'Trump haters are paedophiles': inside QAnon, the conspiracy aiming to put Hollywood behind bars

On 15 July 2020, American model Chrissy Teigen blocked over one million people on the social network Twitter. Just a day earlier, she deleted 60,000 of her old tweets. The 34-year-old – who has two children with singer John Legend – sent out a series of desperate pleas, writing that her notifications were “flooded with sick psychopaths” and she was “worried for [her] family”. “I don’t know how to stop this,” she wrote, “I don’t think anyone quite gets it.”

In fairness, it’s pretty hard to get. The thousands of people who are abusing Teigen on Twitter are doing so because they believe she is part of an elite celebrity paedophile ring. The baseless evidence collected by these conspiracists includes: the fact Teigen tweeted off-colour jokes about TLC reality show Toddlers & Tiaras in 2013; the fact she once tweeted about Brad Pitt handing her pizza (more on that later); and a widely-circulated fake flight log claiming she visited Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious “Paedophile Island” via his “Lolita Express” plane (Teigen’s name does not feature on the real flight logs that were unsealed in 2019).

Teigen isn’t the only celebrity who is currently being falsely accused of having ties with Epstein. The same day Teigen deleted her tweets, news provider Reuters released an article titled, “Tom Hanks is not recorded in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs” via its fact-checking service. Both Hanks and Teigen were first accused of paedophilia in 2017 – Teigen six months after she was blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter, and Hanks less than a month after he first expressed “concerns” about the president.

For the last four years, far-right figureheads have repeatedly leveraged accusations of paedophilia against liberal celebrities who express a dislike of The Donald. It all began during the 2016 election, when a conspiracy known as “Pizzagate” was born. The Pizzagate conspiracy posited that a Washington DC pizza parlour was a front for a child trafficking ring run by the Democratic party, including presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. After a 28-year-old fired three shots inside the restaurant and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones apologised for spreading the theory in 2017, many assumed Pizzagate was over. Yet in actuality, the conspiracy simply mutated.

An ever-growing number of Americans are now avidly following a mysterious individual known as “QAnon”. This anonymous internet poster claims to be a high ranking government official who is leaking information about Donald Trump’s fight against an international ring of Satan-worshippers, cannibals, paedophiles, and sex traffickers. Followers of QAnon are the very same people who believe Teigen is a paedophile. After Pizzagate, conspiracists spread the belief that the word “pizza” is part of a paedophile code (interestingly, online safety groups have recently warned that pizza and cheese emojis are being used as a code by real paedophiles to spread child pornography images online) so that when Teigen tweeted, “I am going to jail over pizza” in 2013, for example, it was apparently a secret message about her propensity for child trafficking.

Many of the beliefs spouted by QAnon supporters are baffling and illogical to outside eyes. One subsect of Q followers, for example, believe Tom Hanks did not actually fall ill from coronavirus in March but this was a lie designed to cover up the fact he’d been arrested for his part in the paedophile ring (that same month, TV host Oprah Winfrey also had to deny she’d been arrested for the same reason). These theorists also believe Teigen is already in jail alongside a number of celebrities such as Gal Gadot and Justin Timberlake (according to some conspiracists, Barack Obama has already been executed, alongside Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth. They have all been replaced by “AI clones”).

On 21 July, Twitter announced that it had removed 7,000 accounts linked to QAnon. The social network has introduced new measures designed to prevent "offline harm", including banning users from sharing URLs associated with the QAnon conspiracy. Twitter estimates its new policy could affect up to 150,000 accounts. Facebook has announced no similar measures, despite a January investigation finding that a combined 3 million people follow over 100 QAnon-related accounts on the platform.

While much of the “proof” for QAnon claims is laughably absent or blatantly faked – Teigen herself recently responded with a laughing emoji to a poor Photoshop job of herself, her husband, and Hillary Clinton hanging out above a roasted human corpse – Q followers are avid believers who experts have likened to cult members. Jennifer is a woman in her mid-40s from the east coast of America whose 69-year-old mother fell prey to QAnon conspiracies in 2017 (her name has been changed to protect her identity). “She is a completely different person,” Jennifer says, “I don’t know this person. She used to be my best friend, and now she’s gone.”

