In 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 supposedly from a celebrity, at the time, it seemed possible that Tegan might email fans. It was the aughts, not every internet user had cultivated today’s requisite armor of automatic suspicion, and Tegan and Sara had an ahead-of-the-curve online presence. The band posted often not only on their official website, but also on Tumblr, Facebook, and message boards. Fans often exchanged concert clips and messages of solidarity about the lesbian and queer identities they couldn’t share IRL, forming a supportive, close-knit community.
Some people who received these messages responded—and saw the conversations blossom into meaningful friendships that lasted years. They received photos that seemed off-the-cuff and authentic, and learned personal information about the Quins. At times the exchanges turned sexual, and some fans were even sent unreleased music.
But the messages weren’t from Tegan at all. Instead, someone pretending to be her was exploiting the trust of an adoring and vulnerable fanbase. The hacker—known by the band and those close to them as Fake Tegan, or Fegan—would continue this violation for 16 years.
This story is documented for the first time in Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, directed by Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, At the Heart of Gold). In the film, Carr and Tegan interview Fake Tegan’s victims and investigate the scammer’s trail in an attempt to find the impersonator that has haunted Tegan, Sara, and their friends and associates for over a decade.
Tegan and Sara fan Julie began listening to the band in college. She had recently realized that she was queer, and was struggling with fear and isolation. The music, and the accompanying 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 to receive a reply.
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 shared publicly. “This had become a long term friendship at a time when I really needed it,” says Julie in Fanatical.
She had been talking with the person behind the profile for three years when the lie unraveled. In 2011, Fake Tegan sent her a link to a drive that contained passport scans from Tegan, Sara, and members of their team. Confused and concerned, Julie reached out to a friend of hers who had a connection to the band’s management to ask about the drive. The reply was stark: Tegan had never heard of Julie.
Piers Henwood, a member of the band’s management team at the time, confirmed that whoever Julie had been speaking with—sharing personal stories, random photos, and other small intimacies of online friendship—was not one of her favorite musicians. It was a lying stranger.
The scale of Fake Tegan’s reach soon became clear: the impersonator seemed to have access to music, photos, passports, addresses, real email accounts, and family medical history.
“No one was operating at a high level with knowledge of how to protect people online. We were way out of our depth,” says Kim Persley, a former member of Tegan and Sara’s management, in Fanatical. The team posted on the band’s official website that Tegan and Sara were not communicating with any fans via email. Immediately, they heard from multiple people who had been corresponding with someone claiming to be Tegan.
Henwood, Persley, and other members of the band’s team began trying to uncover the person behind the Fake Tegan accounts, with little success. Meanwhile, the private nature of the information shared led the sisters to wonder whether the hacker might be someone they knew and trusted. Tegan’s tattoo artist Rene Both, and girlfriend at the time, photographer Lindsey Byrnes, were targeted as well.
“If we were a house,” says Sara in the film, “I [had] felt like somebody might be in the yard. But suddenly I realized they were in the house with us.”
As Fanatical’s timeline spirals forward through Tegan and Sara’s career, viewers come to understand the backbeat of suspicion and fear that has run parallel to their success. “I felt so under attack,” Tegan shares in the film. “It was terrible to be suspicious of people in my life that I loved.”
Tracing a web of misdirection (which may leave some viewers as confused as it did Tegan and Sara’s team, despite the film’s best efforts), Fanatical recounts how Henwood and Persley zeroed in on one suspect after another, only to hit dead ends. They contacted the police, who told them they didn’t have enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. All the while, they continued to wonder what personal information might be out there, and to hear new stories of those impacted.
One of Fake Tegan’s targets, musician JT, demonstrates the lasting impact of the scam. JT weathered a traumatic upbringing, and found solace in Vancouver’s queer music scene. At one point, she was part of the same relatively small circle as Tegan and Sara. She and Tegan had had a real email exchange. So when JT emailed Tegan after a break in their correspondence, unaware that the address had been compromised, she unwittingly began talking to Fake Tegan.
Soon the conversation turned flirtatious and sexual. But when Tegan visited the area and JT suggested via email that they meet up, she was rebuffed or ignored. At a loss, JT ended what had felt like a relationship of sorts. Like many people after a break-up, she discussed her frustration both online and off, until word made its way back to Tegan. Horrified to learn of the scammer’s latest exploits, this time with someone she knew in real life, Tegan alerted Henwood. He reached out to JT to tell her about Fake Tegan.
But JT, feeling tricked and scorned, didn’t believe him. The way she saw it, it was Henwood’s job to protect Tegan—and nobody’s job to protect her. “At the time I’m a young, dumb kid,” says JT in Fanatical. “I felt very small. So what are you gonna do? You have to fight.” JT’s insistence that she really had been talking to Tegan alienated her from the community that had served as a home for her. “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 uncomfortable but meaningful reunion. “We’re victims of the same person, and it’s hung over both of us,” says Tegan. As the conversation draws to a close, the two embrace.
The team behind 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 unsettling to upsetting—and many of them seemed to circle back to the same person.
“Tara” had been a contentious member of the online fandom, arguing aggressively with other fans, in particular in defense of her collection of fanfiction depicting the twins as being in a sexual relationship with one another. She also claimed she and Tegan had been in a relationship, and repeatedly harassed Byrnes both while she and Tegan were together, and throughout their break-up.
In Fanatical, Carr and Tegan have a harrowing phone conversation with “Tara.” The hope is to unmask her as Fake Tegan, but she backsteps and deflects, goading them and arguing that Tegan hasn’t been impacted by the impersonation anyway. Whether “Tara” truly believes that fame renders Tegan untouchable or simply wants to create conflict—whether she really is Fake Tegan, or just a particularly disgruntled fan—the conversation reflects how the desire for connection can curdle.
“I’m really proud of the Tegan and Sara community, and the fans,” says Tegan in Fanatical. She also points out, however, that at times the “people who seem to love and be obsessed with you the most are the most cruel, and mean, and shitty.” Especially online.
Celebrities have faced extreme fan behavior, ranging from unsettling to dangerous, for decades. Queer artist Chappell Roan has recently drawn ire for setting firm boundaries in an attempt to quash a rising swell of stalking and violation—the kind of behavior our culture generally prefers to feel bad about only in retrospect, when it has already marred someone’s life. Stans (a term referring either to stalker-fans, or fans whose obsession rises to the level depicted in the Eminem song “Stan,” depending on who you ask) have already been the subject of study. Examinations like “Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany and Carr’s own Britney vs Spears chronicle the best and worst of fandom.
We already know all this, so why do we keep having to learn it again? Fanatical evokes our most recent conversations about the toxicity of fan culture, parasocial relationships, and celebrity idolization—which we will dutifully have before diving right back into acting like a mess online.
But it’s the universality of fraud and fakes that makes this film truly timely. In the years since Fake Tegan began reaching out to Tegan and Sara fans, we have all become famous. Famous enough, at least, to be impersonated online. Friends begin posting feverishly about bitcoin and off-brand Ozempic as 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 dead loved ones.
In Fanatical, Tegan shares her reservations about coming forward with the story after keeping Fake Tegan under relative wraps for 16 years. “This could just encourage a new generation of Fake Tegans. And not even Fake Tegan, fake anyone. We’re all susceptible to this.”
“We want to believe we’re not like the people who would do this, and we’re not like the people who would be gullible enough to believe this,” says Sara. “But the truth is that we’re all a lot more similar. And I think that makes all of us really uncomfortable.”
The vulnerability and desire for connection that made Julie, JT, and so many others targets for Fake Tegan’s scam—and the refraction of those same feelings, which drove the scammer—are more common than we might like to think.
