Ms. Farrah Ashline This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. July-September, 2004 Inductees Into Twisted Unicorn's Website Hall of Infamy

   www.twistedunicorn.com/website - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/1/2004   Last Visited: 11/12/2004

   That site brought media attention to its founder, Farrah Ashline, which included stories in The Washington Post and Entrepreneur's Start-Ups magazine. Ashline was likened to a "young Gloria Steinem" and she claimed that her site had gotten 4,000 subscribers willing to pay the $60 membership fee.
   
   I became familiar with Farrah Ashline myself when she began posting job openings for her company on DC Web Women's all-female web design mailing list, which I subscribe to. (Click here for a sample of one of her posts.) A few sharp-eyed women on the list noticed that even though Ashline referred to herself as the CEO of GirlsGoingOut.com, she posted her job notices under the e-mail address "goobiebabybutt@aol.com." Granted, Ashline made the common mistake of using a cutesy e-mail address as a business contact (okay, I'll admit that it's more common among job seekers than among business owners), but at least she didn't use something like "imaslut", "foxymama", or "hottits". Anyway, this caused a major discussion war between women who assumed that Ashline was a total dummy (or "goobybaby ImaMoron" as this one e-mail called her) and other women who thought that Ashline was a first-time inexperienced business owner who made a simple mistake and who needed gentle advice and not the flame war that the list had generated. (Click here, here, here, here, here, and here for a few samples.) Sometimes things like that happens in an all-women's organization where women will cut each other down instead of offering helpful sisterly advice, which is unfortunate, but that's an entirely different story.
   
   The controversy had gotten so bad that the list administrators had to shut it down completely. A few days later Farrah Ashline posted a follow-up notice to the list saying that she had named one of her AOL e-mail accounts "goobiebabybutt" after the baby talk she speaks to her cat, Goobie, and that she was unsubscribing to the mailing list as a result of all the nasty e-mails that the list had generated.
   
   I had written to Ashline after the fact telling her how sorry I was that she had to face such a negative reaction over a simple mistake of using a cutesy e-mail address. At that time I had no idea that there was a dark side to that woman. She wrote back thanking me for the e-mail and inviting me to join GirlsGoingOut.com.
   ...
   In the meantime, Farrah Ashline had even started work on a second site called WOMagazine.com, which, judging from the lack of pages at the Internet Web Archive, never got off the ground. (A test version of the site remains on the server of an unpaid ex-employee.)
   
   But there were a couple of warning signals of things to come. Farrah Ashline made an unsuccessful attempt to sell both GirlsGoingOut.com and WOMagazine.com on eBay for a minimum bid of $250,000. Then GirlsGoingOut.com abruptly went offline with the excuse that the site was undergoing reconstruction as part of a shift from a DC area-only site to a nationwide site with franchises located in other cities across the United States. This new national version was scheduled to relaunch on May 7, 2004 (which never made its deadline).
   
   The shit literally hit the public fan when The Washington Post printed a story about former disgruntled employees of GirlsGoingOut.com who claimed that Ashline had never paid them for the work that they did for the site. In addition, one former GirlsGoingOut.com member even came forward saying that she had never received anything for the $60 membership that she paid. When she attempted to speak on the phone to Ashline about it, Ashline screamed and cursed her out.
   
   That story also mentioned an arrest warrant that's currently out for Ashline in Albany, New York for failing to appear in court after being arrested on prostitution charges.
   
   What's more, the Wonkette site had exposed this allegation that some of the writing on GirlsGoingOut.com were plagiarized material from other sites.
   
   Then there were the interesting Help Wanted ads that Farrah Ashline posted on various websites that seeked entertainers, lingerie models, actors, and dancers for a massage business. Some of the ex-GirlsGoingOut.com employees had dug up some interesting stuff about a few sites that contained photos of a woman named Saraphina, who looks like Farrah Ashline, including BabyDollMassage.com and DC-Exotics.com.
   
   There are also a couple of unsubstantiated rumors about Farrah Ashline having offered free massages to a couple of her male employees in lieu of cash.
   
