Issue 3: The Cumberbatch Conspiracy (And Why Fandom Tinhatters Are The Same)

How do you deal with someone who thinks that Sherlock’s kids are fake and his wife is evil?

In November 2014, a small announcement was made in the engagements section of The Times UK to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of actor Benedict Cumberbatch and theatre director Sophie Hunter. It was a very low-key, if extremely posh, way for an award-winning star with an avid following to let the world know he was off the market. At the time, many hadn’t even known he was seeing someone. The pair have been married since 2015. They have three kids, regularly collaborate on film and TV projects, and keep a private life that seems very happy and healthy.

But what if it wasn’t? What if Cumberbatch was actually Hunter’s prisoner, the captive of a scheming social climber who has trapped him into a cruel and unhappy marriage for reasons that may or may not have to do with Harvey Weinstein? What if their three sons aren’t his, or are actually dolls?

It’s a fascinating writing prompt, but also a cruelly familiar conspiracy that has been replicated across multiple fandoms for many years now. This sort of tinhat plotting, imagining dark alternate worlds where the rich and famous are all either traffickers or the trafficked, has taken root on the internet in terrifying fashion. In the era of QAnon and Pizzagate, it was perhaps inevitable that fandom shipping conspiracies would become a weary status quo for so many online communities. If Cumberbatch can take solace in anything here, it’s the knowledge that he’s not alone.

The Atlantic. “How a Fake Baby is Born.” July 13, 2020. Kaitlyn Tiffany.

(Image via Flickr @ Gage Skidmore — Creative Commons.)

The Atlantic got some flack for giving attention to one of these tinhatters. The fear was that such amplification could be dangerous or help to legitimise obvious nonsense. It didn’t do any of that, mercifully. With topics like this, it’s always tempting to stick to the age-old adage of “don’t feed the trolls.” But we’ve long since proven that this doesn’t work. Sunlight might not always be the best disinfectant, but I think there’s crucial worth in exposing patterns of behaviour like this. They are far more common than we care to admit.

The subject of this piece seems like a perfectly average woman. Patty has a partner, a daughter and grandchild, a job, and doesn’t give off any red flags until she starts talking about Cumberbatch and Hunter. The piece opens with her laughing about how she and her fellow conspiracy nuts refer to Cumberbatch's children as pillows. The casualness with which she shares her theories cannot help but send a chill down your spine. It feels so familiar, like being stuck at the dinner table with a relative who won’t shut up about chemtrails or Laurence Fox having some good points. Reading these conspiracies changes the tone. They seldom seem calm or rational, not when rambling about moon bumps and pimps. Showing this harmful rhetoric as almost polite chit-chat between friends shows how it is truly normalised. Eventually, it becomes so ingrained in your psyche that it’s as mundane as saying “hello” in the morning.

According to Patty, the announcement that Cumberbatch had a girlfriend “blew up” Tumblr. It didn't take long for some fans to spin their cynicism over the romance into a full-blown agenda. For Patty, the tipping point came when the pair arrived separately at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January 2015. "The look on his face... And the look on her face. I was like, Uh-oh. I was like, Oh, somebody’s trying to trap him." The look on his face... And the look on her face. I was like, Uh-oh. I was like, Oh, somebody’s trying to trap him.”

As she "stopped just being a bystander and started making posts," her following grew. She herself compares it to falling down "the rabbit hole and [I] haven’t really come out of it yet totally." Said hole includes believing that Hunter and Cumberbatch’s marriage is a PR stunt gone wrong, that one or more of their children aren't real, and that Hunter is a felon and former escort involved in mass criminal conspiracies. Patty says Hunter kept Cumberbatch hooked on drugs and that "she’s also in with some really nasty people who are in with human trafficking." Her way of presenting this "information" is to not directly call Hunter a human trafficker but present her lies then tell people to come to their own conclusions. It's a classic conspiracy tactic, to pretend that presenting outright lies is a way to encourage people to think for themselves. Alex Jones does this crap all the time. Look how it ended for him. How's bankruptcy going?

