Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley fell prey to an online hoax that started with an email from a complete stranger.
According to E! News, a mother emailed Kimberly her story about her dying daughter suffering from neuroblastoma, a kind of pediatric cancer.
On Wednesday night's ABC Nightline, Kimberly revealed that the mother “said that her daughter had begged her to get in touch with me."
"So it sounded very sort of real," Kimberly said. "But she wasn't dying to get a hold of me. You know, that was kind of the beginning of the manipulation" The Nashville actress continued to communicate through email, phone calls and texts with the mother and the daughter, who Kimberly believed to be named Claire, for over a week.
Brad thought the interaction was genuine as well. "In the middle of it, there's no way that's not real," he said. "How can that not be real?" He even sang “Amazing Grace” to the girl in a phone call.
But it was not real. When the mother informed Kimberly that her daughter died, she wouldn't respond to any of the couple's questions about funeral arrangements. After looking into the matter further, they discovered that the whole thing was a hoax. The girl they thought to be Claire is actually a real patient in Southern California.
"That's the sickest part about this to me," Brad said. "That is the part that when I start to talk about that, that's when I get really mad. That there were real kids, that there were real photos involved."
The Paisley's weren't the only celebrities involved in this scam – Little Big Town, Kate Gosselin, some of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, Natalie Grant, Francesca Battistelli and Carmen Hope Thomas, among others, also fell victim to the woman's story.
"When I spoke to this woman she said she was the mom of a little girl and that her heart was breaking as she was watching her only daughter die," Natalie Grant said. "We all were devastated by it and it's so disturbing that someone was claiming the identity of a little child with cancer and tried to pass it off as her child."
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
