The Last Post Ever, Ever, Ever On Aleksey Vayner (We Hope)
It's time to declare a moratorium on all things Aleksey Vayner. This horse is not only beaten to death -- it's been shipped off to the glue factory, buried out in the yard, and decomposed into its component minerals.
Yet here we are.
When the behemoth Today Show limps into the story, getting pretty much every fact wrong ("Someone at one of the Wall Street firms is believed to have sent the video to YouTube" -- no, you hacks, we did!), and not even mentioning the fraud angle, we feel obligated to do one. last. post. And to make it a doozy.
We've obtained (best word in journalism, right there) the first 11 pages of Women's Silent Tears, Vayner's self-published book about women in the Holocaust. The book's host, Lulu.com, took it down after reading our initial report that segments of the work were plagiarized. Well, now that Vayner's work is freely available for download (cease and desist this, Alex), you can Google it for yourself, or follow our handy guide below.
But first, we just have to share this bit from his wholly original "Acknowledgements" section:
[A]nonymous gratitude goes to the generals and intelligence officers who provided the hands-on skills and knowledge that expanded my horizons and changed my perspective on the world forever.
Now for the more Kaavyaesque bits. From the preface:
Women's voices have given rise to many powerful accounts of the Holocaust, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular. [Stolen from: Experience and Expression: Women, Nazis, and the Holocaust]
From the "Broad Overview of the Holocaust" section:
In ancient times, when there was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the priests of the Temple would offer animal sacrifices to God. Some sacrifices would provide the priests with meat for their own consumption, while others would be wholly consumed and only ashes would be left. The latter type of sacrifices was called, in Greek, holokauston, which means, "wholly burned." In Hebrew, the word for this type of sacrifice was 'olah.' However, when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion and translated the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament into Latin, they borrowed the term holokauston from Greek and rendered 'olah' as holocaustum. The English term derives from the Latin word. [Stolen from: The Holocaust History Project]
Then there's this bit from his section on euthanasia, which appears to be lifted in full.
The term euthanasia (literally, "good death") usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage, however, "euthanasia" was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients, without the knowledge or consent of themselves or their families. [Stolen from: Holocaust Encyclopedia]
There. We're done. Forever. We'll update if the guy gets expelled or charged, but that's it. We're not even going to tell you about how we got in contact with the guys who made the ski video he bought.
62 Comments | 
| 
Print This Post
Read more: aleksey vayner, i-banking, plagiarism, Yale
Email – 
Search
About
Follow us on Twitter
Report a bug
Archives
RSS Feed
October 18th, 2006 at 9:59 am
guys come ON… share with us some more of the juicy stories!!! this can’t die like this… there’s gotta be more…
October 18th, 2006 at 10:07 am
it’s spelled “moratorium”
October 18th, 2006 at 10:12 am
I’m addicted to the Aleksey story. If you continue to deny us coverage, I will initiate legal action through the esteemed legal team of ron706@aol.com, Esq.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:14 am
has anyone else noticed that Impossible is Nothing used to be an Adidas ad campaign. The doofus even lifted the title to his own video
October 18th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Keep it going, you cannot leave it like this, is the best schadenfreude I had in years!!!!!
