Poor New York Times They keep getting pranked! They were fooled twice on April Fool's day. It appears that a guy with a sign successfully punked the Times' City Room again. Update: "Jeff Ragsdale" speaks out.

Remember that funny guy with the sign in Madison Square Park yesterday that said "I WAS VERBALLY ABUSIVE I'M SORRY, MEGAN?" The Times' City Room blog did some of their reporting stuff and learned that the man was 32-year-old computer consultant Jeff Ragsdale. According to their post, he was trying to apologize for calling is 29-year-old girlfriend, Megan Brady, "a lying, untrustworthy person.". And it looked like they were going to work things out: ""Now that I know he's doing this, it's showing that he's sorry," Megan told the City Room. Aw

Except! According to NYT Picker—the blog whose only purpose is to destroy the New York Times—Ragsdale is actually a comedian, and Megan Brady is actually an actor. Nobody knows why they wanted to prank the Times, but Ragsdale has a history of popping up in weird TV shows and was even interviewed with Ms. Brady for CBS "Early Show." But in that appearance, they were dating for two years; in the Times article, they had only "dated for about half a year."

Now City Room is running this update:

Lesson learned: Never do reporting.

Update: A person claiming to be Jeff Ragsdale left the following comment on City Room's blog:

I am Jeff Ragsdale. This is NOT a hoax. I did this out of love and desperation. Sadly I was verbally abusive to megan and consequently she left me. Yes, I have acted and done stand-up before, but that has nothing to do with this. Perhaps it made it a bit easier to be out there in front of people, but this was a last-ditch effort to win megan back. And only to get Megan back. I love her. I need her.

Jesus. Poor guy. Now we feel bad, sort of. Don't do anything drastic, Jeff.