When Grace Carter contacted The Right Stuff’s Instagram account, the person controlling it introduced himself as John. He also offered a phone number with a Southern California area code — the same one a WIRED journalist had used in the past to contact McEntee.
There was no obvious reason he had reached out to her in particular. At the time he reached out to her, Carter had about 17,000 followers on TikTok, he says, and he still has only a modest 1,500 on Instagram. “I actually have no idea how he found me,” he says. “Based on the other accounts I follow and the things I post, he’s very left-leaning. So I was surprised when he found me.”
Carter says she never used McEntee’s phone number, though she did take her up on her offer of a free branded hoodie. While messages viewed by WIRED indicate Carter barely responded to McEntee, he did repeatedly offer to fly her and a friend to Los Angeles. “My treat,” she wrote.
“I remember telling my boyfriend and joking that he was going to be the other girl,” says Carter, who says she continued talking to McEntee as a kind of “trolling.” “I thought I could use a free trip, so I kept the conversation going at first.”
In messages viewed by WIRED, McEntee tells Carter, “I think you’re a liberal,” but tells her, “As long as you’re funny, I don’t care.” The conversation, she says, died out after Carter refused to visit McEntee during her winter break.
“I would have felt uncomfortable with him in person,” she says.
Following the September 10 presidential debate, McEntee posted a video saying, “Can someone please locate the women who Kamala Harris claims are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.” The comments section of that video was soon flooded with women from all over the country sharing their experiences.
According to Carter, this post made her feel it was important to share her experience. “That video she made about abortions really upset me,” she says. “And I thought it was necessary to speak out.” Carter posted a video on TikTok sharing her messages with McEntee and says she has received messages from several other young women reporting similar experiences.
One of those women, who spoke to WIRED and asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her safety, says she contacted McEntee through the dating app Right Stuff before texting her. The number provided matched one given to Carter and one previously used by a WIRED journalist; the messages reviewed by WIRED also included selfies that clearly appeared to be of McEntee. Like Carter, she was 18 at the time.
“I would consider myself semi-conservative,” Carter says. Unlike Carter, she knew who McEntee was and initially thought her app profile was an example for users, rather than her actual account. (Last year, a series of TikTok videos featured McEntee First dates (With women he matched with on the app in various cities.) “I had seen it on TikTok. I saw it on the news. My family is pretty conservative, so I had seen it before.”