October 18th, 2006 at 10:25 am
If you guys go to facebook and do a search on him, it turns up that he has three profiles at three different schools-Yale, Dartmouth, and Wisconsin, with a gradution year as ‘07. You just gotta love this guy.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Could you update us also on what happened to the recruiter who forwarded his application to the internet? That’s a pretty bad violation of privacy (even if a funny one…)
October 18th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Word on the street round New Haven is that he is indeed getting investigated by the Dean’s office for, you know, plagiarism and lying. Apparently he’s plagiarized a number of papers while at Yale, which they would be able to nail him on pretty unequivocally. Just hearsay, though, so I wouldn’t swear to it in court.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:15 am
If this is you’re last post on Aleksey, this will be my last click on IvyGate. Common guys…
October 18th, 2006 at 11:18 am
I must be the only IvyGate reader who doesn’t know shit about this Aleksey character. Every time I saw a post on this guy, I skipped right over it.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:31 am
I cannot believe the Today show didn’t credit you guys with putting it up on YouTube. Ah well. At least this story helped us discover IvyGate, which we’re now adding to our regular reading list.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:31 am
totally agree with “come ON”. How can you guys call it quits after posting that zinger about the ski footage?? And we have not even heard from former senseis! Because you know it’s just a matter of time until Dr. Phil books him as a guest. You think big media is gonna let this guy slip through the cracks? IvyGateBlog is simply the world’s only media outlet with the ability, no, obligation to keep these hilarious facts coming in.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:51 am
You can’t stop now! You can’t stop until we find at least one true fact about this guy. I keep up with this story purely for the joy of someone finding out that he’s from Poughkeepsie, NY and doesn’t even go to Yale. Or at the very least, that this is a very, very well planned joke.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Vaynergate cannot die. It simply can’t.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:55 am
it’s funny, very funny. and vayner is ridiculousness personified. but you guys do so many other kinds of stories well that i must agree it is time to move on back to those and stop the vayner coverage. or at least restrict it to truly breaking news.
October 18th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Good call stopping the story now. This is why you’re much better than Dealbreaker.com, which basically has been raiding your comment sections to keep posting crap about Vayner. I’ll keep reading and waiting for your next editorial coup.
And, again, props for remembering the fradulent charity and plagiarism are the real issues here.
October 18th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Check out Bilio he is the link – can you say hero worship
October 18th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
I find it hard to believe that Aleksey Vayner didn’t plagiarize term papers while at Yale. This is the sytematic work of someone who lacks both shame and common sense.
October 18th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
*sigh*
systematic… I’m spell-check aDverse.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Vayner reminds me of John Mark Karr.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I’m faintly disgusted by this story. Not mind, you by poor Mr. Vayner, who strikes me as little more than an unworldly fool, but by the glee that most of you seem to exude as you’ve been tearing him apart.
The story isn’t even that funny. Had I ever met him in person, I’m sure I would be still be dining out on my Alexi Vayner stories. But I don’t know this guy, and neither do the majority of you. So the wide, nearly ecstatic response to Mr Vayner’s downfall leaves me scratching my head: what did this guy actually do to deserve all this?
He was stupid–that’s basically it. Which leaves the majority of you in the rather uncomfortable ethical position of having mercilessly teased an idiot. Not just teased, but comprehensively destroyed. Do you tease Retards with the same relish? Kids with parkinson’s? Because, really, it should be abundantly clear to all of you that Mr Vayner is disturbed in some as yet to be diagnosed manner.
The worst part of this story, for me, is that it was broken by the ultra-macho idiots who run Wall Street. I can just see them, gathered together around a monitor, in their just-for-effect red suspenders, power-drinking their morning coffees, and guffawing, “Haw-haw! What fuckin’ moron!”
AS if working for Goldman-Sachs made you braintrust.
But go ahead–do whatever floats your respective boats. Just know that even though Alexi VAyner’s shit stinks worse than yours, the combined pungency of your not-quite-as-individually-stinky poos makes a smell at which the devil himself would stop his nose.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Please keep Vaynergate going. Ignore NothingFancy, your readers (and I’m a new one) love the story. Don’t hold back now.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Wow. Nothingfancy is brilliant. Let’s blame people for exercising their rights to mock someone who has apparently made it pretty far in life (Yale undergrad isn’t shabby) through lies. If he was someone sitting poor on the side of a street talking to himself I too would find the collective pointing and laughing callous. He is, however, an apparently well-to-do egomaniac that took the space of a more deserving student — I just hope he didn’t receive any financial aid. Your line of reasoning reminds me of the typical brain-mush reporting and debating that goes on in the mainstream press. Keep propagating the BS.
October 18th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Dave, I’m imagining you reading The Great Gatsby scribbing in the margins, “serves that dumbshit right.”
He isn’t going any further–Yale is Vayner’s last stop. This blog and Gawker have seen to that. But wait: was it really this blog that put the kibosh on Vayner’s Gatsby-like aspirations, or was it the fact that Vayner was eventually going to implode all on his own, and IvyGate was merely the means to his self-destruction?
