On October 25 Americans Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiava and their two dogs were rescued from a damaged and disabled 50-foot sailboat about 900 miles off the coast of Japan. The pair told rescuers that what had started as an 18-day cruise from Hawaii to Tahiti turned into a 98-day ordeal because storms had damaged their boat’s equipment and set them essentially adrift.
After Appel and Fuiava were rescued by the U.S. Navy, the media jumped all over what appeared to be a miraculous survival story.
The Associated Press published one of the earliest reports of the rescue on October 28, as seen here: https://www.apnews.com/5d1eb08ee642473f92c924f6804501fe
Almost immediately after the story was reported, however, sailing fans, officials and experts in the fields of meteorology, marine life, and sailing began to question aspects of Appel’s and Fuiava’s incredible story. Those questions were voiced by bloggers (https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2017/10/31/19-reasons-this-survival-story-smells-fishy/) as well as the mainstream media (http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/pacific-sailors-jennifer-appel-tasha-fuiava-questions/index.html).
On November 8, Appel and Fuiava appeared on the Today Show on NBC TV (https://www.today.com/news/two-women-rescued-navy-defend-their-story-being-lost-sea-t118536) and answered some of the criticism leveled against them, which led to more articles, including this one published by The Guardian on November 19: (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/18/jennifer-appel-tasha-fuiava-sea-rescue-hawaii).
Then, on November 25, Appel launched a GoFundMe campaign (https://www.gofundme.com/truth-in-media) seeking $50,000 to: “fund an immediate campaign to pursue the media who omitted and obfuscated the facts surrounding our excursion in the Pacific Ocean” and “nudge the media to play more fairly because the next person they might drag through the mud after a personal disaster by only telling selective pieces of a story could be you.” The campaign has received one donation of $5 as of post time.
In the 1990s, Appel was an amateur motorcycle road racer known as “Fer Appel,” and a proposal she submitted to potential sponsors for the 1993 season included topless photos of her sitting on her racebike. Scans from her sponsorship proposal are shown with this post.