episode 7: Avril Lavigne’s Clone Named Melissa

[00:00:00] CLIP - ET LIVE:
Avril Lavigne finally responds to death threat—I’m sorry—death conspiracies. For those who don't know, there has been a theory that the current Avril—the current one you're seeing—is allegedly a clone named Melissa.

[00:00:19] CRISTEN:
That slip of the tongue was from Entertainment Tonight Live back in 2018. And technically, that alleged Melissa isn't a clone. She's a lookalike or what conspiracy theorists might call a replacement. Avril's response that ET Live referenced happened during an Australian radio interview. Avril was calling in to Kiss 1065 Sydney to promote her new single Head Above Water.

[00:00:57] CLIP - KISS 1065 SYDNEY:
Did you laugh at the rumors that went around where you no longer exist and there's a clone of you? So you died?
Oh, I forgot about that. Like years ago.
When there's a clone pretending to be you, that's mental.
Like, yeah, some people think that I'm not the real me, which is so weird. Like, why would they even think that?

[00:01:15] CRISTEN:
Well, that's one way to face your own mortality. That wasn't the first time Avril had been asked about it either. And even now on her TikTok, comments inevitably pop up questioning, is that really her, or is that Melissa? I'm Cristen Conger. This is Conspiracy She Wrote.

Grab your red string and follow along…

For those unfamiliar, Avril Lavigne was the princess of pop punk back in the early 2000s. She's also one of Canada's best-selling music artists of all time. And those so-called death conspiracies have cycled in and out of social media feeds and headlines for well over a decade.

For me, as an elder millennial, just the thought of Avril Lavigne evokes all kinds of sensory nostalgia. Watching MTV's TRL with Carson Daly every afternoon or walking into Hot Topic at the mall to peruse all of the ironic t-shirts—the scent of Tommy Girl perfume hanging in the air.

Avril Ramona Lavigne grew up worlds away from that hyper-American early aughts mall culture. She's from a small town in Ontario, Canada, where she sang, played guitar, and was barely in high school when she got signed to a million-dollar record deal.

Avril was talented for sure. She was also strategically cultivated for MTV teens and tweens. This was the era of solo female pop stars—Britney, Christina, Shakira. Then you had the pop punk boy bands—Blink-182, Sum 41, Good Charlotte. And what do you get when you cross a sexy female pop star with suburban skater boys? You get Avril Lavigne. Her 2002 debut album Let Go—Avril was 17 years old when she first went platinum.

[00:04:02] CLIP - MTV TRL:
My face is on a billboard over there.
How do you feel about that?
Ha ha ha! Large head. Exciting!
Someone told me that today. And it's like—it's kind of like in a weird way another dream come true. Like, you know, all this stuff.
Right. Stop it! Alright, let's talk about the lights.

[00:04:20] CRISTEN:
And when she blew up, she blew up. World famous, mobbed by paparazzi and fans wherever she went. And this is the conspiracy theory about it. In 2003, Avril was wildly famous and also feeling the pressure to get out a second album. That year, her grandfather also died, and the pressure plus her grief was too much to bear. So she unalived herself.

But her record company wasn't going to let their new cash cow rest in peace—no way. So they hired a lookalike named Melissa Vandella to become their new Avril. The general contours of this conspiracy might sound familiar if you've listened to episode two. Researcher Annie Kelly and I briefly touched on the most famous death hoax in pop music history.

[00:05:26] ANNIE KELLY:
The Paul is Dead conspiracy theory, which was essentially half hoax, half prank, but also half conspiracy theory about the member of the Beatles, the famous British 1960s band Paul McCartney.

[00:05:43] CRISTEN:
The conspiracy theory called Paul is Dead went viral in 1969, and the narrative is pretty much the same as New Avril. A hot pop music commodity died tragically, and the greedy record execs swooped in to keep it a secret and hired a doppelganger to take their star's place. But as unoriginal and low-stakes as the Avril conspiracy theory is, its origins and persistence...

[00:06:20] NUR IBRAHIM:
I will say that, you know, Avril Lavigne was an interesting confluence where someone intended to make fun of death hoaxes by posting a satirical article, and then it just sort of goes haywire and gets taken seriously.