Obviously the latter. No one “broke” Vaynergate–Alexi Vayner, through sheer stupidity, blew the whistle on himself.
Still, does that mean that everybody has to revel in it? “OMG! What a friggin’ liar!” I just can’t get my head around the thrill of beating on this guy when he’s already down and out.
Thus, you Dave, remind me of Bill O’Reilly, rabid with his own self-righteousness.
October 18th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Hey nothingfancy, let me give you the no-frills rundown of who you should be bitching at:
Ivygate – Called a moratorium on this story.
Dealbreaker – Went on Fox’s Inside Edition to talk about Vayner:
http://www.dealbreaker.com/2006/10/aleksey_vayner_responds_to_luc.php
Ivygate: Diligently pursued the fraud and plagiarism angles.
Dealbreaker: What fraud or plagiarism? They took the fake personals ad seriously:
http://www.dealbreaker.com/2006/10/aleksey_if_it_means_ill_widen.php
Ivygate: Actually did its own research and information gathering.
Dealbreaker: Ripped off Ivygate’s commentors:
http://www.dealbreaker.com/2006/10/the_full_aleksey_vayner_treatm.php
Now if you want to chew someone out for unethically humiliating Vayner to boost readership, click on one of those links and go to Dealbreaker. Seriously, go. No one’s stopping you.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Thank god Harvard rejected this guy.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Harvard isn’t known for self-deprecating humor. The Yalies are taking it in stride.
That being said, I hope you guys milk it at The Game.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Problem is there are more motherfuckers like this…they are posers, playas, and most end up selling internet ads…
October 18th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
What about Bill O’Reilly and his fake Kennedy School degree? Some 6-week program and he says he has a Harvard degree…true? Mesmells a rat…
October 18th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Nate: I realize this is incredibly difficult to comprehend, but the same people who are sending IvyGate tips also send us tips. Your assumption that we got any of the info from those posts off of IvyGate is just flat-out wrong. We *always* credit when we reference things we found on other sites as a matter of policy (and have credited IvyGate several times.) Your erroneous assumptions are not our wrongdoing.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Aleksey Vayner is my hero… I can’t wait to see what he does next. I wish I had the balls to try the shit he does; I’m a pathological liar as well, but I tend to keep my lies on the smaller side…
October 18th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Aleksey Vayner’s downfall was brought about because he created an incredibly ridiculous image aimed at striking metaphorical chords with people who work on Wall Street. Perseverance alone does not make you a success. I’d much rather hire someone who could show a little modesty. The reason people are laughing is because Vayner thought people would take a cartoon seriously. The reason people are perhaps being so vocal is because many of them work hard to get to just the same place but they do so by being honest, not pretending to be an action star most likely found in a late-night Cinemax movie. He committed literary fraud. About the Holocaust.
And yes, he would have brought about his own implosion, but what do you think this is?
The reason DealBreaker and IvyGate are covering it is because their readership is chattering about it. It might be a vicious cycle, but it’s kind of their purpose for existing and–cough, cough–their job.
The guy’s a liar. Lies beget lies and lead to someone, and not just the liar, getting hurt.
October 18th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
We-e-elll,
Maybe I’m overreacting. The guy did try to set up a dummy hedgefund, and worse yet, a dummy charity.
If he’d been just a little bit slicker, he might have made off with a substantial chunk of other people’s money under false pretenses, and that, of course, would be utterly indefensible.
It’s just the sight of all these people licking thier chops over this kid’s corpse makes for a very unappetizing spectacle.
October 18th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
You guys should really give Alesky the benefit of the doubt. The whole thing about his hands being lethal weapons is true. I flew with him once and airline security made him wear oven mitts with little padlocks.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Does this kid still actually still go to Yale? Why has there been nothing on his reaction to this story? How is it that nobody has spoken to Vayner? I want to hear his side of the story!
After all the dude’s contact info can be found through the main Yale site at http://www.yale.edu/search/find_people.html. He must still somehow be enrolled.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
This may be old news that I missed– do we know for sure that the video exploits are Aleksey? Maybe it’s really him in each frame but I wondered… we don’t see his face during the bench press of 405, nor do we see his face during the martial arts feat of smashing the brick. Perhaps he can truly do those things, or maybe he used old Hollywood techniques to create the impression.