   The ex-GirlsGoingOut.com employees filed suits in various small claims courts in Farifax County, Virginia (where Ashline lived at the time) and they won but they weren't able to collect on those judgements. So they decided to use the World Wide Web to get Farrah Ashline. When the domain registry on WOmagazine.com expired, one digruntled employee grabbed it and used it to redirect to a page on AtomicApril.com that details her days as one of Ashline's employees along with some interesting graphics slamming Ashline. Another disgruntled employee started a site using links to the Internet Web Archive to document all the employees who have worked on GirlsGoingOut.com in order to refute Ashline's frequent claims that those unpaid employees had never worked for her company. A third disgruntled employee registered FarrahAshline.com as a domain name and started a site providing links to stories from other unpaid employees and contractors about their dealings with Ms. Ashline.
   
   The disgruntled employees and members who got nothing for their $60 fee also managed to convince the Better Business Bureau to give an unsatisfactory rating to GirlsGoingOut.com.
   
   In the meantime, the ex-employees had turned the comments section of a blog page on SpeicalAgency.net's site into a gathering place for the unpaid workers to write about their unpleasant dealings with Ms. Ashline and report on any further developments on Ashline, who had gone into hiding at that point.
   
   The attempts to get payment and justice by the ex-employees resulted in a follow-up story in The Washington Post but Farrah Ashline was nowhere to be seen.
   
   There was one rumored sighting on the SpecialAgency.net page that Ashline had briefly worked in a mall kiosk selling jewlery in Wheaton, Maryland.
   
   But then some dedicated researcher uncovered a few Craig's List postings from a woman named Paidia Linefar, whose writing style and activities seem similar to Farrah Ashline's. One posting advertises psychotherapy sessions mixed with massage and yoga. Another one is a job listing that is seeking to hire massage therapists, nail technicians, facial experts, spray tan experts, and makeup artists for all-female spa parties. One eagle-eyed person who posted on the SpecialAgency.net page noticed that Paidia Linefar's surname combines the last four letters of the name "Ashline" with the first three letters of the name "Farrah."
   
   Then someone discovered the Paidia Public Relations site and the disgruntled ex-employees felt that they had hit the jackpot. While the writing style suggests that Paidia and Farrah Ashline is the same person, the evidence seemed circumstantial at first. But then the ex-employees gathered more evidence suggesting a stronger link.
   
   The Paidia Public Relations site was designed by a company called Juice Box Design. There is a blog by one of Juice Box Design's employees that provides a revealing story about the company's dealings with Paidia Public Relations. It also provides the strongest evidence that Farrah Ashline and Paidia Linefar is the same person. Like I wrote at the beginning, Farrah Ashline had used the e-mail address goobiebabybutt@aol.com when she posted available jobs at GirlsGoingOut.com to the DC Web Women mailing list and she said she named that e-mail account after the baby talk she speaks to her cat Goobie. Well, here is what this employee has to say:
   
   one of our clients... oh boy. carve out an afternoon (i did). we made a web site for a public relations entrepreneur (paidiapr.com) and she was just bizarre from the beginning. her e-mail address is goobiebabybutt which, as she explained in a voice mail, is because her cat's name is goobie and she has "a cute little baby butt".
   
   But then this employee goes on to explain what happened next:
   
   hmm, ok. but anyway we made a layout, it was good, and then all of a sudden she changed her mind and said she would rather have a dog care web site instead. we said ok, and made a layout for that. then she said she wasn't going to have a dog care company after all. so we inisisted that she pay us for our time, and refused to do any more work until we got paid for the rest of the public relations work up front. she disappeared for a month, reappeared, told us she had just changed her name to paidia, and that she would send the money overnight. we got i

2. 2. GirlsGoingOut.Com: The Best Interactive Event Site For Women

   girlsgoingout.com/magazine.asp - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/27/2002   Last Visited: 3/14/2004

   GirlsGoingOut.Com was founded in 2001 by Farrah Ashline. Ashline, at the time, was employed as managing editor of Nursing Spectrum Magazine. That's when she decided to launch GirlsGoingOut.Com, a Internet web site geared towards woman, thus also allowing her to continue to write her fiction.
   ...
   More information on GirlsGoingOut.Com and WOMagazine.Com can be obtained by contacting Farrah Ashline, CEO at (703) 877-2104 or by e-mail FAshline@GirlsGoingOut.Com.

3. 3. Nursing Spectrum- Career Fitness Online

   www.nursingspectrum.com/AboutN - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/13/2001   Last Visited: 3/13/2001

   Farrah Ashline Managing Director :