[00:06:33] CRISTEN:
Nur Ibrahim is a reporter for the fact-checking website Snopes, and she actually got into full-time fact-checking by working on late-night comedy, of all things. Shows like Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper.

[00:06:54] NUR IBRAHIM:
I enjoyed that process of fact-checking scripts so much, and I was fact-checking not just hard news. I was fact-checking jokes. I was fact-checking all kinds of absurd things because I was working with comedy writers, but I wanted to get to really just writing hard fact checks.

[00:07:08] CRISTEN:
We'll hear more from Nur a little later. First, though, let me explain what she meant about Avril Lavigne and satire gone haywire. Let’s go back to 2014. Avril had just released her sixth album, self-titled Avril Lavigne. She was touring in Brazil and stopped by a talk show called Programa Pânico. Now the audio isn't great, but at one point, the music turns sinister, and one of the hosts asks Avril if she's heard the conspiracy theory.

[00:07:51]
PROGRAMA PÂNICO HOST: I was reading on the internet, and some people say that you—you—you died, and this is a clone of you. Have you read about this?

AVRIL LAVIGNE: I—I didn't hear about it. I just hear about it—from—I'm hearing better from you. Well, I'm here, and I'm in Brazil. I’m not a clone.

[00:08:14] CRISTEN:
During that exchange, the camera cuts away to what looks like an Avril fan blog. Black background, white text, a no-makeup photo of tween Avril at the top. And that MySpace-looking website was actually where this conspiracy theory was born. The blog Avril Está Morta went live in 2011. And that's Portuguese for Avril is dead. The homepage asks, “Has the real Avril Lavigne died? Is Avril dead?” It goes on to acknowledge that Avril has been making music since she was young, and she looks and sounds different than she used to. But also, we all change as we get older.

However—and here I'm quoting Google Translate—“If you like conspiracy theories, I have one for you. What if Avril Lavigne had died in 2003 and been replaced by an almost identical lookalike? As incredible as it may seem, everything would have fallen into place for this to have happened.” End quote.

And from there, get ready to scroll. Avril Está Morta lays out selected lyrics, album art, music videos, YouTube videos of live performances, unflattering paparazzi pics. There's even a whole section just about her height and how she's allegedly gotten a half-inch shorter. And there's still so much left to scroll. That blog post got more than a thousand comments.

It is unclear how many folks sincerely believed it, but Avril Está Morta took on a life of its own. Cut to three years later, and Avril herself is getting asked on Programa Pânico if she's heard about it. And by 2015, even the conspiracy inventor came clean-ish in a Facebook post: “Avril is not dead. The blog was a way to show how conspiracy theories can seem real. Avril Lavigne never died and was replaced by a lookalike. I apologize to people who believed that she was dead and feel disappointed about this revelation, but this was an exercise to teach you to become more skeptical and not believe everything you see.”

There was more to it, but you get the gist. Sorry not sorry, it was a media literacy lesson, y'all. But word to any would-be satirists listening: you can bring a conspiracy theory into the world, but good luck killing it off.

It's time for an ad break, and when we come back, Avril Está Morta goes global.

AD BREAK 1

[00:10:45] CRISTEN:
A couple of months after Avril Está Morta posted that Facebook mea culpa in Brazil, a BuzzFeed reporter unintentionally introduced it to a whole new audience up North. The reporter learned about the conspiracy theory on a work trip to the BuzzFeed office in São Paulo. He got a kick out of it, later tweeted about it, and linked to the conspiracy blog.

Within a day, Paper Magazine reported, “A conspiracy theory says Avril Lavigne is dead and has been replaced by a doppelganger.” The same day, over on Vice.com: investigating the conspiracy that says Avril Lavigne was killed off and replaced with an actress. And from there, it went mildly viral for the first time in English. In 2017, it got picked up again.

A since-deleted Twitter thread from an anonymous user retold Avril is dead with a new made-up detail: Avril's lookalike/doppelganger/clone was actually her former paparazzi decoy named Melissa Vandella. After Kyle and Jackie O on Kiss 1065 Sydney asked Avril about it in that 2018 interview we heard earlier, the conspiracy circulated yet another time. And after you're done listening to this episode, you might enjoy the BBC podcast Who Replaced Avril Lavigne that came out earlier this year.