And maybe everyone has said this for the past few days. Just curious.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:31 am
IvyGateBlog has covered the story very professionally, and they uncovered the truly interesting hidden side of it – i.e. the widespread fraud and plagiarism. Despite their findings, most people covering the story, particularly the high profile media sources, ENTIRELY ignored this aspect. As such, the media image that was created for Aleksey was of a guy who just tried too hard, but otherwise a smart, succesful young man.
Ivy Gate’s reaction much like ours was: we cannot let…
1) A story this funny pass us by.
2) A deceiving looser such as Aleksey make a career for himself by cutting corners.
I for one wrote Yale, forwarding the relevant links, and suggested they need to investigate him.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Mr. Vayner has made NY Post and aparently got himself a real lawyer. Now they are planning to sue UBS. for “put(ing) me and my family under a great amount of stress and greatly affected future employment in a negative sense.”
Read more here -> http://www.nypost.com/seven/10192006/business/video_resume_leak_has_yalie_crying_foul_business_dan_mangan.htm
October 19th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Take that! You will repsect my Authority, UPS. I will own your little company and rule it with my masterful (and multi-talented) hands.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:39 am
There’s more plagiarism…..a large chunk of his writing sample on hedge funds was taken from http://www.pimco.com
I mean, OK, we’re just bonds, not the holocaust, but give us our props.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:48 am
The irony of the situation hasn’t been discussed. Aleksey is a caricature of what the investment banks yearn for during recruitment. Though he’s clearly delusional, the video, resume and writings are crafted to conform to what the ibank interviewers want out of a prospective banker: Someone who is intellectual, supremely confidant, cultured, and athletically gifted. The subject matter of his book was engineered to gain support, targeting Jewish people who he probably expected to meet during the interview process. He was an outsider desperately trying to demonstrate that he was “a member of the club”. I am almost certain that those who ridiculed him probably lied themselves during the interview process, though not to the same degree. And now they are out to haze Aleksey, as they believe that they are somehow superior, in that their lies have placed them on the other side of the interview table.
Aleksey deserves the scorn, and deserves expulsion if he’s plagiarized term papers. But equally ugly are the investment bankers who feel somehow superior to Aleksey. Many share the exaggerated self-worth, and propensity at self-aggrandizement. Sanity questions aside, most were either more polished, or truly “members of the club”.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
My ingenious plan is working out perfectly. First I will bring UBS to its knees and make them pay me a huge settlement. Then I will make Yale expell me so I no longer need to plagiarize term papers and borrow people’s notes to pass silly tests of my infinitively enlightened mind.
Then I will bang all the gold digging banker wenches in New York City.
Hakuna Matatta, bitches!
October 19th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Mr Garber/Vayner is himself Jewish, and so not an outsider in that sense. Writing a book on the holocaust would have had personal meaning for him, and not been an attempt to fit in.
As for bankers looking for confidence, they look for people confident in their own abilities, but not to the point of hubris or believing one has abilities he doesn’t. As for athletic ability, nowadays, it is just about 100th on their list.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
He’s Back: Aleksey Vayner Lashes Out
Just when we thought the story was beginning to fade—IvyGate had declared a moratorium on it, Gawker seemed to be returning it’s attention to the children of celebrities, we were ginning up another hotties contest—Aleksey Vayner is pouring fuel o…
October 19th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Personal meaning, like the charity work?
October 19th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I plagiarized a book on the Holocaust because of my deep emotional commitment to the topic, and not to pad my resume.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Please keep going. PLEASE. I need more Vayner…
October 19th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
“Impossible is nothing”– Isn’t that an Adidas slogan?
October 19th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
“Mr Garber/Vayner is himself Jewish, and so not an outsider in that sense. Writing a book on the holocaust would have had personal meaning for him, and not been an attempt to fit in.”?
Some of the comments are (as we say in Uzbekistan) fruitier than a nutcake.
