I have an honest question for you: do you believe Gavin wasn't telling the truth when he said there's a chance that Wright may be Satoshi? And by "telling the truth," I mean conveying what he actually believes. He distinctly left open the possibility that Faketoshi is real, and I would like to know if you believe he did that dishonestly.
Both dishonest (how would he expect anyone to fall for this) and honest (how would he fall for it) really don't make a ton of sense in my view.
It's not that I view him as extremely honest-- I recently ran into some evidence that convinces me that Gavin was being wilfully dishonest when it came to the block size drama-- but rather it's too stupid a lie to play along with, and it's not that I think he's totally immune to smoke and mirrors (I think even far more capable people are not immune) but I have not encountered anyone else who knew almost anything about the technology and wasn't explicitly on Wright's payroll that expressed a public belief in it for more than a second. At least to technical experts (and I think many other people) wright is just that transparently a fraud.
Unfortunately, we know relatively little about the scope and progression of his interactions with Wright, because other than detailing a bit about the proof ceremony (e.g. that it was via a computer provided by wright) he pretty much clammed up and stopped answering questions.
So... Sorry, I can't explain the inexplicable. I wish I could.
Some people say that it's not a big deal that he hasn't issued a clear and emphatic retraction, or shared publicly his electronic communications with wright which he claimed convinced him before they met. I might even buy an argument that it was all just too much for him and he can't take dealing with it if he'd disappeared from the public light entirely-- rather than showing up periodically to toss shade at bitcoin and promote competitors. ... but he hasn't and it's really easy to find real people who are being exploited by Wright that cite Gavin's endorsement as a primary justification.
I pretty much believe, that Satoshis GMX email account was already under control of somebody else at that time.
I'm fairly confident that both of them communicating with "Satoshi" (not satoshi) after the account was compromised. -- both because the account was leaking messages it got from them to others, e.g. about mike and gavin talking about planning to fork bitcoin long before they did anything public... and also because they claimed to have heard from satoshi long after it would have been consistent with other evidence. But I don't now what, if any, roll this played in setting up the wright circus.