all i want to get is a little bit closer

fanatical: the catfishing of tegan and sara

When I saw the announcement for a new documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, I think I sent the trailer to every single person I knew, mostly with a “!!!!!!!!!” type message attached. OBVIOUSLY I was going to be day and date on this one. I’ve been a Tegan and Sara fan for so long; I love a good true crime documentary especially a non-murder one; I am fascinated by catfishing in general. Mostly, I couldn’t believe I’d been listening to their music and following their career for 16 (?) years and had no idea any of this was happening. (Well. Put a pin in that, I’ll come back to it later.)

So What Happened?

This is where I’m going to give you the overview of the actual catfishing at the center of the documentary, so if you don’t want any spoilers, skip ahead!

In 2011, Tegan was at a friend’s birthday party when all of a sudden several people told her that Sara had been trying to get ahold of her. Tegan finally reached Sara and their management and learned that they had a big problem — somehow, Tegan had a hacker. This person seemed to have access to her email account, personal information about her, they’d been talking to people pretending to be her . . . it was a nightmare.

These relationships with “Fegan” (the name they came up with for “Fake Tegan”) date back as far as 2008. They started on fan message boards and various online communities, where someone would say they had Tegan’s cell phone number, or that Tegan had a personal account on Facebook, or whatever. Suddenly the fan would be communicating with someone they thought was the real Tegan, and everything seemed to check out — the messages referenced stuff that matched with the band’s public itinerary (“We’re in Denver and it’s so cold here!” when they were touring in Denver, messages never coming during a time they’d be playing a show, etc.) Fegan also seemed to have a lot of information they’d only have if they were the real Tegan — unreleased demo songs, copies of official passports and other documentation, even knowledge that Tegan and Sara’s mom currently had breast cancer, which was a real fact that Tegan and Sara hadn’t shared publicly and weren’t talking about at the time.

It seemed very likely that whoever was doing this, it was someone that Tegan and Sara knew or who had access to their lives in some way, which made them paranoid of everyone. They didn’t use this analogy in the documentary itself, but I watched an interview where they talked about it as feeling like bed bugs, where something had infiltrated the most intimate parts of their lives and they couldn’t get it out.

Even though these fake relationships went back a few years, they only came to Tegan and Sara’s attention in 2011 when one fan who’d been communicating with Fegan was sent a shared drive that included passport photos, etc. She thought it was weird enough that she reached out to a friend who had connections to the band’s management, and got back: “She has no idea who you are.” That was basically the what the fuuuuuuuck moment that got management involved and led to that phone call to Tegan at the birthday party.

This time was huge for Tegan and Sara’s career — it’s when they released Heartthrob, their poppiest and bestselling record to date, they did the song for the LEGO movie, they performed at the Oscars, etc. They were actively working to “queer the mainstream,” and it was something they talked openly about in interviews, wanting to continue to be themselves but also put themselves in those big moments where queer artists previously hadn’t been represented. (If you love Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, you should know they BOTH cited how influential Heartthrob was for them! TEGAN AND SARA WALKED SO CHAPPELL ROAN COULD RUN! lolol I’m sorry, I saw those soapboxes just sitting there so I jumped up on them for a sec, please excuse me)

Anyway. Unfortunately, even after the Fegan stuff came to light, it was still humming in the background, a constant worry and problem. In 2013, Tegan was out to dinner with some friends where she started talking about the Fegan situation, and she could see them looking at each other, clearly putting something together in their minds that they were reluctant to share.

(“I could feel my face burning,” Tegan said about how she felt in this moment, and if there’s one detail I feel like I will always remember from this documentary, it’s this one, because fuck if we haven’t all had this moment. Of deep embarrassment or shame, of knowing that someone is talking about you, that someone has information on you, whatever. It’s so visceral.)

Basically, she found out that a mutual friend — someone she knew personally in real life but hadn’t talked to for years — had been claiming to have had a secret relationship with her this whole time. This is when it became clear just how deep the Fegan stuff was going. They weren’t only targeting fans, in some cases they were targeting people in Tegan’s actual, real life. In the case of this person, Fegan had obviously had enough control over Tegan’s email account at the time to send an email saying, “by the way, don’t use this address anymore, here’s my new number and email,” and then basically carry on the relationship through those fake channels.

