In June 2011, followers of Tegan and Sara’s social media (including yours truly) received a distressing message from the band’s management: For at least two and a half years, someone (or someones) had been privately communicating with individual fans pretending to be Tegan Quin, one-half of the queer indie-pop duo who cultivated a close relationship with their fandom in the early aughts.
In the decade since, Tegan and her identical twin sister and bandmate, Sara Quin, haven’t spoken publicly about what they’ve privately referred to as “Fake Tegan” or “Fegan”—until now.
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is a Hulu documentary directed by filmmaker Erin Lee Carr and co-produced by Carr, music journalist Jenny Eliscu, and filmmaker Elyssa Hess (Harry & Meghan). It explores a catfishing scandal that not only rocked the Tegan and Sara fandom when it was initially exposed, but upended the lives of Tegan and Sara themselves, as well as the lives of their family, partners, friends, professional team, and even acquaintances. It opens new paths into the investigation and attempts to get to the bottom of it, with updates on how the situation has progressed over the last decade and a half. (Yes, really.)
Following the release of Tegan and Sara’s So Jealous in 2004, the band quickly became darlings of the indie scene—especially because of their openness about being queer. That, combined with their dedication to connecting with fans through conversations held over hours standing at their merch tables, by their tour buses, and walking queues before doors opened, created a unique bond between them and their fanbase. Unfortunately, as revealed in Fanatical, at least one person decided to take advantage of the trust built between the band and their supporters and twist it to catfish hundreds of international fans over 15+ years.
Through interviews with some of Fegan’s victims, Tegan, Sara, their managers Piers Henwood (2002-2020) and Kim Persley (2004-2019), music journalist and co-producer Eliscu, Tegan’s ex-girlfriend, photographer Lindsey Byrnes, and even her tattoo artist, Rene Botha, director Carr attempts to piece together how Fegan amassed so much personal information about the Quins and how they weaponized it. As noted by Persley, cybersecurity in the early aughts was mostly lax: “It was the wild west” of the Internet.
By hacking personal emails and at least one hard drive, Fegan created multiple fake profiles on websites including Facebook and Last.fm. They befriended fans and, over thousands of emails and text messages, shared personal photos, unreleased demos, real passport scans, and information about Tegan’s family—including her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis—all under the auspices of forming friendships and, in some cases, sexual relationships.
Fanatical is told mostly chronologically, revealing evidence in the order that it was uncovered by Tegan and Sara’s team and the documentary team over time. There are no “gotcha” moments, and the overproduced drama of MTV’s Catfish is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the film tells a very human story about a public figure whose identity was and is used to manipulate primarily young, queer women. Although Sara says they briefly worried about the possibility of their identities being stolen and their bank accounts being hacked, Fegan had other goals. Namely, they convinced fans they were the real Tegan Quin and in many cases painted an abusive, controlling portrait of the musician.
At one point, they even formed a relationship with one of Tegan’s actual, IRL acquaintances, whose appearance in the film further underscores the depth of Fegan’s deception and the harm they did. In fact, they’re still doing this—or some other Fegan is—according to the timeline presented in the film, Tegan’s testimony, and an update shared before the end credits. One of the main reasons Tegan and Sara haven’t talked about this publicly since their managers posted that message in 2011 is that they feared making the problem worse.
“You know, as soon as we got the green light to do this project, I immediately regretted it,” Tegan shares at the beginning of Fanatical. “I actually regret it now. This is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. It puts our fanbase under the spotlight. I don’t want to accuse the wrong person. I had to go against a decade of instinct, which was that if we talk about it, it will make it worse. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about it. Someone can still pretend to me. They still do. I just want to know what the fuck happened.”
Multiple people in Fanatical, including Tegan, talk about how the discovery of Fegan made them lose trust in those closest to them. Several of them confess an inability to listen to Tegan and Sara’s music after learning the person they had formed a relationship with wasn’t actually Tegan. The documentary emphasizes how violating and mind-blowing it is to be the victim of a catfish—and it also emphasizes how violating and mind-blowing it is to be the victim of identity theft for catfishing.
And, as indicated by the title, Fanatical explores how fandom can become toxic. It touches on the concerning trend of fans referring to themselves as “stans”—a term seemingly derived from the combination of “stalker” and “fan” that traces its origin to the Eminem song—and how an obsession with celebrity can become pathological. We now refer to one-sided relationships with public figures as parasocial, which is a term that didn’t exist when Tegan and Sara first stepped onto the scene. But after Fegan was discovered, the band no longer felt safe being so open with their fans.
Coincidentally alongside another rise in their stardom, they introduced VIP ticketing to formalize fan interactions as a safety measure. Tegan and Sara fans who had been there from the beginning and formed bonds with the band—however one-sided—were angry and hurt by this change, especially since it wasn’t addressed. Having seen Fanatical, I find myself questioning my reaction to similar changes with bands I loved before they were big, and if safety was part of the shift.
At any rate, watching this documentary as an early fan of Tegan and Sara who was stunned by that 2011 message and wanted more information, but couldn’t find any, was deeply surreal. Unfortunately, the initial discovery of Fegan is only the start. The 15+ year timeline revealed in the film is deeply disturbing, and the web is wide and incredibly tangled. Carr and the documentary team do a stellar job with the storytelling, though some fans may still feel like they don’t have enough information at the end of it. Restraint is understandable, given the subject matter, but we’ve come to expect all of the gory details from highly-produced documentaries. Anyone hoping for that in Fanatical will come away disappointed, but hopefully understanding.
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is streaming now on Hulu.
Published: Oct 18, 2024 07:05 am