Musicians across all genres have been speaking out about toxic fan behavior, but few have as much firsthand experience with the concept as Tegan and Sara.
Over a decade ago, the Canadian indie pop duo, made up of twins Tegan and Sara Quin, learned that their fans had been targeted by a Tegan impersonator who tried to prove their legitimacy by sharing personal information about the band as well as photos and unreleased demos. Fegan, as Tegan and Sara’s friends and crew began calling the imposter, maintained yearslong relationships with various fans, some of whom had trouble accepting the fact that they had never been speaking with the real Tegan.
After keeping the situation relatively under wraps for years, the band is opening up about the ordeal in the new Hulu documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, directed by Erin Lee Carr. The film features extensive interviews with the Quin sisters, 44, as well as fans who fell victim to Fegan’s catfishing over the years.
“It still impacts us all the time,” Tegan exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the film’s release. “When strange things happen, if someone tries to break into one of our emails or someone tries to sign into our social media, it sets off a wave of panic. So it’s something we still deal with.”
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Tegan and her sister first learned something was up in May 2011 when the band’s manager realized that a fan named Julie had been communicating with a person she believed to be Tegan for two years. From there they learned about more victims who thought they’d been talking to Tegan, as well as at least one person who believed they were in a romantic relationship with her. That person, JT, appears in the film, as does Julie and several other fans who were catfished by Fegan.
After deciding she might want to speak out about the ordeal, Tegan initially thought she’d write a book or record a podcast about it, but one of her friends, writer Jenny Eliscu, suggested reaching out to Carr, 36. The director, who previously helmed Netflix’s Britney vs Spears and HBO’s Mommy Dead and Dearest, realized right away that the story should be a documentary. While Tegan was happy to connect with Carr, she had misgivings almost as soon as she said yes, which she says in the first few minutes of Fanatical.
“When it got greenlit, I immediately felt regret,” Tegan recalled to Us. “I didn’t even know how bad it was gonna get and how emotional and how traumatizing at times. This really affected my health a lot and my anxiety a lot. When I said that on camera, I had no idea how bad it was gonna get. I think I just was like, ‘Oh, s—. What are we doing?’ But I think sometimes you can’t think through what you’re doing or you’d never do it.”
Tegan’s twin sister and bandmate, Sara, was also hesitant about the project, but she ultimately participated and appears in the film as well (albeit much less than Tegan, as she wasn’t the main target of the catfishing).
“I don’t think Sara loved the idea of revisiting this. She’s a parent now and has also had a much more arms-length relationship to social media,” Tegan explained. “So I think she was really the only one that was like, ‘Are you sure you wanna do this?’ Throughout the process, my parents, my partner, a lot of people were like, ‘This is having a really negative effect on you. Are you sure that you want to do this?’”
As Tegan and Carr began talking to victims, however, she began losing some of that hesitancy.
“I realized that it was gonna be cathartic for me and for everyone else,” Tegan said. “It seemed so significant to the victims to be able to talk to me. A lot of them just wanted to apologize, you know? There was so much unsaid. And so right away I was like, ‘No matter how bad it is, it’s worth it for that reason.’ And the second thing was, from the mental health sort of perspective, I had buried it. I didn’t really let myself feel the feels when it was going on, and I realized that it had really had an effect on me. And as soon as we started working on the project, I was like, ‘Damn, did I need to go through it publicly?’ Perhaps not. But talking to the victims, talking to the investigators, talking to my team, my family, going back through all this, it was, like, ‘You can’t bury something like this.’”
That’s not to say that the process was easy. Carr filmed Tegan sitting down with several of Fegan’s victims, including JT, who initially thought the Fegan story was a lie concocted by Tegan to hide infidelity in her real-life relationship.
“Every conversation was hard,” Tegan told Us. “Even the ones that were really positive and cathartic, they’re still hard. It’s still a violation. These people thought they knew me. They had songs and unreleased material and my private information … it’s that parasocial relationship but super supercharged. Because it’s like they know that they didn’t actually have the relationship with you, and yet there’s this feeling of intimacy because we went through this thing.”
Musicians across all eras have dealt with overinvested fans, but the problem has only gotten worse in recent years — especially because of the internet, which creates an illusion of closeness with people you may never meet. Just ask Chappell Roan, who not long ago had to remind her fans not to touch her in public without consent.
“I think the pandemic really affected people’s mental health and their ability to understand the line between reality on and off the computer,” Carr told Us. “I think that we have a mental health epidemic in America, and a lot of people self-soothe through television, music, pop culture and kind of take it a little far. The whole body of my work has always been about that. We think that when we’re behind a computer it isn’t us talking to someone in real life, right?”
The film ends without a solid cut-and-dried resolution, with a title card noting that the investigation is still ongoing. Carr and Tegan now believe that they know who is responsible for the Fegan debacle, but they have no interest in revealing who it is.
“All I can say is that the things that we uncovered show so much mental health struggle. And as a human being, I can’t put my work and audience satisfaction above the well-being of a person,” Carr told Us. “It’s been an incredible exercise in patience and understanding. I am a journalist and I want to figure out and tell everybody exactly what happened. But … it isn’t about that. It’s that we’re all the bad actors and we’re all Fegan in some way.”
Tegan, for her part, hopes that Fanatical reminds viewers to question everything they’re seeing online — and to remember that there’s always a real person on the other side of the screen.
“Why do we feel entitled to know everything about everybody?” she wondered to Us. “Why do we feel compelled to share everything about ourselves? What has social media done to us that we think that everyone needs to know how we make pasta or fold our laundry or put on our makeup? I think we have to ask ourselves, is it too much? … We should just all be nicer and more compassionate and thoughtful to each other. It’s f—ed up out there. The world’s a complicated place — lead with more compassionate understanding.”
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara premieres on Hulu Friday, October 18.
