Last week, BethAnn McLaughlin, who founded the group MeTooSTEM, announced that one of her colleagues had died.

McLaughlin posted a sob story on Twitter that a friend, @Sciencing_Bi, had died of COVID-19, and it likely happened because she was forced to teach in the classroom.

“She was a fierce protector of people,” McLaughlin wrote on her account, which is now suspended. “No one has ever had my back like that.”

@Sciencing_Bi had gained a large Twitter following by playing the victim and claiming they were assaulted by several men in her field while working at Arizona State University. She claimed that she contracted COVID-19 because of the school’s policies.

“ASU kept teachers, staff and students on campus until April. That’s well after we knew this was a killer disease. Many got COVID. Including me,” the Twitter account wrote.

“Please read her timeline,” McLaughlin wrote on Twitter. “Campus closed and she was in the hospital a week later. Be mad about COVID but be more mad that BIPOC community is most vulnerable and underrepresented on campus. We are killing them.”

McLaughlin even went as far to suggest that she had relations with @Sciencing_Bi, writing: “Looking at her side of the bed and crying. Just a lot of crying. I literally can do nothing.”

However, there was one major problem with McLaughlin’s story: @Sciencing_Bi was a fake account and not an actual person. ASU discovered that it was a hoax after looking into the matter.

“Unfortunately, this appears to be a hoax. We looked into this over the weekend and were unable to verify any connection with the university. We were in touch with several deans and faculty members and no one was able to identify the account or who might be behind it,” ASU said in a statement.

“Some of the past commentary this person posted was questionable, such as teaching in April. ASU transitioned to fully remote teaching in March. The person also mentioned salary reductions. We have not implemented any salary reductions here,” they added.

McLaughlin downplayed her role in the hoax after it was found out, but she is widely believed to be behind the phony account.

“To the extent that I have people engage with me on Twitter using accounts not associated with their names, I try to do that in good faith assuming they are authentic,” she said.

The social justice community is in an uproar against McLaughlin for allegedly perpetrating this hoax.

“Catfishing is not a nice thing to do and to catfish as queer indigenous person — and then publicly kill that person off — is unconscionable behavior,” wrote Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who works as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire.

“Impersonating a Native American survivor of sexual assault is cruel in a time when people are so aware of missing and murdered women and when so many Native women have risked coming forward, using their real names,” she added.

Anna Fore Waymack, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, said that she found McLaughlin’s “digital redface” to be abhorrent. She accused McLaughlin of having “blood on her hands” as this “hoax of ‘forced to teach, died of COVID’ is hitting the news right as [university] admins make final decisions about reopening. About whether our fears are overblown.”

As usual, the social justice lefties pushing their victim racket are disingenuous. They have to create fake oppression when it does not exist.