An email landed in Massarah Mikati’s inbox on Feb. 13. The subject line read, “Story Pitch: Arab Rachel Dolezal Situation.”
Mikati, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, noticed that the sender was anonymous. The body of the email included two pieces of information: a link to an open letter on Medium with allegations about Raquel Evita Saraswati, a queer Muslim woman who was well-known in advocacy circles around the city, and a phone number for Saraswati’s mother. The Feb. 10 letter raised concerns about the recent hiring of Saraswati as chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works for peace and social justice.
In an 11-page takedown, anonymous members of the organization claimed Saraswati was not the person of color she has publicly and privately identified as. She’s actually white, they said, and had undergone several name changes, from Rachel Elizabeth Seidel to Raquel Evita Seidel to, finally, Raquel Evita Saraswati.
When the journalist saw the email, the name rang a bell. At least two people had mentioned Saraswati to Mikati in the months after she began her new job as a community and engagement reporter with the Inquirer in August 2022. Mikati’s role is part of the newspaper’s Communities & Engagement Desk, which focuses on elevating community voices.
“Half of the job is to produce stories that are for communities of color and marginalized communities,” Mikati said. “And the other half of the job is to build nonextractive, nontransactional trusting relationships with community members. So essentially trying to decolonize journalism and uproot all of the harmful ways that journalism has been practiced when it comes to these communities in the past.”
With this goal in mind, Mikati had set out to try to build relationships with residents in the city, with a focus on members from the South West Asian/North African diaspora (also known as SWANA). She spoke with people about covering Philadelphia’s Muslim community and how to make sure she covered all of its diversity, including queer Muslims. Saraswati had been mentioned as someone the journalist should connect with.
So when Mikati saw the email, she said it raised her Spidey senses for two reasons. The first was that she hadn’t connected with Saraswati yet.
“I didn’t know anything about her, but I had heard about her peripherally, so I wanted to make sure that whatever reporting I did wasn’t going to further harm an already marginalized community,” she said.
Mikati also wondered about the motivation the AFSC members had to put out this detailed report about Saraswati’s life and history.
The Intercept was the first to cover the story of the accusations of Saraswati’s misrepresentations. Saraswati’s mother told the outlet that she was “as white as the driven snow,” and so was Saraswati. Mikati praised The Intercept’s reporting, which included nuanced details about Saraswati’s claims and relationships, as well as her history of media appearances and association with right-wing groups. Other outlets followed with their own coverage. Saraswati soon resigned from her position.
Mikati said many of the stories that followed her resignation were framed around the fact that Saraswati lied about her race. And that was it.
“It didn’t really go much more in depth than that,” Mikati said. “I knew that there was more nuance and that there was more context to this story that was missing, and that we needed to make sure to get in order for the story to tell the full picture.”
If Mikati were to pursue this story, it was important for her to not produce an article that was harmful, especially since race and ethnicity are such complex topics.
Sabrina Vourvoulias, the Inquirer’s senior editor for communities and engagement, also felt it was a story the team should look into further, especially given that Saraswati has served on the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission on LGBT Affairs.
“We approached it very cautiously initially,” said Vourvoulias, who is Mikati’s editor. Vourvoulias added that the newspaper’s Communities & Engagement Desk is very aware of how frequently people who are racialized or come from racialized and marginalized communities are sometimes held to a different level of scrutiny than those who aren’t.
“We opted to do a very considered look at this by talking to community members and seeing what the level of harms that were created by this might be,” she said. “It probably, for us, might not have been a story if there was no sense of harms created and felt by communities. We were very, very aware that this could have been a very salacious, clickbaity sort of story. And we didn’t — on our desk in particular — didn’t want to approach it in that way at all.”
So began Mikati’s reporting on the claim that Saraswati was not who she described herself as for years. Because of the story’s sensitive nature, the journalist took her time with it.
“I think that a lot of news outlets really rushed to write the story and, in the process, they only got part of it,” Mikati said.
On March 20, the Inquirer published Mikati’s story, titled “Raquel Evita Saraswati pretended to be a woman of color. Her deception traumatized the communities.” Mikati’s article went in depth about the ways Saraswati’s deception caused harm to former friends who confided in her, as well as Saraswati’s history of participating in anti-Muslim dialogue on far-right platforms. It also mentions the anonymous letter from Saraswati’s colleagues and how she “always ambiguously presented herself as a woman of color — of Latino, Arab and/or South Asian descent.”
“And so while her lying about her race is certainly part of the story, to me the bigger parts of the stories were her right-wing past and her ability to infiltrate prominent spaces regardless of that past,” Mikati said. “But also how she used that false identity to legitimize herself everywhere from those right-wing spaces to the progressive spaces that she ended up infiltrating, and then ultimately gaining the trust of people from marginalized identities.”
Mikati said Saraswati, who answered questions via email, was cooperative. Mikati said Saraswati maintained that she has not lied about who she is or where she’s from, although she didn’t clarify where she’s from.
To find people who know Saraswati personally, Mikati said she reached out to as much of the community as she could. It proved difficult to find people close to Saraswati who were willing to speak on the record. Many, the reporter said, weren’t ready to talk because they were traumatized and still processing the revelations. But she was able to interview a longtime friend of Saraswati’s who was not identified by name in the story, and Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a Philly-based writer and organizer, and a former friend of Saraswati’s.
“She deeply connected to the experience of people who are oppressed around their gender, their sexuality and religious background,” Muhammad said in Mikati’s story. “And because of that, we had very personal conversations as a Black Muslim who grew up queer and nonbinary in Philadelphia. I thought at the time we had points of connection around a shared spiritual identity.”
Muhammad told the Inquirer that they were stunned when they heard the news, and that other people were deeply hurt and damaged by Saraswati’s lies.
Mikati’s story also covered broader implications of the situation, like when she reported that revelations about Saraswati’s race “raised questions about the shortcomings of diversity, equity and inclusion work in white institutions — including the vetting of applicants for spots on the Mayor’s commission.”
Unlike most other stories, Mikati’s reporting also addressed Saraswati’s early right-wing media appearances, during which the activist urged fellow Muslims to speak out against “radicalization.” She explained the trend of “the good Muslim.”
It was important to Mikati to make sure there were context and nuance to the story. “When you’re writing a story like this, there are so many layers to it,” she said, adding that you have to get all of those layers to tell the most truthful story.
Mikati said a few questions remain, such as was Saraswati perpetuating harm in her everyday actions in the spaces she occupied? And what was the motivation of her former colleagues in publishing the open letter?
Since publishing the story, Mikati said she’s gotten multiple emails from people who knew Saraswati. Some thanked her and asked if she was going to look into it further. She’s also received nasty emails from more conservative people who had a bone to pick with “progressives” and “leftists.”
“I think that I answered all the main questions that I did have, and that I could have had at the beginning,” Mikati said. “And now it’s just waiting to see what develops and what comes to this, because there’s going to be more and more fallout.”
This story was updated to add clarity on The Intercept’s early reporting on Raquel Evita Saraswati.
