The Washington Post has a fascinating–and terrifying–examination into how QAnon conspiracy theories start and spread, and their horrifying impact on the people who are the subjects of such rumors.
The Post’s investigation centers on the experience of a girl named Samara Duplessis, 13, from Michigan, whose unusual last name is shared by a pillow sold on online home goods retailer Wayfair Like many teenagers, Samara was frustrated with being stuck at home during the pandemic and became annoyed with her mother, so she ran away from home. Her lark lasted just two days, and she returned home safely, but not until after police issued a missing person’s alert and her family made pleas for her return on social media.
Jump to the Wayfair website: a zodiac-themed pillow with the product name “Duplessis” gets listed on the site for $9,999; the high price is the default given by the website when the seller doesn’t list a price. But in the warped mind of QAnon, that meant the pillow came with a special feature: a trafficked girl.
The same was the case for a teenage boy in Maryland named Cameron Dziedzic. After a $9,999 pillow with the product name “Dziedzic” was advertised on Wayfair, he became the target of harassment and overly-intrusive people. One day, while walking through a Walmart, a woman stopped him to tell him he had been reported missing; the woman saw one of the many memes created by QAnon followers. Although Cameron assured her that “it’s all cool,” she called police anyway, putting Cameron through an hour of police questioning.
Another girl, 18, staged a Facebook Live that drew a half million views to tell everyone that she was fine: she hadn’t actually been sold into sex trade after rumors circulated that she had been sold *in* an industrial cabinet with her name that Wayfair had listed for sale at $9,999. Even still, one of the comments on the feed declared, “Put her ass back in the cabinet,” promoting the young lady to respond, “You’re mad because I’m telling you that I’m not missing?”
The children who are the subjects of the QAnon stories become victims of another sort, not of sex trafficking but of the paranoid delusions of conspiracy theorists. When they go in public, some random person will recognize them, sending them down the rabbit hole of having to explain to the person–and sometimes police–that they are safe.
Their false stories are never erased from the internet–despite Wayfair, Youtube, Facebook and others doing their best to erase the lies from their platforms. While that seems like the prudent thing to do, it feeds the fire of QAnon adherents who then claim that the platforms are “in on it” and just protecting the sex traffickers.
Wayfair has added security at some of its warehouses, fearful that the deluded will decide to take action themselves, just as 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, North Carolina did in 2016, firing shots from an assault rifle in Washington, DC’s Comet Ping Pong Pizza restaurant, the rumor of QAnon stories about a major DC-based child sex trafficking ring run out of the business’s basement–even though the building doesn’t actually have a basement. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison for his crime.
Unfortunately, not all of these incidents end peacefully for the children: Liliana Carrillo, of Reseda, California drowned her three children, ages 3, 2 and 6 months, in the bathtub last April after becoming convinced that her husband was going to sell them to a child sex trafficking ring.
“I killed my children,” Liliana Carrillo told KGET in a television interview from jail. “I hate myself for it, but like I said, I wasn’t about to hand them off to be continuously tortured and abused. … I promised to protect them from everything that would come their way.”