October 20th, 2006 at 5:33 am
Sanek, a ne poiti li tebe na hui, pidorasticheskoe chmo? Kogo ty zashishaesh, mraz? Menia? Da ya ne nuzhdaus v tvoei zashite, mozhesh zasunut ee sebe v zhopu.
October 20th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Translation from Russian:
Sanek: Lyosha [Lyosha is a faggoty word for Aleksey in Russian], good job, tell them all to go fuck themselves. They are all jealous. They created the American dream ..[this bullshit looks like it's in Russian, but it's not – apparently this stupid fuck cannot even write in Russian]…I wish you success! Hooray Tashkent!
October 20th, 2006 at 6:23 am
Must admit, I have also been checking back for updates. For me, the core motivation is not schadenfreude, but a combination of curiosity and pity for Aleksey. The whole Uzbek Jewish background made me think: his ancestors may have been deported by Stalin to what is now Uzbekistan. A Central Asian dictatorship is not the most cheerful place on earth, so the guy and his family pack up and emigrate to NYC. Somewhere I read that they arrived in the US in 1994. In my calculation, that would make Aleksey just 10-11 years old. And there is no way that a 10-year-old does not pick up a perfect NY accent… Yet, he does have an accent. In my experience, people who emigrate to the US at age 13 can still lose an accent, while those who arrive at age 14-15 will not necessarily. Aleksey falls in the second category.
As for the whole lying thing. The guy started all over in his early teenage years, with no bearings in American culture. He was probably smart and creative, and to compensate for his shortcomings, he built up this alternative universe, where he was not the Soviet immigrant, but a well-rounded, successful, athletic wunderkind. I think this masks a serious personality disorder, which merits a visit to the shrink. Yet, I feel pity for the guy, not glee upon his downfall.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:35 am
I want to hear more about this story,please write more!
October 20th, 2006 at 10:39 am
please write more!
October 20th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Eurocrat, I have never heard of jews deported by Stalin. I’m sure otherwise the Jews would have publisized it as another Holocaust all over the World.
There are so called “Bukhara Jews” living in Uzbekistan since….well, long ago. They tend to look more like Arabs than Europeans, so Aleksey might be from a mixed family as opposed to being a pure jew.
October 20th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
A glorified piece of self-promotion on part of Ivygate. C’mon, give us some more, that’s how the majority of your readers discovered you…
October 20th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
I know Aleksey personally and he would never sign his name as “Lyosha”. So please refer those comments to yourself, loser who signs under somebody else’s name
October 20th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
You couldn’t make this up: the guy lives across the street from Bellevue. I wish I were joking.
October 20th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
As sickened as I am that Vayner is a fraud who blatantly plagiarizes and sets up fake charities, I hate to see Yale get so much undeserved negative attention. Comments I see on this blog and others that utter the refrain “typical Yalie” really anger me, because Vayner is by far NOT a typical Yalie. Yale is full of amazing, industrious, brilliant people who don’t need to lie about their accomplishments. Vayner, please drag your lying egomaniacal self down, and not this wonderful institution.
And Ivy Gate, please keep giving us more!
October 20th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
I can understand why you want to stop posting about this guy, only after reading some of these comments. Between the dumb posts from people who want to say he is a hero or genius and the i’m-only-here-because-of-the-internet-meme it probably doesn’t seem worth your time. I would hate to see the only interesting source of what’s going on with this guy stop now. I want to know what will happen now, shouldn’t people who steal money from legitimate charities be somehow punished? How will we all know what to believe if you stop now? Is he going to be sued from SOMETHING of the many things he’s plagarized? I’d hate for you to feel like it’s beating a dead horse when you are simply posting on the unfolding story of an incredibly stupid and criminal liar and the trouble that is sure to follow him.
Thank you.
October 21st, 2006 at 2:03 pm
it’s still going strong
http://www.alekseyvaynerbsrepository.com/
October 21st, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Years ago (1948)I had an 8 year old friend whose family had emigrated from Hungary under violent circumstances. He was smart and decent, but a very traumatized 8 year old. I didn’t realize this until I had grown up. I often wonder how he turned out and how he adjusted to life in a new culture. Perhaps, Aleksey went through something similar.