We still have this general image in our head of what a conspiracy theorist looks like. It’s usually a nerdy white guy who talks about UFOs, or someone like Dale Gribble in King of the Hill, an anti-government rabblerouser who even his closest friends dismiss as a few sandwiches short of a picnic. That’s obviously changed a lot in the past 30 years. We know that young boys and teenagers are especially prone to being radicalised, thanks to the terror of the YouTube algorithm and figures like Jordan Peterson. Less discussed is how older women have fallen down the rabbit hole. QAnon is bolstered by middle-class white American mothers. Indeed, alt-right racism and queerphobia have been immensely empowered by women like Moms for Liberty and the Fox News blondes.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons.)

And the threat level is similar with Patty, at least by her own admission. She tells the interviewer “warmly” that she wants Hunter to know she’s being watched. “I want her to know that someone knows what she’s doing.” But what is it she’s actually doing? Again, Hunter is a director who married Dr. Strange.

These conspiracies are nearly identical across the board in terms of theory, intent, and rhetoric. They all point to a shadowy source rooted in entertainment management or PR as the root of the problem. They’re obsessed with interpreting every image, and every finding is “proof” of their delusion. If Cumberbatch smiles in a photo with his wife, it’s because he’s being made to. When he’s more stoic, that’s him signalling that he’s truly unhappy and trapped. The case is apparently glaringly obvious yet only noticed by a few dozen or hundred people using the same Twitter hashtags. Typically, a woman is the true villain. If she’s not white, the fury gets even louder. Just ask Meghan Markle.

There’s very little that differentiates the Cumberbatch conspiracy from, for example, the Larries who remain convinced that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson have been in a secret relationship since One Direction was founded. Indeed, like Tomlinson, Cumberbatch has directly called out the Conspiracies surrounding his personal life and noted the pressure it puts him and his family under. He told Vanity Fair in 2016, "There are people who believe that my wife is a PR stunt and my child is a PR stunt. I think really it’s to do with the idea that the Internet’s boyfriend can’t actually belong to anyone else but the Internet. It’s impossible he belongs to anyone but me. And that’s what stalking is. That’s what obsessive, deluded, really scary behaviour is."

He’s also talked before about how Hunter takes the female fandom attention he attracts in her stride, which is a quality that is far more underrated than it should be. How would you deal with the internet fetishizing your spouse and turning you into a meddlesome obstacle in the process? Of course, none of it has stopped the madness.

It should also surprise absolutely nobody that one of the quoted sources in this piece is Crazy Days and Nights. The hack-site run by 'Enty Lawyer' is a total cesspool of conspiracies, bigotry, and pure paranoia. They literally have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying they make shit up! And yet they're referenced so frequently as a legitimate source, bolstered by the support of fellow liars like DeuxMoi. Enty tells The Atlantic, 'That’s the thing that keeps me obsessed and the thing that makes me want to keep writing—looking for these holes.' This leads him to declare how it was 'pretty obvious' that various celebrities faked their pregnancies, from Meghan to Beyoncé to Hunter.

Kaitlyn Tiffany correctly notes how 'a deliberately concocted air of mystery surrounds Enty and his “sources,” not unlike the one that surrounds, say, QAnon.' Enty's point about 'looking for these holes' is a key driving force for conspiracy theorists, whether or not there are actual gaps in the narrative to begin with. If one doesn't exist, you make it up. With a celebrity like Cumberbatch, who is highly obsessed over yet intensely private, a lot of people run rampant with ideas because there's nothing to directly refute them (aside from logic.)

Conspiracies aren’t meant to be proven. I would argue that there is nothing worse for the tinhatters than the warped version of reality where they’re right. It’s the journey, not the destination, where they are able to accrue power and influence. Just look at Britney Spears. People were right about her being trapped in an ethically ghoulish conservatorship, and increased press interest driven by #freebritney fans helped to liberate her. Yet so many of those people are still obsessively trawling Spears' social media for proof that she’s not actually free. Many called 911 to make the police do wellness checks, something she has actively condemned. Others think her Instagram videos are AI-generated. Even direct rebuttals do not count because obviously count were done under duress and just further prove that the string-on-a-board theories are right. The goalposts never stop moving.

And that’s the case for the Cumberbatch creeps. Tiffany cites an expert in the field of conspiracy theories as they relate to women, who describes the patterns that bind together the Cumberbatch drama with the likes of QAnon: "Conspiracism of all kinds is about identifying a powerful cabal and creating a narrative around it as a means of grasping some kind of control over the mysterious events of the world." To this day, I get weird rambling messages from these women who think I’m one of the mainstream media shills helping to cover up Hunter’s crimes. One sent me a picture “proving” that Hunter wore a fake bump to an awards ceremony, and that Kelsey Grammer was laughing at her for it. Yup, they’ve got Frasier on board, apparently.