Fegan reached out to Tegan’s tattoo artist asking for the password to a shared drive. They had a Facebook profile where some of Tegan’s actual friends would post messages on the wall. They created a fake account for Tegan’s girlfriend at the time, Lindsey, and Fegan and Findsey (?) would communicate back and forth and cc in these fans/victims, it was all just really fucked up. Then there were the victims of Fegan who were also lashing out, spreading misinformation about Tegan online, at one point even reaching out to Lindsey to tell her that Tegan had been having these secret relationships with fans, basically just hurt and embarrassed and believing that “Fegan” was a cover-up for the real Tegan’s bad behavior on the internet.

God. What a fucking mess. And meanwhile, Tegan and Sara weren’t publicly talking about any of this, because they worried that acknowledging it would only make it worse.

Wait, *Did* I Know About This?

I mean, no. I didn’t. But it did make a few things click into place for me, and I feel like in retrospect I can read between some lines. It was one of the interesting parts of watching the documentary, for me, the way it recontextualized some things about my own experience.

Right away, there was something so eerie about seeing concert footage and iconic photoshoots and stuff given the “true crime” treatment with music and voiceover, because like . . . I was there! (Not physically at the photoshoots or even every concert, obviously, but in this general milieu. I know these photos! I’ve watched this banter clip! The Sainthood-era black+white website, god it brought me back!!!) It felt like when you happen to catch a local episode of Forensic Files, where they’re like, “She was walking down Nebraska Avenue . . .” and you’re the Leo pointing meme like FUCK, I know Nebraska Avenue!!!

I do remember that it seemed like Tegan and Sara were always making announcements like, these are our only accounts, we won’t contact you from any other account, but I just thought that was typical language. I say the same thing when I’m running, say, an Instagram giveaway because I don’t want any potential scammers trying to swoop in and get people’s information from them pretending to be me.

They also did seem to pull back from interacting directly with fans quite a bit around that Heartthrob era, but I just put it down to the natural growth that happens when bands get a little more famous. I remember fans being upset that they’d switched to only VIP meet-and-greets, instead of more casual opportunities to meet them at merch tables or in the line, but fans were also upset that their songs weren’t as guitar-based anymore so I just figured, again, growing pains.

And then there was a VIP soundcheck I went to a couple years ago in Portland, where someone asked a question (I’m sorry, this story would be so much better if I could remember what it was, or anything more specific), and Tegan kind of looked at Sara and said something like, “Yeah, I — there’s more to say about that, but uh. Not yet.” It was so cagey and there was clearly a Story there that the MINUTE I saw the trailer for this documentary I was like ahhhhhh okay, this is what they were referring to.

I did my time in the Tegan and Sara messageboards, especially circa 2014 or so, but I was always a lurker more than someone who posted anything. So while I totally recognized some of the boards they were showing in the documentary, and in fact am pretty positive I remember posts from several of the people featured in the documentary, I really had no idea that all this was going on with Fegan. I can see now how one of the insidious ways this scam festered in the darkness was that each victim thought they had a “secret” relationship with Tegan, one they shouldn’t talk about too widely for fear of embarrassing Tegan or themselves.

Some Things I’ve Learned About Catfishing

I picked up a book about catfishing at the library a few months ago, Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love with You by Becky Holmes, because frankly I’ve always been interested in catfishing and, well, I’d just written a romance with a very low-key catfishing plot. (I prefer “hidden identity” since it’s more about Daphne hiding her dual identity from Chris than her deliberately trying to deceive him online, but when her friend calls it catfishing there’s also not much Daphne can say to that.)

A lot of what Becky Holmes talked about were the kind of scams I KNOW you’ve gotten, if you’re on Instagram at all. Where _keanureeves_198447825 follows you, or where you get a guy with two first names and a feed consisting of 5 generic military/doctor pictures messaging you with “hello dear.” (Just to share a story I personally find a little charming, once I got a message from one of these accounts and I 100% thought it was one of those scams, but then it turned out he was a real guy who’d read my book on deployment and just wanted to say he’d enjoyed it. But you should’ve seen his feed. It LOOKED like your typical “Michael Anthony” with a bunch of military pictures. Remember in Flight of the Conchords when Murray got an internet letter with a business opportunity and it turned out to be legit? But in all seriousness, don’t answer those messages lol.)

