could not prove she made any false claims. But she and her husband were bruised and bleeding from the extensive court battle. You’re aware lawyers aren’t cheap.

As she says, “I’m just a little ol’ mum from the rain forest.” She’s not some wealthy public figure.

I have a feeling the scammers who stole her identity know this. The O’Neills left their country and came to the U.S., hoping things would be different here.

They might be better here. But now this. I’m not sure that where Australia went first, we aren’t already in process of going.  I know about 8 or 10 company owners who are being put out of business by the FDA—all of them in natural health, of course.

I had half a dozen colleagues attacked by the FDA in Mar, Apr, May 2020, for writing anything at all about something that they said may help people with covid, that wasn’t the V we were supposed to all sit around and wait for.

And yet, Pharma keeps making supplements that aren’t regulated, and they aren’t whatsoever natural or even real “nutrients.” And the company on the label isn’t even any drug company—

--the many companies on the labels you think are devoted to you having fabulous natural alternatives to drugs.

As if the pHarma you already knew about wasn’t bad enough. They make almost all your supplements, too.

Anyway, with all the buzz about Barbara O’Neill, I thought you should know “the rest of the story.”

Be careful out there. Social media isn’t always what you think it is. I personally think that O’Neill’s content got so big, so fast, because:

1. The marketers have ruined everything, and almost no one is still doing excellent content on topics like O’Neill talks about in her classes. I used to teach very similar content in front of live classes, hundreds of times, too. And I think people miss that kind of useful, holistic, no-profit-involved information, and resonated with it.

2. O’Neill reminds you of your grandma, or the grandma you wished you had. She’s knowledgeable AND sweet, all at once.

and

3. Someone with an agenda knew that, and USED it, to build huge groups they could then use to serve ads to. Online, they rounded up people who WANT content like that, and are now pretending to be O’Neill, selling them stuff.

Let me know if you have information to add to this story. It’s one of the worst and saddest things I’ve seen on social media.

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