Rosie Vela – Zazu

She obviously didn’t know anything about it, and the go-fund me campaign was stopped at $5000, hopefully people were reimbursed. The name of her supposed “friend” shows up on about another 20 similar campaigns. They’re all really well researched, and they always increase the initial amount requested.
There’s a lot of crap out there about her, like accusing her of stealing all her songs from her first husband who died of cancer. Here’s a link to some of his (really hard to find! Seriously!) tribute YouTube videos .

 

Hi Neko. Thanks for this. Im more confused than before.

What leads you to surmise that she didn't know about the go fund me page?

I don't get how someone with such big connections would have been in that situation, but I suppose it wasn't beyond the stretch of imagination that she still needed the funding.

Is anyone the wiser on whether this was genuine or if she got the treatment she needed?

 

All this stuff sounds beyond crazy. Unless she is beyond crazy, and I have no evidence of that, you'd think she could interest a legit media outlet to write a story with her to set the record straight. Seems like, no matter what, there's an interesting mainstream story there.

 

Doing a Google last week of her name, I was pleasantly surprised when I glanced at her age.

 

it's unsettlingly good. Airless 1980s production and all. The tunes all have this Overworld sort of yacht-pop noir ambience, and Rosie has a good voice and sounds right in character singing them.

 

Wow, that's terrible! I do hope the information about her being in ill health is all false as well.

Maybe she was a target for a scam because she's a public figure yet keeps a low profile. When I first saw the GoFundMe page, it looked semi plausible yet some of the details seemed over the top. It is the kind of story that many people would just accept at face value. I looked up the friend listed and she had a Wikipedia page, so I just assumed it was legit. I never donated though since I found the page four years too late.

Maybe this also answers my question about Barbados. If a scammer was looking to create a fake story, they might have read that she had some connection to Barbados and decided to use that as a detail.

 

There’s a lot of inconsistencies. First off it’s written terribly, I compared it to a short biography that Denice Lewis wrote and the entire writing style is significantly different, in fact I ran the entire text a couple of ways through a Gender Checker used to detect hackers, and it kept coming back as written by a Male. She claimed she met Rosie Vela in NY in 1982, the problem is “Denice Lewis”didn’t start modeling until 1984, and they weren’t close friends. The Denice Lewis Facebook page she refers you to is fake, and something the Go-fund me account doesn’t take into consideration is there’s a US Consulate in Barbados that she could contact for emergency financial assistance and would have arranged her discrete assisted immediate return to the US.
But the bottom line is, would Rosie Vela go through all the negative publicity for $5000 in donations?

 

Thanks. It is badly written, and the sentence structures (and accompanying lack of commas to separate clauses) are similar, whether it is meant to be authored by Denice Lewis or Michael Keesling. Unfortunately, there is no clear evidence that the same person hasn't authored both.

On the page it also says:

It seems some have recently questioned the legitimacy of this campaign and GoFundMe has asked for the following information:

What follows is some 'rebuff' that anyone could give, on the question of legitimacy (of campaign)

eg

Denice has also had to deal with several people who have been very negative about this campaign and very accusatory regarding the legitimacy of it even though they have known her and have also been recipients of her generosity themselves over the years. Her phone rings all day and night and she manages all of these calls and questions on behalf of Rosie in order to facilitate her in achieving Rosie’s goal of returning to the USA to receive the help she needs

Why should we believe this?

I'm flabbergasted that Go Fund me can accept what someone this as some kind of 'proof' that someone is legit (i.e that Denice Lewis is involved) and the campaign is genuine,when would be so easy to conduct a scam, based what appears to pass as evidence.

Presumably, I could make up a story about someone in need of help, pretend to be someone else (eg Denice Lewis), and no authentic identification would be required.

What is also baffling though is why noone has come out (the subjects) and stated this is fraudulent, if it is. They should have.

Rosie Vela Needs Our Urgent Help!, organized by michael keesling

 

New deserves a Magic Smile

 

You’re not missing much

 

Sounded like the follow up to Gaucho at the time.

 

Well I guess she’s stopped using Facebook messenger! lol
There’s a bit of a dark side to go fund me, they basically benefit from other people’s tragedy. When something like a mass shooting takes place people set up funds, they then take their small percentage and bully you to connect your Facebook page to increase donations, they’re also pretty secretive about things like revenue and percentage of scams. A good indicator of a fraudulent page though is lack of photos to back up the story apparently.

 

One thing I should have added is that I do remember seeing a video of (apparently) Rosie talking about her situation, a while back. I think it is referenced on an ELO forum page, but not available anymore.

That was what led me to think the plea was genuine.

I guess all this shows how it's difficult to know what is real and what isn't, even with the added advantages of the net revolution.

 

Since this is still a fairly current discussion and I’ve somewhat inexplicably become a bit of a self-proclaimed Rosie expert (hence how I found this thread), I feel the need to chime in:

Please be aware that the claims from the GoFundMe campaign do come from Rosie herself and have been repeated by her on multiple occasions years before and years after the campaign. The people who ran the GoFundMe were her friends, and she specifically sought Denice Lewis in particular to set up a campaign on her behalf. They did bring her home to the United States, and she spent about ten months living with Denice. I’m still not clear on the details of exactly what happened (but I hope to be, at some point), but it appears that things unraveled at some point shortly after Rosie returned to the states. Denice and Rosie have since cut ties with each other. Some of the claims from the GoFundMe are nearly impossible to definitively confirm or debunk (although in my opinion, common sense can provide an answer for some of it), but I can confidently say that at least a significant portion of it is untrue, and some of it is a sort of contorted version of the truth. I am inclined to suspect that the people who set this up for her were none the wiser until all was said and done. In the sense of “are these people who they say they are?,” though, the answer is yes.

I’ll avoid going into too much detail because I don’t want this to turn into some kind of fight-fire-with-fire smear campaign, but I would advise anyone interested to have a healthy amount of skepticism about anything Rosie has to say, particularly when it verges on inflammatory. She is in some way or another a genuinely troubled person, but she is also an extremely unreliable narrator with manipulative tendencies and a considerable history of behavior very similar to what is displayed here.