Jennifer says that her mother fell prey to conspiracies after the death of her father – the couple had been married for nearly 50 years. Before QAnon, Jennifer says her mother was “straight-laced” and didn’t believe in any conspiracies. Memes on Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in affecting Jennifer’s mother, who now passionately believes in the existence of a celebrity paedophile ring. “She wants to help the children… she firmly believes that by posting Facebook memes, she’s doing something.”

Jennifer’s mother now has a long list of TV shows and movies she refuses to watch because she believes their celebrity stars are part of the ring. “The list kept growing,” Jennifer says, “It must be pages long by now.” Jennifer has made no headway arguing with her mother, and says her family is now “severed”. She is not alone in her experiences – an online support group for people whose friends and family have fallen prey to QAnon now has nearly 7,000 members.

Why do so many people believe such an absurd conspiracy? Dr Daniel Jolley is a psychology lecturer at Northumbria University who runs a conspiracy psychology lab group. Jolley notes that many conspiracies have a grain of truth – the suspicious death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the recent arrest of his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and accusations against Prince Andrew, are a legitimate base from which unfounded beliefs can spring. “Conspiracy theories can appeal to people who have a need to feel unique,” Jolley explains, “Being in the privileged position of holding new information, which can also help them understand the world, can be an appealing place to be.”

But it is not a coincidence that QAnon supporters predominantly spread theories about people who oppose Donald Trump – Jolley calls these conspiracies “very politically motivated”. Yet while some high-profile right-wing figureheads were undoubtedly cynical in leveraging their accusations, this doesn’t mean ordinary people don’t truly believe what they read. “It can speak to feelings of paranoia, and our desire to feel that other groups are out to get us,” Jolley says, explaining that confirmation bias means we accept evidence that supports our pre-existing believes and dismiss that which doesn’t (such as, for example, multiple pictures of Donald Trump socialising with Epstein).

Like most conspiracy theorists, QAnon supporters look for patterns and proof – in this case, by combing through Teigen’s old tweets. On 16 July, the model seemed to accept no amount of blocking could stop the conspiracists: “Let them pretend to be doing something. We all need purpose,” she wrote. Jolley concurs that conspiracies can be rewarding for believers: “Looking for the ‘truth’ can offer purpose.”

Jennifer says her mother was “looking for a fantasy world” where all of society’s problems would be fixed and she found this with QAnon. She also points to her mother’s poor internet literacy as a factor in her beliefs. “She’d show me a picture of Obama with a very young girl sat between his legs,” Jennifer says, explaining the image was clearly Photoshopped. “She doesn’t understand technology.”

Dr Lee Hadlington is a cyberpsychology lecturer at Nottingham Trent University who is currently studying how fake news spreads. He compares misinformation to a virus – “it only needs a small germ of interest to grab hold” – and explains how obvious Photoshops can gain traction. “They may look fake to us, but for others that have a vested interest in things like this and a different world view, they appear realistic representations of what might have happened,” he says, noting that confirmation bias once again comes into play. He also adds that “bandwagon heuristics” increase the likeliness that people will share an image or post – put simply, “we are more likely to believe, like and share something that has lots of existing likes and shares.”

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t totally new. In the 1980s, the Satanic Panic took over the United States – a number of childcare centres were falsely accused of child abuse and satanic ritual abuse. Hadlington notes, however, that the internet allows misinformation to spread globally in a matter of hours without the need for published materials or time-consuming translations.

One question remains: why is Teigen, in particular, so hounded? She was first accused of paedophilia by a popular right-wing conspiracy theorist in 2017, and responded on Twitter almost immediately. Teigen has repeatedly used the social network to deny and mock QAnon posts – the attention she gains seems partially related to the fact she fights back. While Tom Hanks falls victim to similar abuse, he has not yet spoken out about it. The same is true for numerous other celebrities accused by QAnon – from Lady Gaga to Demi Moore to Jim Carrey.

Like many people whose family members have become QAnon conspiracists, Jennifer isn’t hopeful about the future. “Every argument you have, they have ten other comebacks for it, and it’s exhausting and frustrating,” she says. “Unfortunately, I don’t see her letting go of it. It’s like she’s not happy with what she did with her life, and she wants to leave things better than she found them.”