So when Nur Ibrahim at Snopes described Avril Está Morta as attempted satire gone haywire, she was not exaggerating. Nor would she. She's a professional fact-checker. But also, Nur sees this kind of misinfo all the time.

[00:14:30] NUR IBRAHIM:
Death hoaxes are really, you know, perhaps a tiny fraction of the kinds of stuff we have to cover, but it's sort of like a very well-oiled machine. We can now tell very clearly what is a death hoax and what isn't because of the years we've spent seeing the same rumors pop up again and again.

[00:15:29] CRISTEN:
The health factor may have also contributed to the longevity of Avril Está Morta. In April 2015, Avril Lavigne detailed her Lyme disease diagnosis in an interview with People magazine. A fresh-faced Avril graced the cover with a giant pull quote, “I thought I was dying.” The disease had left her bedridden for months, and fans were genuinely concerned. It was another four years after that before Avril released her next album. And it was during that interim that the conspiracy theory cycled in and out—and in and out—of headlines. In 2017, for instance, a Change.org petition for a picture of Avril and Melissa: The Only Proof of Life got more than 700 signatures.

[00:16:36] NUR IBRAHIM:
So when Bruce Willis had his health diagnosis, suddenly there's a proliferation of death hoaxes associated with him. Even though he hasn't died, he's got a very serious medical condition. Months and months before Queen Elizabeth's actual death was announced, there would be rumors about her death. But again, she was, at the time, a 90-plus-year-old woman. So that's sort of to be expected. Everyone's sort of expecting something's going to happen. You're always constantly thinking about the line of succession of the royal family, you know, things like that. Celine Dion's definitely been on our death hoax watch list.

And also, you know, this is sort of one of the funniest things about a death hoax. I mean, it's tragic, but it's also quite silly. The randomness of the headlines and the randomness of the ways in which people die. Like, you'll often have a celebrity who perhaps had their heyday in the 80s, like Tony Danza, and he'll have fallen off a cliff on multiple occasions. And then Wayne Knight, again, another celebrity who I haven't thought about, would get into a car accident.

[00:17:39] CRISTEN:
As if Avril Está Morta wasn't enough, a separate death hoax once claimed Avril Lavigne died in a snowboarding accident. That's another recurring theme. Death hoaxes love killing off celebs on the slopes.

[00:17:59] NUR IBRAHIM:
And these are often repetitive traits in death hoaxes. So there's sort of little reason behind some of the choices, but they are intended to be shocking and make people click on them. So that's probably why they are described the way they are because people will be like, “Oh really?” And then they'll click on it, and it'll take them somewhere that they don't necessarily want to go, but it serves the creator's purpose to just get you to click. A lot of times, these headlines tend to be vague, or they tend to be posts that act as screenshots of another post without any link to an actual news outlet.

They sort of come in all shapes and forms, but they're primarily intended to be clickbait. Like, they're primarily intended to be shared because people see a bit of news about an actor. They want to react immediately, and they'll see a bigger, more shocking piece of news, and that the timing of that is designed to get them to react and to be engaged in the process of commiseration or condolence or just sort of to immediately react the way we always tend to do on social media—to sort of be part of the whole crowd reacting.

[00:19:08] CRISTEN:
Do you remember the first death hoax that you had to fact-check?

[00:19:13] NUR IBRAHIM:
Oh, God, that's a hard one because I've fact-checked so many death hoaxes at this point. It's a very popular death hoax that I've actually encountered consistently over the last three—three out of the four years I've worked here—is that, for some reason, people are always making death hoaxes about Chuck Norris.

[00:19:32] CLIP: CHUCK NORRIS:
We're leaving.
You're leaving, alright, but you're going to jail.
No way, no more jail, never!

