Just a week after professor Jessica Krug ousted herself as a white woman who spent years pretending to be Black and later resigned from her job at George Washington University, two more similar cases have emerged.

Both University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad and Indianapolis activist Satchuel Paigelyn Cole have been accused or admitted to lying about being Black. 

In two Medium posts apologizing for their actions, Vitolo-Haddad said they are Southern Italian and Sicilian but has repeatedly pretended to be Black while working as an activist.

They have since resigned from their position as co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association and at UW-Madison. They wrote they were "regretful to the people I deceived by inserting myself into Black organizing spaces I didn’t belong in." They went on to call themselves and their actions "parasitic and harmful."

Vitolo-Haddad was originally ousted by an anonymous Medium post that came out after Krug's real identity came to light. The anonymous writer said they were angry when they saw tweets from Vitolo-Haddad talking about Krug and their own struggles with being "light."

"CV is not only an academic capitalizing on the performance of Blackness in their research; they also deploy their identity to gain access to and credibility in the ever-growing movements for Black power and justice in Wisconsin," the post read, adding dozens of pieces of evidence that showed Vitolo-Haddad changing what they told people about their ethnicity.

Over the years, they referred to themselves as Latino, Black and North African, but the post highlighted that their parents are Italian and from Florida. 

Despite admitting to lying about being Black, Vitolo-Haddad still took time in their post to blame their family for "conflicting stories" despite acknowledging that their family is fully Italian. 

"UW-Madison expects that people represent themselves authentically and accurately in all aspects of their academic work," UW-Madison representative Meredith McGlone told The Daily Mail in a statement.  

Vitolo-Haddad was not the only one to get caught in a lie about being Black. 

According to Black Indy Live, Satchuel Paigelyn Cole has held major positions within Indianapolis activists groups like Indy10 Black Lives Matter, Indy SURJ and Don’t Sleep, but has done it all while saying she is Black. She was featured in news stories over the years and even served as an Indy Pride Parade 2020 Grand Marshals. 

But reporters for the news received a dossier of information that raised a number of questions about Cole who has said for years that her father was Black.


In the dossier, there was information saying that the man who Cole originally said was her father is not, and that she is the child of Rachel Irick and John Oliver Benton, two people said they were white on various legal documents. The news outlet also obtained high school photos of the two as well as high school photos of Cole who as a child went by the name Jennifer Benton.

According to the news outlet, Benton changed her name to Satchuel Paigelyn Cole in 2010 after a series of tragedies involving her sister and mother.

The newspaper obtained legal documents that showed Benton identified as white before changing her name. Once she joined the activist community in Indianapolis, she began to tell others that her father was Black and that she never met him. 

In a now-deleted profile done by Freedom Indiana, Cole took a photo with a Black man who she called "Lee Timeless Barnes" and said that he was her father. Black Indy Live searched for the man but was unable to find the man in the photo or find anyone with that name. 

The news outlet notes that for the last ten years, Cole has been given significant press for her activism and is featured as a commentator on Black issues in dozens of news stories.

On Facebook, a number of people who know Cole have started to speak out about their experiences with her. 

Black fishingCV-Vitolo-HaddadJessica-KrugSatchuel-Paigelyn-Cole