Louis Tomlinson could not have gotten Briana Jungwirth pregnant in 2015 because he was and is in love with Harry Styles. The pregnancy was fake and the resultant “baby” was at first a doll, then replaced with either an actor or a child secretly supplied by a member of Jungwirth’s immediate family. Whatever Jungwirth and Tomlinson did was because of a contract drawn up in secret by the people in control of Tomlinson’s life. The charade will someday “end,” and then Styles and Tomlinson will finally live free. These are the core tenets of belief in the Babygate conspiracy theory.
“When Babygate happened, I was really embarrassed. It really made us look bad,” Mina Hughes told me. But she could still see where the theorists were coming from. “I would never say they’re faking a kid, but her pregnancy was a weird one.” There were rumors that Jungwirth doctored pregnancy photos that belonged to other people for her own use, which Larries attempted to verify and eventually just presented as unquestionable. “People say the first photo Louis posted was very clearly edited,” she told me. “A whole lot of suspicious stuff.”1
On August 4, 2015, One Direction performed on Good Morning America and then sat down for an interview. Tabloids had reported two weeks prior that Jungwirth was pregnant, and Simon Cowell and Liam Payne had both confirmed the news personally, for whatever reason, but Tomlinson had yet to speak about it. Cheerfully, as if this were not the case at all, the co-host Michael Strahan said to him, “From one father to another, I want to congratulate you on your upcoming fatherhood.”2 Tomlinson gave the sort of pained smile of a person who is having the “Happy Birthday” song sung to them in an office context, but he didn’t hesitate to respond. “Thank you, obviously it’s a very exciting time,” he said. “I’m buzzing, thank you.”
The “Babygate” tag first appeared on Tumblr that day. Prior to Tomlinson’s “I’m buzzing,” Larries could convince themselves that the tabloids were making stuff up, which tabloids are known to do, and that Cowell was egging it on for whatever nefarious reasons, and that Liam was simply confused. But now that Tomlinson had spoken, it had to be code. And speaking code means: conspiracy. The fact that Jungwirth and her family were unused to an intense level of media attention and were inexperienced with crafting a public image only added fuel to the fire. Every awkward move or odd choice of words was scrutinized by thousands of fans looking to see something sinister. (Jungwirth’s former stepfather, Danny Fitzgerald, for some reason confirmed the pregnancy by sending screenshots of text messages from Jungwirth’s mother to Buzzfeed News.3 The undeniably tacky maneuver was made stranger by his choice to refer to Jungwirth by her first and last name in text messages to her own mother.) They also started digging, in hopes of finding a counter-narrative. They looked back at the hundreds of hours of concert footage from earlier in the summer and found something interesting: On June 27, at a show in Helsinki, someone in the audience had thrown a baby doll onto the stage and Tomlinson had picked it up. In GIFs pulled from a video, Liam Payne can be seen mocking the way that Tomlinson is holding the doll—by the ankle. Then Tomlinson laughs and yells, “It’s not real!” before throwing it back into the crowd. There were plenty of these incidents. On July 12, two days before Jungwirth’s pregnancy would become public, Tomlinson had tweeted, “And I owe it all to you.” Maybe you know that this is a lyric from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” a song made famous by the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, and that it was also a clue. “You know, there was a pregnancy in that movie, too,” one fan wrote. “People assumed Johnny was the father because he was ‘close friends’ with the mother. He wasn’t.”4
Hardly anything Tomlinson or Styles said or wore or carried or touched—past or present—escaped notice. There was so much to sift through, hundreds of amateur sleuths could each make a splash by digging up something fresh or making a novel connection. But because Tumblr follower counts are private, a handful of pseudonymous bloggers were able to speak as authorities to audiences that it was impossible to ever quite judge the size of, making that authority difficult to question. There was Lisa, as she said, from the very beginning. There was also a Big Larrie who had been a well-known British sex blogger in the early 2010s and wrote under the pseudonym Sex at Oxbridge (or SAO for short). She started writing about Larry theories on BuzzFeed’s unpaid community section in early 2016 with the intention to use the clips in an application for the site’s editorial fellowship, she told me. But BuzzFeed deleted all of her posts a few weeks later (writing in an email that it was because she’d used the site to promote her personal brand), and she shifted to Tumblr and a private newsletter full-time.5 Her style was unique, sometimes crass, and people seemed to like her because she was a little bit glamorous and because she framed Babygate as an academic pursuit, often emphasizing that key Larries were older fans who were professional adults or university students. “I’ve done my research,” she wrote in 2016. “Please educate yourself. Larries may be fuckin’ wild, but we’re statistically the more intelligent critical thinkers of the fandom.”6