[00:19:46] NUR IBRAHIM:
And he's sort of an action star who I haven't—you know, I didn't grow up watching him, but perhaps my parents did. And he hasn't really been heard from in a long time, to my knowledge. I don't follow his movements, but death hoaxes about him keep popping up. And they pop up around the same time as a very small entertainment news outlet might publish, oh, Chuck Norris making a comeback in some small film or a film that may not be widely known. And then, around that same time, a YouTube video will come out. And there's, interestingly, a formula to a lot of the YouTube videos. And they're not just about Chuck Norris.

But there's always sort of a formula in the headline. It starts with “RIP talented actor Chuck Norris passed away at the age of 82, goodbye and rest.” And it looks like it's been written by AI, or the voiceover on these YouTube videos often sounds like it's a robot speaking. The same voice is often used for other celebrity death hoaxes, and they're often rehashing news about the celebrity. And saying, “This celebrity is known for X, Y, Z action star, doing, you know, these movies.”

And most of the video will be spent with them rehashing news about them, and then a bit of it will be spent with a very eerie voice saying, “He was taken ill, and this is a tragedy, and we hope they rest in peace.” And there's no other concrete, detailed information given, but you'll find those videos propped up on the same handful of YouTube channels quite consistently.

There was a page claiming that Whoopi Goldberg's death—if you clicked on it, it would redirect you to some, supposedly, a CBD product line. A lot of the YouTube ads that we've uncovered over the course of Snopes's many years covering death hoaxes, they've been claiming celebrity deaths end up funneling you to a sales pitch for keto diets or CBD, and others just sort of want you to click on their website. So, primarily, I would say the majority of the situations we've encountered are either clickbait or they're intended to take you to some scammy site. And there's really not a huge amount of motivation that I've encountered other than to perhaps funnel users to somewhere where they'd be able to take your data or try to get information. And then you'll get sort of all these weird ads later on because you clicked on something strange.

[00:22:12] CRISTEN:
That morbid curiosity coming to...

[00:22:13] NUR IBRAHIM:
It is very morbid at the same time. I mean, it's like, this celebrity fell off a cliff. I mean, it's funny, but it's also extremely morbid. But we'll click on it because we have that—it's that human instinct to want to know more and to want to be part of something like that, like something very morbid and gossipy. And having seen the process of repetition and the ways old stories come up and even old themes keep coming up tied to the death hoaxes, you will also see stories about body doubles of famous individuals.

[00:22:46] CLIP: AI KATE:
Kate Middleton, 42, has not been seen in public eye since an abdominal surgery for a non-cancerous but unspecified condition on January 16th.

[00:22:58] NUR IBRAHIM:
We just saw it with Kate Middleton, her walking around on a farm, and again, we don't know for a fact that—what people are saying or even those grainy videos—we don't know much enough about them to verify it, but there is going to continue to be sort of this obsessive interest in celebrities, in prominent figures. And as long as that obsessive interest continues, and with the age of the internet, we are going to have to keep publishing these again and again at risk of being broken records.

[00:23:31] CRISTEN:
Death hoaxes existed long before the age of the internet, but they were much fewer and farther between. Back in episode one, for instance, a late 19th-century death hoax helped radicalize one of the women who propagated the anti-Semitic Illuminati conspiracy theory back in the early 1930s. Are there, generally speaking, differences between celebrity death hoaxes and body double conspiracy theories of like, “Oh, this person has been replaced?”

[00:24:16] NUR IBRAHIM:
So, in January 2023, I covered the collapse of football player Damar Hamlin.

[00:24:22] CLIP: DAMAR HAMLIN HIT:
Hamlin made a hit. He got up, took a couple of steps, and then just fell to the ground. We don't know, of course, the extent of his injuries.

[00:24:31] NUR IBRAHIM:
He collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. And this was a sort of—I don't want to say the word “perfect,” but it was definitely sort of one of those confluences of multiple conspiracy theories coming into play in really one story.

You had a rumor that he died due to the COVID-19 vaccine. Oftentimes, when something like this happens, then you'll find a celebrity death also tied to COVID hoaxes and COVID vaccine rumors. And that in itself has very dangerous consequences because, you know, you have a public figure, part of the NFL, which is, again, very popular. And then you have a lot of skeptics of COVID vaccines, and you're putting that together. It's a very potent combination, so to speak. Then you had a rumor that after his collapse, a body double began standing in for him at public appearances. It was a perfect combination of every major conspiracy theory and celebrity death hoax.

