The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara

When Tegan Quin first began developing the new Hulu documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, she didn’t think of herself as a victim of the events it chronicles until she had a conversation with her collaborators, producer Jenny Eliscu and director Erin Lee Carr. “They called me a victim, and I was literally like, ‘I’m not a victim of this.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, she doesn’t know,’” she tells Consequence.

Quin laughs a bit at the memory, before going on to talk about the “humiliation and shame and guilt” she’s experienced over the years, after learning about an Internet imposter (or imposters?) who was interacting with fans of Tegan and Sara on the internet. Chronicling a span of over a decade, Fanatical investigates how Quin’s personal and private information got spilled and shared online thanks to hacking, while fans were misled into thinking they were having intimate conversations with Quin via fake accounts (known as “Fegans”).

Making the documentary, and confronting the effects these events have had on her life, has Quin hoping that it will make audiences reconsider the current state of fan culture. “I think the vast majority of people have a pretty healthy relationship with celebrity. But I think as a culture, our entire society is pretty obsessed with it,” she says. “I mean, I get it. Our parents’ generations had The Beatles and Elvis, and we all witnessed Princess Diana die because paparazzi were chasing her, but that paparazzi was driven by us. That was us clicking on those stories. That was us buying those newspapers.”

And, Quin adds, “It’s not just paparazzi. It’s everyone standing with [cameras]. We thought [the paparazzi] were monsters like two decades ago. Now we are the paparazzi. I saw a video of Taylor Swift coming out from dinner — hundreds of people standing outside a restaurant to take a clip of Taylor Swift being embarrassed. Why are you doing that? But that’s our culture now. That’s fine, we’ve normalized that.”

Being filmed in public against her will has happened to Quin, she says, adding, “It feels awful when you’re sitting in a restaurant and your wife is like, switch seats with me. Someone’s filming you while you’re eating. It’s embarrassing. I want to go over and be like, ‘Why would you do this? This is so embarrassing.’”

Continues Quin, “There’s gotta be some sort of shift,” because “we’ve normalized stalking. We’ve normalized that we turned into the monster and we’re fine with it. But why? That’s an insight I can only have at 44 because now I’m middle-aged and I’m successful and I can just piss off, buy a farm, and not need the collective ‘you’ anymore. I don’t want to do that. I love being in a band. I love being an artist. But I can say those things now because I’m not afraid that it will end my career.”

Quin is excited by the way that artists today are pushing back on the expectations of fan culture. But while “Chappell Roan’s statements the last couple months are amazing,” she notes, “Justin Bieber’s been begging us to leave him alone for years. I just think we’re okay with it. We normalize it and it feeds us. And so, I just hope when people watch the movie, they think twice about the things they say, the things they click on, or how they prioritize social media in their lives.”

Initially, Quin was developing the story of Fanatical as a podcast, but then she connected with Carr through a mutual friend. However Carr, a prolific documentarian whose credits include Britney vs Spears and The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, knew that it should instead be a movie. “And I just loved the way that Erin already understood the story,” Quin adds. “She’s a big music person, and I had a sense from our first call that she was going handle this really compassionately.”

For Carr, she had been planning to take a break from documentary work until she first heard about the idea, at which point she was “very anxious to get on the phone and really understand some of the details” — she was especially interested in how this story had never gotten much attention, and that it was unsolved.

It hadn’t attracted much attention, though, because it’s not something that has been discussed publicly to any degree, by Quin or anyone else. “I think at that time we were fairly fearful that if we drew too much attention to it, it would just draw more fans into the lion’s den, if you will,” Quin says. “Because this wasn’t a common thing. This was very unusual. It was very new, we didn’t even have the word catfishing yet. So our fear was that people wouldn’t believe that. Like, they would think like, oh no, Tegan’s private Facebook leaked, and now they’re trying to cover it up or something. So we were like, maybe don’t draw attention to this.”

In 2011, the band’s management posted a warning to social media and Tegan and Sara fan forums about potential fake Tegan and Saras in the wild — their official website’s contact page still contains a note which specifies which Tegan and Sara social media accounts are officially authorized. But otherwise, Fanatical is the first in-depth discussion of it.

And even with the documentary now coming out, Carr and Quin haven’t stopped their investigation. “We were chasing down a lead today in the car, while we were headed to Times Square to take a photo under the Hulu sign,” Carr says. “So yes, I think the story continues, but we’re being really thoughtful and careful because we’ve taken a look inside and it’s a snake eating its own tail. Who’s the victim? Who’s the perpetrator?”

Erin Lee Carr and Tegan Quin, in Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (Hulu)

They’re both accepting of the fact that once the documentary is streaming, a whole audience of Tegan and Sara fans might have new information to add. However, Quin says that “I think the film that Erin made is beautiful and it asks bigger questions and it reminds us this isn’t just about fake Tegan or me, it’s about something much larger. And I’d be okay with that being its legacy.”

They do have a good idea of who one Fegan is, and Quin would love to have a conversation with them — and she also suspects that over the course of working on this documentary, she and Carr have “been catfished by fake Tegan many, many times.”

Should they be able to make proper contact with a Fegan, would that conversation become a follow-up film? “I think it would be a podcast,” Carr jokes — bringing it all full circle.

Really, Quin says, “I would also be fine with it just being a conversation between me and Erin and this person. I mean it so sincerely — unmasking fake Tegan for public consumption would bring no value to the story, and it would bring no catharsis to the story.”

But, she continues “It might bring it to me, personally, if we could just sit down and try to understand each other.”

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara premieres Friday, October 18th on Hulu.