Anyway. One thing I was really struck by in this book was that she talked about the people who were victimized by this crime, what made them susceptible to it in the first place. I think it’s easy for people on the outside to look at those victims as being too gullible — who thinks KEANU REEVES is actually messaging them? Who doesn’t get that it’s weird that this random guy online keeps putting off meeting you in person and yet asks you for money? — but the truth is that these people are often in a very insecure, vulnerable position to start with. They’ve had trauma in their past, they’ve just experienced a huge life change, they’ve lost someone, they’re feeling alone, they’re suffering health problems, whatever. Some of these are things we will all be vulnerable to, at various stages in our lives.

I saw that reflected in this documentary, and it was one of the parts that struck me as the saddest. Like, of course if you were a young queer kid who could barely talk about that with people in your real life, of course if you had trauma in your family or your background or past relationships, of course if you felt alone except for when you listened to this band’s music and connected with the community at shows . . . if you thought the real Tegan Quin was messaging you, supporting you, trusting you with her secrets, you’d be drawn in. That’s powerful stuff.

When we think of catfishing, we often think of more obviously nefarious purposes, which are usual either financial or sexual in nature. The person is going to build a rapport to ask you to loan them money, or share your bank account information. The person is going to make you think you’re in a relationship so that you send nudes, which they can then blackmail you with or post on the internet, etc.

But I think there really is a very dark psychological component to catfishing that’s just . . . getting a thrill in manipulating other people, in infiltrating other people’s lives in this way. And so sometimes victims get especially drawn in because they think “if this person isn’t asking me for money, nudes, anything like that, then . . . why would they do it? It must be real.” That’s one of my theories, anyway.

Some Observations About the Documentary Itself

There was such restrained anger and pain in this documentary, I felt like, that made it really interesting but hard to watch. You feel how affected everyone was by this experience, even as they’re trying to talk about it in a more measured way for the interviews. When victims of Fegan talk about how it cost them relationships, made it harder for them to trust people, made it impossible to listen to Tegan and Sara’s music or even hear their names without feeling triggered . . . god, you really feel it.

And I think it’s obvious that Tegan herself is trying really hard to process everything and have compassion for everyone involved, but it was a real mindfuck experience for her, too. One of the most memorable moments in the entire documentary comes when the director and Tegan are on the phone with an individual who may be a victim of Fegan, may even be Fegan themselves, they’re still trying to figure it all out. And at one point this person says, “You weren’t affected in that capacity. It barely skimmed the surface . . . I mean, none of this became public, right?”

And you can just see how Tegan is so taken aback by this. “Why do you think that it didn’t affect me?” she says. “Why do you think it doesn’t affect me? How could this not affect me?”

I think this interaction is at the heart of the documentary, because it gets at one of the things that makes celebrity culture and parasocial relationships so toxic sometimes. There’s this disconnect, where we don’t always think of celebrities as real people, or we think if we don’t know something as part of their public story or it didn’t cost them anything we can see from the outside, that it didn’t have any impact. On a very, very micro-scale, I feel like I observe this even in the things I get tagged in sometimes. I actually have to comfort myself that this person must not think I’m a human being who checks my own account because the alternative is worse.

If you go into this documentary solely for the true crime aspect of it, you might be a little disappointed only because (spoiler alert) they never satisfactorily answer the question of who Fegan is, or even if there’s only one person or multiple accounts at this point. But if you go into it more with this lens of looking at parasocial relationships, fan culture, the way we interact online, the way we love things, I think it’s a lot more instructive.

Some Extra Observations

When I tell you I’m a Tegan and Sara fan, I mean I’ve seen them live so many times I literally can’t keep count, in NYC, Oakland, Portland, Austin, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, I own all their albums in multiple formats and listen to them all the time (I’ve been listening to So Jealous while writing this), I’ve read their memoir several times, I subscribe to their Substack. They recently did an interview on there with Erin Lee Carr, the director of this documentary, and Jenny Eliscu, a music journalist and producer on the film. It was so interesting to me and made me think about even more aspects of creating art, fan culture, etc., so I thought I’d put them all here.

They started off by talking how odd it was, that people were laughing at certain parts of the documentary when the screened it at the Toronto International Film Festival, but how they understood that sometimes the laughter is a nervous reaction or a coping mechanism. It’s odd, when you think about it, that we laugh about social media posts that say things like “if you don’t stan ____ you should end yourself” when that’s like . . . not funny.