And part of the reason why those rumors spread was because he was watching the game after his collapse. He came back, watched the game from a private room. He gestured to the crowd, but he had his face covered and a hoodie on, so he wasn't totally visible, partly because of weather conditions and because he'd covered himself up. And even his coach and others had told reporters that he'd been meeting his teammates, he'd been showing signs of recovery, but people just sort of took pics and screenshots of him going in and out of the stadium, his face covered, and being like, “You know, is this really him? Why has he not shown his face?”

He himself kind of stepped in and talked about the theories. He tweeted a photo of himself next to a wall mural, where he did his like heart gesture, and he wrote in the caption, “Clone,” and so he made a joke about it himself. But it makes for a lot of rumors. And so that was a pretty crucial fact-check in that it covered so many areas, and it had a very influential sports figure at the center of it.

[00:26:33] CRISTEN:
But the hottest spot for body doubling and death hoaxery isn't pro sports or pop culture. It's politics. After the break, Nur fact-checks… Vladimir Putin's chin?

AD BREAK 2

[00:27:10] CRISTEN:
We're back with Snopes reporter Nur Ibrahim.

[00:27:10] NUR IBRAHIM:
Body double rumors and death hoaxes frequently overlap, particularly when it comes to political figures. We often find Vladimir Putin death hoaxes, and we'll find Vladimir Putin body double rumors. We had a video that I covered in which it shows sort of a side profile of Putin, and they’ll say this doesn't look like him. He's got a weird chin. His chin is—it doesn't look like Putin's chin. It must be a body double. And then we'd look at like different videos from different angles taken from the same scene or photography from that same scene, and we'd be like, you know, this looks like Putin. This is definitely Putin.

And sometimes that has to do with the politics of the time. You want to have information about a Russian or Ukrainian leader coming out that sort of—it's a kind of tension and anxiety and is intended to create a sense of uncertainty for whoever is supporting that side of this conflict. And so we see that with Russia and Ukraine. We've seen plenty of Putin body double rumors. These are specifically politics.

You'll see tons of Joe Biden body double rumors because of Joe Biden's age and his purported rumors about his health. Back in 2020, during the elections, my colleague extensively covered rumors about Joe Biden's body double because his earlobes look strange. We do cover it very seriously. We are like, you know, we will look at footage. We won't just dismiss the rumor. We'd be like, here's footage, here's evidence. This is clearly him. Here's him from another angle. Here's another photograph taken by a Getty Images photographer, you know, which verifies, you know, they saw him with their own eyes, you know?

And yes, they often overlap with death hoaxes simply because, you know, especially in wartime, people will assume, “Oh yeah, Putin was killed. Someone has been parading around to sort of show that he's around to give you a sense of security.” And so the idea of destabilizing a system that's in place or something during a very tense time—that's when I noticed body double death hoaxes sort of merging and becoming.

[00:29:26] CRISTEN:
Is there also an element at work of people kind of seeing what they want to see?

[00:29:35] NUR IBRAHIM:
Oh yeah. There always is that. And that's the reason why these stories keep coming back is we can write a lot of fact-checks. They will be available out in the world. And some people will—I'm sure there are people out there who will believe what they want to believe, who will continue to see what they want to see. I often receive emails where I will have presented all these facts in a story, and someone will send me an email out of the blue being like, “You're wrong.” And I will say, “Okay, what am I supposed to say to that? That's your opinion. I am in the business of facts.” So, you know, there will always be internet trolls. There will always be people who do not trust even the fact-checkers. We just have to keep doing our jobs. That's really all there is to it.

[00:30:21] CRISTEN:
So when it comes to Avril Lavigne—this Avril Lavigne death hoax/body double conspiracy theory—the irony is that it really took off as a result of satire. Someone set up a website creating this whole conspiracy theory to show basically like how easy it is to spread conspiracy theories on the internet. And now cut to 10-plus years later, and—like, I've been on Avril Lavigne's TikTok, and in the comment sections on some videos, there will still be people saying, “Nope, that's not her. It really is not her, y'all.” Yeah, yeah. Even if it's well-intentioned, is conspiracy theory or death hoax satire in this day and age ever effective? Does it ever not backfire?

