White GWU professor is seen for the first time since controversy erupted

The white George Washington University professor who confessed to lying about being black was spotted for the first time since the bombshell controversy as family members revealed they were outraged by the news.

According to her sister-in-law, Jessica Krug is ‘white as snow white’ and the family only discovered the masquerade after being contacted by the media.  

Krug appeared downcast on Saturday night while returning to her East Harlem apartment building after a tumultuous week.

While dressed in a pink blouse, jeans and sunglasses, Krug kept a bag slung over her shoulders as she attempted to keep a low-profile. 

Students, colleagues and others who’ve encountered Krug have expressed their utter shock over the admission. But according to her sister-in-law, her family was blindsided, too.

The sister-in-law, who wished to remain anonymous, told CNN that ‘there’s no way she’s Black.’

‘I can tell you that, there’s no member of the family that is Black,’ she said.

The sister-in-law said that her husband has been estranged from Krug for two decades. She confirmed that her husband and Krug are Jewish and grew up in Kansas.

‘Our last name is tarnished, and all my husband and I want to do is cry our eyes out right now. I can only imagine my father-in-law rolling around in his grave,’ she said. 

She claimed that the family was completely unaware of Krug’s deceit until they received a phone call on Thursday from a reporter.

‘We had no clue, we are shocked right now and hurt. Our name is ruined,’ the sister-in-law said.

‘It hurts because she slapped everyone in the face, not only her family, she slapped every Black woman in the face.’ 

The sister-in-law said she has not met Krug, and she’s not welcome in their home.

In her blog post, titled ‘The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies’, she went into detail about the deceptions that rooted in all aspects of her life.

‘For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,’ she wrote. 

‘To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.’ 

‘To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. ‘

Her confession is reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP leader from Washington state who was exposed as a white woman pretending to be black in 2015.

In her blog post, Krug said she has battled ‘unaddressed mental health demons’ her entire life and that she first assumed a false identity as a child.

She wrote that her mental health issues could never explain or justify why she pretended to be black.

‘When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person. But this isn’t trauma that anyone imposed on me, this is harm that I have enacted onto so many others. There is nowhere to run. I have ended the life I had no right to live in the first place,’ she said. 

In a video posted online in June of this year under her activist pseudonym, Jessica La Bombalera, Krug denounced ‘all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers’.

She adds: ‘Much power to all my siblings who were standing up, my black and brown siblings who were standing.’

Krug has been teaching classes on African American history at George Washington University since 2012.

Her biography page on the university website says she also specializes in subjects including Latin America, Africa, imperialism and colonialism.

She has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to the GWU page.

Krug has also written several books and essays on blackness and black culture. Some of the outlets who have published her work started deleting the posts on Thursday after the revelations.

She has taken financial support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Guardian reports. In 2009 she is understood to have been award as Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.

Her book Fugitive Modernities includes the acknowledgement: ‘My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist…Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.’

DailyMail.com exclusively revealed how Krug went to the exclusive Barstow school in Kansas City where she was described as ‘very political’ and is said to have identified as a white, Jewish girl. 

One of Krug’s former peers, who did not want to be named, said she boycotted prom and planned a flag burning while at the school from where she graduated in 1999.

In an online bio Krug had described herself as an ‘unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood’.

Her current neighbor in the Bronx, Anna Anderson, told the DailyMail.com that Krug would call her ‘white trash’ and tell Anderson she was ‘gentrifying’ the neighborhood by going running.

Following a dispute over their bikes Anderson said Krug asked her: ‘Do you know what the police do to black people like me?’

Anderson told DailyMail.com: ‘She called me white trash, which is ironic.’

Following the revelations in her post, Krug has since been slammed on Twitter by several black writers and scholars who she had contact with throughout her career.

Hari Ziyad, a black author and screenwriter, claimed that she had only penned the post because she had been ‘found out’.

Another Tiwtter user, Neal Davidson, says he ‘started grad school in history at UW-Madison around the same time as Jessica Krug. Everyone I knew suspected she was full of sh*t, but no one was sure what to do about it.’

In a series of scathing tweets, Ziyad said he considered Krug to be a friend until she called him a few hours prior to the Medium post being published to confess.

‘Jess Krug… is someone I called a friend up until this morning when she gave me a call admitting to everything written here. She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out,’ Ziyad tweeted.

‘For years I defended her work, and her from her own self-loathing. I did it despite warnings from Black friends, from those who said she wasn’t Black enough even if they could accept that she was Black, and from my own mind and body.

‘I always knew there was something off. It was in her persistent negativity and jealousy, her always needing to prove her authenticity at the expense of everything else.

‘I kept her at arm’s length, but still close enough that she could harm Black people around me. I owe so many people apologies.’