Look at this. F*cking look at it!

Patty talks a lot about Hunter being a "narcissist", akin to a number of people in her life who all coincidentally seem to be women. She also believes that Hunter is stalking her, which she clearly isn't, as Tiffany notes, and seems excited to discuss the possibility of people being violent towards her. Of course, Patty still sees herself as a feminist because, to her, it’s Hunter who is “setting women’s rights back [and] making everybody look bad.” How often have you heard that line from fervent fandoms? Hilariously, she’s against other conspiracies, saying it’s “dangerous” to claim that vaccines cause autism or that Keanu Reeves’ relationship is fake. A lot of tinhatters draw the line somewhere to make their own cause seem more legitimate by comparison.

For someone like Patty, for these obsessive fandom figures who cling to the cruel fantasy, that’s their ideal reality over one where Cumberbatch is happy. They’d rather he be a drugged-up trafficking and abuse victim than a man who loves his wife and children. That’s so incredibly depressing. Really, this isn’t the behaviour of a fan. You have to be committed to a very bleak version of life to root for Benedict Cumberbatch to be miserable in order to please yourself. Conspiracists like Patty see themselves as public servants, as independent journalists exposing a rot at the heart of society. She brags that others have been threatened into silence but not her, and that Cumberbatch's own silence is an endorsement of sorts to her "work." "We don’t have the proof to truly out—Oh, there’s no kid—and I get that," she tells Tiffany." But I think there’s enough out there to show why we’re questioning it.”

There’s nothing. There’s no proof, no hints of something more nefarious that must be teased out like a puzzle in a Poirot novel. There is only misogyny and cruelty and a hunger to find answers in a world so bereft of them. If it wasn’t Benedict Cumberbatch for Patty, it would probably be Prince Harry. Or Harry Styles. Or Robert Pattinson. Or Tony Goldwyn or Tom Hiddleston or the Supernatural guys or Sam Heughan or Jamie Dornan or BTS or Adam Driver or Taylor Swift or someone on TikTok who does little dances. They wouldn’t even need to change the details, just the names. And people like Enty will fuel the non-existent fires to further legitimize their hate, and eventually it will slide into something far more dangerous.

Conspiracies are about control, not just of one celebrity and their spouse but of grander societal standards. When people rant about a celebrity “faking” their pregnancy and children, they’re exacerbating the tensions around the fight for reproductive freedom. Every woman accused of mounting a campaign of terror against their partner represents another way in which our entire gender is seen as an acceptable punching bag. This is why I think calling out this kind of conspiracy matters. Even if it seems like only a few dozen people are perpetuating it, they represent a far greater and expanding mindset that has permeated politics, entertainment, science, and the internet. I think we should know how to spot the signs and snuff out the flame before it engulfs everyone. We’ve seen what happens when stalkers go after people when they’re driven by conspiracy. There was a whole bloody insurrection!

As for Patty? She’s still at it. On her Tumblr page, in between inspirational posts and information on Gaza, she talks about Cumberbatch. One recent post says that "Ben is still “officially” “married”, but he seems to be keeping her at bay. If the trolls are any indication, Ben seems to be standing up for himself." She also references a Crazy Days and Nights claim that Tom Hiddleston is distancing himself from girlfriend Zawe Ashton, months after they welcomed their first child. Hunter, meanwhile, "belongs to a sex trafficking ring that also trades in minors." And so it goes on and on and on…

Thanks for reading the newest issue of the Gossip Reading Club. You can check me out on BlueSky, Instagram, and Twitter. Most of my work can be found on Pajiba, including my piece on the veneers trend in celebrity circles, some thoughts on how much accent accuracy matters in film, and a deep dive into two of the weirdest movie sex scenes of 2023 which both coincidentally feature Joaquin Phoenix. On Paste, I wrote about the dark romance trend and celebrated the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho that is far better than you remember it being.

A quick reminder: The first edition of Reading Hollywood, the Gossip Reading Club’s official book club, will kick off on December 16^th. We’re looking into The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. This issue will be free for all to enjoy but after that, it’ll be a paid feature.

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