[00:31:27] NUR IBRAHIM:
We fact-check satires all the time—satirical stories all the time. We have an entire rating that either labels it satire because then people misunderstood it, or that it's a story that proliferates, and we rate it as originated as satire and turned into sort of something else where people actually took it seriously. And so, you know, you'll find both. People will both turn something that is satirical and take it seriously and spread it. And you will also find people saying, “Come on guys, are you stupid? Like, this is clearly a joke.”

[00:32:02] CRISTEN:
Which brings me to one last word on the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory.

Something else it has in common with Avril Está Morta is that it, too, involved satire gone haywire. In late 1969, a college student named Fred LaBour was supposed to write a review of the Beatles’ new album Abbey Road for the Michigan Daily student newspaper. Instead, the paper published his sprawling piece headlined, “McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought to Light.” But Fred had made up most of that so-called evidence on a lark.

Now, Fred did not invent Paul is Dead, but his article was what brought Paul is Dead briefly into the mainstream. And within weeks, Life magazine made it their cover story. Headline: Paul is still with us. A reporter tracked him down in the Scottish countryside, where he'd been taking a break from the Beatlemania with his wife and young kids. He wasn't exactly happy about the pop-in, but he did pose for a proof of life photo and told the reporter, “Can you spread it around that I'm just an ordinary person and want to live in peace?”

Or, to quote Avril Lavigne: Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?

. . .

[00:34:18] CRISTEN:
Fact-checkers are essential workers, seriously. Go read all about the death hoaxes, body doubles, and political disinformation Nur has gotten to the bottom of at Snopes.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @Nur_Ibrahim.

[00:34:45] NUR IBRAHIM:
I'd love to share with listeners about what to keep an eye out for when you see an online death notice and the questions you should ask, especially if you want to verify for yourself: Is this true or false? There's a couple of things you can keep in mind. You can check: Is the announcement of a death coming from a verified source? Is it an official spokesperson, a family member, or a celebrity's verified social media account? If it's on a web page, is it coming from a website that is mimicking a real news site? In that case, you can always keep an eye out for typos, changes in the logo font, unusual URLs. If it sort of, you know, looks like a verifiable news outlet, then compare to the URL of the actual news site that it looks like it's mimicking. Does the website or social media page have a disclaimer about its own veracity? Because, again, going back to our discussion on satires, some pages state that they are satirical in nature, so you should always look at, you know, their “about” section or their description—any sort of, you know, tag on the post because a lot of posts have satire tags on them. And also, if you see or click on something, I think if readers are planning to click on what looks like a very sketchy, strange photograph with a lot of typos or a strange URL, you should definitely do that. Be careful of those because they might—those suspicious links might ask more details from you. You might be asked to give out your data or, you know, be taken to a site with a virus or a scammy kind of promotion or something like that. So these are the things that readers should keep an eye out for and always sort of verify before sharing, basically, or check Snopes and see if we've verified it.

[00:36:00] CRISTEN:
Next time on Conspiracy She Wrote, we move from the princess of pop punk to the teen queen of green. When a 16-year-old Greta Thunberg read the UN climate summit to filth, she cemented her status as an activist icon and the target of rabid conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns.

[00:36:31] CLIP: GRETA THUNBERG:
We must find a smooth transition towards a low carbon economy. There is no planet B. There is no planet blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

[00:36:45] CRISTEN:
Conspiracy She Wrote is an Unladylike Media production created, executive produced, and written by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and our theme song is “Tarana” by R. Gift.

[00:37:13] CRISTEN:
And maybe final thought—uh, if it's about Chuck Norris, definitely fact-check it first?

[00:37:13] NUR IBRAHIM:
I mean, you know, Chuck Norris will eventually die, as all of us will one day. The day that happens, we will definitely most likely and definitely probably publish a story about it. But we also have a wealth of rumors that we've covered where he has not died yet, to our knowledge. So, we definitely keep—keep an eye on Snopes if you want to verify whether or not Chuck Norris has died. So, yeah, it's absurd. It's random. But it is the internet.