Ezra Dolezal, Rachel Dolezal’s adopted brother said she warned him not to blow her cover as she headed to Spokane, Wash., to start a new life, Buzzfeed reports.

Buzzfeed:  “She just told me, ‘Over here, I’m going to be considered black, and I have a black father. Don’t blow my cover,’” Ezra Dolezal, 22, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. Rachel also told him to tell people that he and her other adopted brother were her “blood brothers,” he said.

His sister did not offer “any logical explanation” for why she was changing her identity, and Ezra never confronted her about it. But it was the next stage after growing apart from her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, and leaving their home in Montana.

“She wanted to make a new life for herself but she took it to the ultimate extreme,” Ezra said. “Not only did she move out to Spokane, but she created a whole new identity for herself.”

Ezra said in 2011, Rachel started “applying makeup to her face to appear ‘darker and darker’ and perming her naturally straight blond hair,” Buzzfeed reports. He said she gradually changed her physical appearance and her decision to identify as black was “sudden.” He believes her radical change was due to racism she may have endured at Howard University.

The controversy erupted when Rachel Dolezal’s parents told a local news outlet that she was white, not black, and was passing off her younger adopted brother as her son.

This was cross-posted from The Hinterland Gazette.