Model and activist Rain Dove has been in the news frequently in recent months. Apart from dating Rose McGowan, she has made headlines for leaking Rose’s texts with disgraced #MeToo activist Asia Argento to the press, and for being maced in a public restroom by a woman who thought she was a man, among other fantastical claims.
I debunked her fake hate crime story here, which was published in the Daily Mail, apparently taking Dove at her word.
Here’s the thing, Rain Dove is a pathological liar who has concocted an entire origin story and bamboozled a lazy press corps.
Her ridiculous, unverified, unequivocal lies have been published, apparently without fact checking, by the likes of the New York Times, Yahoo News, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed – which is somehow, frighteningly, a source linked to the Mueller Investigation.
It’s fake news. Much like the rightfully disgraced Jussie Smollett, Dove is positioning herself as an activist and generating publicity for her own benefit to the detriment of the cause she purports to support, and the real people who are actually affected.
Granted, the Daily Mail is a trash publication, but, synergistically, her lies have have generated enough press to propel her to the forefront of the LGBT movement, in turn generating puff pieces in reputable publications such as the New York Times, which recently gave her a soft write up entitled Who is Rain Dove?
Among her easily fact checked lies are that she graduated from Berkeley with a degree in genetic engineering (she didn’t), that Rain Dove is her real name (it isn’t), that she won the Ledbury Prize for poetry (she didn’t, I obtained the documents from a source), that her great grandfather was a Holocaust survivor (he wasn’t), that she is a former firefighter (she isn’t), who was involved in a firefighting accident in which she sustained burns (she wasn’t, and didn’t), and that, while working as a firefighter she served as a man alongside her male colleagues, who were under the impression that she was a man and treated her as such (none of this happened.)
The firefighting story has become central to Dove’s public image, and she repeats it ad nauseam, most recently while speaking to a campus LGBT group on her college speaking tour, for which, as you can see, her booking agency suggests a speaking fee of $2,950, plus meal and hotel, obviously.
If you’re asking yourself ‘why would someone make something like that up?’, this is why. Because it works. Rain Dove makes up lies, generates press, and is rewarded by making more money than she otherwise would if she were a decent person.
As proof, here is an email I sent to one of her regional booking agents.
The firefighter story is a strategic piece of narrative for her. It fits perfectly, too perfectly. A non-binary woman doing a traditional man’s job, embedded, triumphing in the face of gender norms.
But Rain Dove was never a firefighter, not at all.
While in high school Danielle Rupert (her given name) volunteered with the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps. She was a member of Roving Crew #6 in the summer of 2007 for four weeks.
Here is a photo from that period, where Dove is listed as Danielle Rupert.
According to the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, they are a “non-profit service, conservation, and education organization. Our mission is to teach individuals to take personal responsibility for all of their actions.”
Mission not accomplished.
A few years later, Dove ended up in Colorado, working with a conservation group called the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.
This is the kernel of truth to her story, and this is the extent of her experience in forestry, and it is very much different from being a firefighter.
According to their website, the “Rocky Mountain Youth Corps (RMYC) was established in 1993 by the City of Steamboat Springs in response to a community demand for more youth employment, educational, and recreational opportunities. In 1999, RMYC obtained 501(c)3 status enabling us to serve a greater geographic area to serve youth and accomplish projects, and greater capacity for programmatic expansion in response to fluctuating demands. The basic mission has not changed over time, but has been reinforced and expanded for greater success.”
Here is a photo of Dove with her Rocky Mountain Youth Corps crew, which I obrained from her own Facebook page. It is dated 2009, the time during which she purported to be living as a man, a man with self-described Double D breasts, which nobody apparently noticed.
She’s the one in the front, and she just got caught in a lie. I’m surprised the crack staff at Huff Po doesn’t have access to Facebook.
As you can see, Rain Dove was not a firefighter. She went to a charitable conservation camp. She was most certainly not a “hotshot” – a designation of the most highly trained and elite wilderness firefighters in the nation – as she claims.
Her lies aren’t just lies, they’re bad, implausible lies. Lies which are contradicted by her own Facebook page.
According to Dove, she went to work on the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps and unwittingly became a firefighter, which, needless to say, is impossible, not how things work, and would be highly illegal. As she described in a 2015 interview for Arise and Shine TV:
Rain Dove: Well I really didn’t want to be a firefighter, I actually went to what I thought was going to be a conservation corps and I was too broke to go back when I I realized I didn’t quite read the fine print, the fine print that said, you know
Host: (interrupts) That you were going to be a fire fighter?
Rain Dove: Yeah you know…
She also repeated this lie in a ridiculous puff piece for Yahoo News entitled Meet Rain Dove the Firefighter Turned Model Who is Genderless:
“After an episode of heartbreak, I went across the country to Colorado for what I thought was a conservation course. Turned out it was for wilderness firefighting.”
Can theses weak journalists be fired immediately please? This is a ludicrous claim. If Rain Dove had claimed she was an astronaut who went to the moon or that she had once played catcher for the Detroit Tigers, would this simply be printed? Clearly there’s not much budget for research, but does Yahoo News not have access to Facebook?
Here is Rain Dove claiming to be a (male) “hotshot” firefighter, from her own Facebook page. Notice her shirt, it says RMYC, or Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.
