The story behind Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara

IIn the mid-2000s, fans of the queer indie pop band Tegan and Sara began receiving messages and emails from Tegan Quin, one half of the twin sister duo.

While most people today would immediately dismiss a message claiming to be from a celebrity, back then it seemed possible that Tegan would email fans. It was the zeros, not every internet user had developed the armor of automatic distrust required today, and Tegan and Sara had an online presence ahead of its time. The band posted frequently not only on their official website, but also on Tumblr, Facebook and message boards. Fans often shared concert clips and messages of solidarity about the lesbian and queer identities they couldn’t share in real life, forming a supportive, tight-knit community.

Some people who received these messages responded—and saw the conversations develop into meaningful friendships that lasted for years. They received photos that appeared spontaneous and authentic and learned personal information about the Quins. Sometimes the exchanges turned sexual, and some fans were even sent unreleased music.

But the messages didn’t come from Tegan at all. Instead, someone pretending to be her exploited the trust of an adoring and vulnerable fan base. The hacker – known to the band and those close to them as Fake Tegan or Fegan – would continue this breach for 16 years.

This story is documented for the first time in Fanatical: Tegan and Sara’s catfishingDirector: Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs. Spears, Heart of gold). In the film, Carr and Tegan interview Fake Tegan’s victims and follow the impostor’s trail to find the impersonator who has been haunting Tegan, Sara and their friends and colleagues for over a decade.

Tegan and Sara fan Julie started listening to the band in college. She had recently realized that she was strange and was struggling with anxiety and isolation. The music and the supporting community were a lifeline. In 2008, another fan sent her a link to a Facebook profile that appeared to belong to Tegan. Julie sent the profile a message – and was stunned when she received a response.

Soon, Julie and the person behind the profile were exchanging messages regularly. Julie learned that Tegan and Sara’s mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, information that had not been publicly disclosed. “It turned into a long-term friendship when I really needed it,” says Julie Fanatical.

She had been talking to the person behind the profile for three years when the lie was exposed. In 2011, Fake Tegan sent her a link to a ride that contained passport scans of Tegan, Sara and members of their team. Confused and worried, Julie reached out to a friend who had connections to the band’s management and asked about the ride. The answer was clear: Tegan had never heard of Julie.

Piers Henwood, then a member of the band’s management team, confirmed that whoever Julie had spoken to – sharing personal stories, random photos and other small intimacies of an online friendship – was not one of her favorite musicians. It was a lying stranger.

The extent of Fake Tegan’s reach quickly became clear: the impersonator appeared to have access to music, photos, passports, addresses, real email accounts and the family’s medical history.

“No one was at a high level and knew how to protect people online. We were completely overwhelmed,” says Kim Persley, a former member of Tegan and Sara’s management team Fanatical. The team posted on the band’s official website that Tegan and Sara were not communicating with fans via email. Immediately they heard from several people who had corresponded with someone claiming to be Tegan.

Henwood, Persley and other members of the band team began to uncover the person behind the fake Tegan accounts with little success. Meanwhile, the private nature of the information shared led the sisters to question whether the hacker might have been someone they knew and trusted. Tegan’s tattoo artist Rene Both and his then-girlfriend, photographer Lindsey Byrnes, were also targeted.

“If we were a house,” Sara says in the film, “me [had] I felt like someone was in the garden. But suddenly I realized that they were in our house.”

As FanaticalAs the timeline of Tegan and Sara’s careers spirals forward, viewers understand the backlash of distrust and fear that runs parallel to their success. “I felt so attacked,” Tegan says in the film. “It was terrible to be suspicious of people in my life that I loved.”

Searching for a web of misdirection (which, despite the film’s best efforts, may leave some viewers as confused as Tegan and Sara’s team), Fanatical recounts how Henwood and Persley zeroed in on one suspect after another, only to reach dead ends. They contacted police, who told them they didn’t have enough evidence to file criminal charges. All the while, they continued to wonder what personal information there might be and heard new stories from those affected.

One of Fake Tegan’s targets, musician JT, shows the lasting impact of the scam. JT survived a traumatic childhood and found solace in Vancouver’s queer music scene. For a while she was part of the same relatively small circle as Tegan and Sara. She and Tegan had had a real email exchange. When JT emailed Tegan after a break in their correspondence, not knowing the address had been compromised, she unknowingly began speaking to Fake Tegan.

