Eric Abramovitz is an incredibly talented clarinet player from Canada. Back in 2013, he auditioned for a music school in L.A. that only accepts 2 students a year to study on a full-ride. However, his girlfriend was worried about him leaving, so when he got the email offering him a scholarship, she intervened so he never saw it.
According to the Montreal Gazette:
Scared he would move away and perhaps no longer be in a relationship with her, Jennifer Lee deleted the email. She sent the Colburn Conservatory of Music an email, pretending to be Abramovitz, refusing the offer because he would “be elsewhere.”
She sent Abramovitz an email pretending to be Yehuda Gilad, under a new address she apparently established herself, giladyehuda09@gmail.com, saying Abramovitz had not been accepted for a scholarship at Colburn. Writing as Gilad, she told Abramovitz he was offered a position to study at the University of Southern California with a scholarship of $5,000 a year. Annual tuition at USC is $51,000, a cost she knew Abramovitz could not afford.
In 2015, he eventually went to study with Gilad, and after a few lessons, Gilad asked him, "Why did you reject me?" Of course Abramovitz had done nothing of the sort, so he asked, “Why did you reject me?"
“That’s when I knew that something underhanded was afoot,” Abramovitz said. One day in 2015, he and a friend set about trying to gain access to the fake email account, and because Abramovitz and Lee once shared a computer, he knew one of her passwords, which he tried.
“Miraculously, it logged right in,” he said. Her email was listed as the recovery email, her phone was the recovery phone. “We felt like Sherlock Holmes.”
Abramovitz also said she did a similar thing involving fake emails with his successful application to the Juilliard School in New York, causing him to decline it.
After Abramovitz learned of the deception, he sued for $300,000 in general damages, including for loss of reputation, loss of educational opportunity and loss of two years of income potential.
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