Next is Dove’s claim that she lived as a man while out combating blazes, which she has stated multiple times, including in the same interview for Arise and Shine, in which she states:
“The first thing that these firefighters thought was that I was a male. Which was very interesting; I hadn’t really thought about it and then here they were calling me ‘bro.’ I looked at how the other women were treated in the room and I realized that being a woman was not a good thing in this predominantly male work environment. At the end of the day, if something goes wrong, you have to be able to trust your fellow man to get you out of the situation. You don’t want to be the one stuck with ‘Helga who can’t carry the chainsaw.’ There was just this perception that women couldn’t ‘step to it’ as much as the guys. I went under a pseudonym and nobody even asked if I was trans or gay; they just thought I was a guy. I lived a year like that for a year.“
These are photos from her own Facebook page, which, as of publishing this, is still up and active. As you can see, she is not living as a man, and nobody would think she was a man.
Here, in a Ted Talk, she actually uses a photo from her above Facebook album to support her claim that she was working as a man.
She flashes a slide of the male firefighters that her conservation crew ran into that day, leaving herself out of the photo, since she is wearing a bra and doesn’t appear in any way to be a man.
Dove’s story is flimsy at best, and it defies basic reason that she is still being given a platform to spew her utter self serving nonsense.
Next is her claim that she was injured in a fire. She regularly discusses this at length, such as this 2018 interview with Healthyway.
Not only does Dove lie about being caught in a fire (there was no fire), and being injured (she wasn’t) but she is now fashioning a helicopter rescue into a narrative in which the EMTs appear to be selecting who they will rescue based on gender, which is, needless to say, not how things work, and not plausible in any sense of the word, unless you are the editor for Healthyway, apparently.
“I got caught in a blaze with two other people. That’s actually how people found out I was a woman. Or, not a woman, but you know—that I had female on my birth certificate. It was a really brutal time period. In fact, we all got injured really badly. The helicopters came in to airlift us out, and they only had room for two people, and there were three of us. They took one person named Colin, who was male-identifying, because he was the most injured. He was barely alive. And they looked at myself and this other person, and this other person was very femme, female-presenting. Then there’s me, who’s been operating as a male for a while. We both had very similar injuries; I had a head injury with a helmet kind of melted into the side of my head, and she had multiple fractures in her foot and her ankles. We both had broken collar bones—it was just a mess. But you know what they said when they were trying to determine who to take first? They were like, “Well, ladies first.” And they picked her up and put her on the ‘copter. I was like, “Wait! I mean, sure go for it! I mean—of course, she’s my crew mate, but that can’t be the reason. Surely, tell me that her injuries are worse, that’s why you’re taking her. Don’t just say ‘Ladies first,’ like—come back here, fucker!”
As this is a more recent interview, Dove is really ramping up the sensationalism. It appears that since nobody has ever checked her bullshit, she is becoming more and more emboldened and quite possibly losing her mind, as if the real world operates exclusively in the form of gender norm anecdotes which provide material for Rain Dove. It doesn’t.
Like most of Dove’s lies, there is a starting point from which she unraveled her false yarn. While working on the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, a member of her crew was seriously injured when felling a tree, however, there was no fire, so it would make one curious how Dove’s helmet became melted onto her head.
I have obtained the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, report of what transpired that day. As you can plainly read, there was no fire. There was an accident, and the RMYC was written up for various safety violations.
Dove claims that she helped save a member of the crew who was seriously injured, and she very well may have. She certainly doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, being a pathological liar and all, but the details are unclear.
What is clear is that what she told Healthyway is total bullshit, claiming “I had a head injury with a helmet kind of melted into the side of my head.”
Again, you can simply check Dove’s own Facebook page and you’ll see a photo of her shortly after the accident, with the date of the photo she has posted matching the time of the OSHA report, and her head doesn’t appear damaged, and in fact she doesn’t even mention a head injury, but she does have a tiny weak ass splint on her thumb.
Clearly there was an accident, and some members of Dove’s crew were injured. But she was not hurt, and there was not a fire, so I would like an explanation as to how her helmet could have melted onto her head.
In recent months, Dove parlayed her fake firefighting experience into exploiting the victims of the Paradise fires in Northern California, posting this tweet to her feed showing a screenshot of an email response from someone named Samara Brinks from the Paradise Fire Department.
The purpose of this tweet was for Rain Dove to advertise the fact that she would be volunteering to assist in that disaster.
But she never went. Look at the phone number on the bottom of that email message. That is the actual phone number of the Paradise Fire Department.
But nobody named Samara Brinks works there. Call them. Nobody named Samara Brinks has ever worked there. This isn’t Amazon. It’s a small town fire department. They would know. They’ll tell you the exact same thing. I called them.
Rain Dove photoshopped it. It might strike you as strange, but if you know what you’re doing it takes a few minutes at best.
I’m beginning to think she might not be very bright.
This is beyond pathetic and it’s certainly disgusting. Rain Dove is furthering her career on the backs of actual victims, and actual tragedies, not to mention besmirching the names of the hard working men and women of the US Forest Service, and firefighters everywhere for that matter, insinuating that they trick unsuspecting youth into combating fires, and prioritize which severely injured firefighters to airlift to medical care based on gender.
She should not be rewarded with speaking engagements. She should not be listened to anymore, or respected for any reason. She should not be given cushy, not fact-checked publicity, whether it’s in a trash publication like the Daily Mail or an esteemed one such as the New York Times.
When confronted with her lies, Dove’s strategy should ring familiar with anyone who follows Donald Trump in the news – she will issue a hard denial followed by a cacophony of confusing disinformation. Like Trump, her origin story is completely bogus, but she just keeps repeating it.
Unfortunately the correct information is in plain view on her own Facebook page.
I would posit that there are less than ten people in America who are huge fans of Rain Dove and Donald Trump, but a liar is a liar, and if you support one just because you don’t like the other you’re a total hypocrite.
Let’s ignore this sociopath and move on.