And Sara told this story about how, when they were touring around the memoir and doing these quieter shows where they played a more intimate, stripped-down set, sometimes people in the audience would be coughing or laughing or otherwise rustling around while she was reading what she thought of as the hardest, most vulnerable chapter in the entire book. She said in those moments she was filled with such empathy for the audience, but also found herself a little furious because it was so distracting. It gave her extra respect for people who did that kind of thing more regularly, because she said she realized maybe she wasn’t meant to be on a stage unless there was very loud music around her to drown everything else out.

God, did I feel that! On so many levels. You really have no idea how distracting even one facial expression can be sometimes when you’re up on a stage and sharing something vulnerable. But I also felt it as an audience member because I went to one of those shows! In Portland! (I always joke with my friends who live in Portland that if they want to know when I’m coming to town, they should check Tegan and Sara’s tour schedule lol). It was two hours, no opener, just a very intimate set of Tegan and Sara alone playing songs and reading from their memoir, and people KEPT GETTING UP OUT OF THEIR SEATS!!! Sara even stopped at one point to be like, “Are you all okay? What’s going on?” To this day I don’t understand it. I mean personally I would’ve PISSED MYSELF before getting up out of my seat, but even allowing that everyone shouldn’t be held to this standard (which I don’t think should count as toxic fan behavior, by the way, because in this scenario I am quietly pissing myself in my own seat, a victimless crime), it was just really odd.

Another thing Sara said that stayed with me, when she was talking about how she found herself pulling back from reading reviews, comment sections, etc. “I’m so vulnerable to the way that people talk about us . . . it’s the actual vulnerability that made me turn away and seem invulnerable.”

I sat with that one for a while. I really relate to it. It was also weirdly comforting to hear her say that there are reviews they’ve gotten in their career that she still has memorized, that had the ability to put her in the fetal position when she first read them. While I certainly hope that I never lose sight of the fact that some of my favorite musicians/writers/artists whatever are people, I do think it’s easy from the outside to assume that they’re stronger than you are, more confident, that the kind of stuff that gets under your skin wouldn’t bother them at all because they’re a more evolved Pokémon or something.

Anyway, it was a really good discussion, and they got into a bunch more stuff — about some of the gender politics in celebrity culture, where male celebrities are often allowed to just exist and not have to answer any questions while female celebrities are often expected to “take care of” their fans in a different way and be grateful to their fans for getting them where they are; about what artists “owe” their fans including a discussion of everything that’s been going on with Chappell Roan lately; about how things like social media are work, even if they can be fun or if we value the connections we make there.

Okay, woof. This has been so long and is off my usual posting schedule, I know, but every once in a while I’m moved to share my thoughts about something whether or not anyone will ever read all the way through them. (For example: when I read Britney Spears’ memoir):

If you’re not super familiar with Tegan and Sara’s music, I obviously highly recommend it! I made this playlist for a friend a while back, which was meant to be a chronological journey through their career where I shared a few songs from each album that meant something in particular to me or that I thought were the best examples of that era or whatever. (There was an accompanying zine and everything!) PLEASE know that if I had my way every single Tegan and Sara playlist would just be all their albums in their entirety in chronological order lol, but I had to make some tough choices.

And only because I’m sometimes bad about plugging my own books in these newsletters, here are links to where you can order/preorder each one along with a description of how they relate to this newsletter in particular:

Love in the Time of Serial Killers - Phoebe is studying true crime, so I think she’d be all over this documentary! And in general, I think she could really relate to the ways that you can let past trauma, paranoia, a fear of being vulnerable, etc. get in the way of letting yourself open up sometimes.

With Love, from Cold World - My sweet babies. I need to post about this book more, with Christmas coming up and a companion book to this one coming out next year. “If it’s not fun, don’t do it” is an explicit Tegan and Sara reference! I feel like I could meet Asa with his blue hair in line at a Tegan and Sara show. That feels right to me.

The Art of Catching Feelings - I mean, there IS the catfishing connection, even though once again I really don’t like to think of it that way because I think what Daphne did was more understandable than that! But the idea of becoming close with someone online while also having a relationship with someone in real life is something I’ve always been drawn to, so that was a big inspiration for writing this book the way that I did.

Never Been Shipped - This book is a LOT about creating art and putting it out in the world, how joyful that can be but how complicated, too. Micah has a lot of baggage from her time being famous, her time after the height of her fame when she felt like a failure, trying to figure out how to reconnect with this thing she used to do for the fun of doing it, then became her whole identity, and then got warped into something else. Also yes, I did see Tegan and Sara on a cruise once.