Soon the conversation became flirtatious and sexual. But when Tegan visited the area and emailed JT to suggest they meet, she was rebuffed or ignored. At a loss, JT ended what he felt was a relationship. Like many people after a breakup, she talked about her frustration both online and offline until Tegan found out about it. Tegan was horrified to learn of the con artist’s latest exploits, this time with someone she knew in real life, and alerted Henwood. He reached out to JT to tell her about Fake Tegan.

But JT, feeling betrayed and despised, didn’t believe him. From her perspective, it was Henwood’s job to protect Tegan – and no one else’s job was to protect her. “I’m a young, stupid kid back then,” JT says Fanatical. “I felt very small. So what are you going to do? You have to fight.” JT’s insistence that she had actually spoken to Tegan alienated her from the community that had served as her home. “I didn’t want to be in queer spaces, I still don’t want to be in queer spaces,” she says in the film.

At the end of the film, JT and Tegan have an awkward but meaningful reunion. “We are victims of the same person and it affects both of us,” says Tegan. As the conversation comes to an end, the two hug.

The team behind it Fanatical reviewed over 2,000 messages between at least one Fake Tegan and many fans sent over the course of 16 years. Their stories ranged from disturbing to disturbing – and many of them seemed to originate from the same person.

“Tara” was a controversial member of the online fandom and aggressively argued with other fans, particularly in defense of her fan fiction collection, which depicted the twins in a sexual relationship with each other. She also claimed that she and Tegan had a relationship and that Byrnes repeatedly harassed her, both while she and Tegan were together and during their breakup.

In Fanatical, Carr and Tegan have a harrowing phone conversation with “Tara.” The hope is to expose her as fake Tegan, but she takes a step back and deflects, egging her on and arguing that Tegan isn’t affected by the impersonation anyway. Whether “Tara” truly believes that fame makes Tegan untouchable or simply wants to stir up conflict – whether she really is Fake Tegan or just a particularly disgruntled fan – the conversation shows how the desire for connection can become stagnant.

“I’m really proud of the Tegan and Sara community and the fans,” says Tegan Fanatical. However, she also points out that sometimes “the people who seem to love and obsess over you the most are the cruelest, meanest, and shittiest.” Especially online.

Celebrities have faced extreme fan behavior for decades, ranging from disturbing to dangerous. Queer artist Chappell Roan has recently drawn ire for setting firm boundaries to curb the rising tide of stalking and violence – the kind of behavior our culture generally prefers to be angry about after the fact, if it’s already happening affected someone’s life. Stans (a term that refers to either stalker fans or fans whose obsession reaches the levels depicted in the Eminem song “Stan,” depending on who you ask) have already been the subject of studies. Trials like “Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany and Carr’s own Britney vs. Spears Chart the best and worst of the fandom.

We already know all this, so why do we have to keep relearning it? Fanatical is reminiscent of our recent conversations about the toxicity of fan culture, parasocial relationships, and celebrity idolization—which we’ll dutifully have before jumping right back into acting like a mess online.

But it is the universality of fraud and forgeries that makes this film truly timely. In the years since Fake Tegan began reaching out to Tegan and Sara’s fans, we’ve all become famous. At least famous enough to be imitated online. Friends start frantically posting about Bitcoin and the off-brand Ozempic while their accounts are hacked or cloned. We learn that our email addresses and passwords have been “compromised on the dark web” (whatever that means). We receive Facebook friend requests from our deceased loved ones.

In Fanatical, Tegan shares her reservations about revealing the story after keeping Fake Tegan relatively secret for 16 years. “This could encourage a new generation of Fake Tegans. And not even Fake Tegan, Fake anyone. We are all susceptible to this.”

“We want to believe that we’re not like the people who would do that, and we’re not like the people who would be gullible enough to believe that,” Sara says. “But the truth is that we are all much more alike. And I think that makes all of us really uncomfortable.”

The vulnerability and desire for connection that made Julie, JT, and so many others the targets of Fake Tegan’s scam — and the refraction of the same feelings that drove the scammer — are more common than we might like to believe.