SAO made waves by connecting Babygate more intimately to Simon Cowell. She suggested that Tomlinson was going along with a plot orchestrated by Cowell, but signaling clues to the fans all the while, and taunting Cowell at the same time. The first photo of Tomlinson holding his child was in black-and-white, which fans believed was a choice made to cover up sloppy Photoshop. His shoulders were an “odd shape,” and his eyelashes looked too thick. A tattoo looked smudged. And then SAO found a black-and-white photo of Simon Cowell holding his baby on his chest in nearly the exact same pose.7 (The rest of the Cowell theory is way too confusing to explain, but it hinges on Tomlinson carrying around a 2011 pop psychology book called The Psychopath Test.) “I am a very thorough researcher and just took all the information that I had at my disposal and presented my conclusions,” she told me years later. “I wish I was completely wrong about everything because the reality of a situation in which these guys have been controlled and manipulated since they were teenagers is a horrific thought.”8
Though SAO also emphasizes that she uses only publicly available information to inform her conclusions, different writers have different approaches. Some claim to have privileged information, or walk through every hypothetical about every detail in their story until it’s easy to forget that they’re speaking hypothetically at all. These theories are often broken out into their own master posts, which tend to be thousands of words long and contain hundreds of links, as well as dozens of tangents into “if this, then that,” splintering in all directions. For example, though Lisa does not believe that Briana Jungwirth was ever pregnant, she has entertained thought experiments about the possibility. She meticulously re-created the pregnancy timeline, starting with Tomlinson’s arrival in Los Angeles on May 4, 2015, then rattling off each night that he was photographed out with Jungwirth (May 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 22). From there, she offered piecemeal calculations of a stranger’s menstrual cycle: Jungwirth’s mother said she was exactly thirty-four weeks pregnant on December 24, 2015. The last day of Jungwirth’s last normal period would have been April 30. “Assuming a normal cycle, Briana would likely have been ovulating May 12th to May 16th.” The estimates are printed alongside a chart of three months’ worth of Jungwirth’s speculated periods, and the most likely date of “conception”—in other words, staged conception—would have been May 11, the night that Jungwirth and Tomlinson attended a party hosted by Snoop Dogg. The reason for all this math is to prove its impossibility. Jungwirth’s mother started following People magazine’s People Babies page on Twitter on May 18, the day she made an account—suspicious to Lisa, as, if the pregnancy were real, Jungwirth would “have only started missing her period around May 18th.”9 A photo from the Snoop Dogg party was used on the cover of the U.K. tabloid The Sun when the pregnancy was announced—again suspicious because The Sun’s U.S. editor at the time, Peter Samson, was married to Ann-Marie Thomson, head of public relations at One Direction’s record label. Also suspicious because blurry clips of paparazzi following the pair out of the party show Jungwirth slowing down at the car door—maybe she was waiting to be photographed, knowing that the photo was key to the stunt.
Ultimately, suspicion and paranoia won out, but they weren’t uncontested. In the hours after the pregnancy was announced on Good Morning America, there was caution in the Larry fandom—even sympathy for Jungwirth. Some wrote about an obligation to “protect” her, and to keep an eye out for anyone criticizing her unfairly.10 “i am expecting every single person to shut that shit down,” one wrote. This didn’t last very long. By the end of the day, the idea of Babygate as a “stunt” had taken shape, and Jungwirth became an undeniable villain. “She’s revolting in every way,” one fan wrote.11 Another bought the domain name BriaJungwirth.com, and dedicated it to “expressing disdain for Briana Jungwirth and her band of losers.” The same fans who had sworn not to attack Jungwirth for her role in a public relations nightmare were soon passing around what they thought might be her sex tape, and publishing photo collages intended to prove that she’d gotten lip fillers and a nose job while pregnant. They refer often to her “new face,” and imply that she is using Tomlinson’s money to keep it up. “The question is how is she paying for [these] procedures?” Lisa asked in 2020. “Babygate truly seems to have been an opportunity to get a ‘makeover’ for Briana at Louis’ expense.” In the same post, she annotated images of Jungwirth’s body. “The bikini photo below does seem to show recent implants,” she wrote. “They don’t appear to have ‘dropped’ yet—when implants are first inserted they tend to sit higher and not ‘hang’ as naturally, looking more like round balls attached to the chest.”12
In fact, every photo of Jungwirth came to be loaded with significance. There was the blurry screenshot of a video taken at a family Christmas dinner, where her pregnant belly is obscured by a table and difficult to make out. (It’s usually placed side by side with a photo of another pregnant woman sitting down, belly popping forward like a watermelon.) There are the photos of Jungwirth on Halloween, six months into her pregnancy, belly visible but not obtrusively so, side by side with a photo from three days later, where it looks enormous. There she is at a passport office—what could be the significance of that? There she is backstage at a One Direction concert in all black—why was it posted by someone who is followed on Twitter by Simon Cowell? There she is—or is she?—in a gray-scaled photo of her pregnant body from the neck down, suspicious because it chops off her head. The analysis continued long after she gave birth. Briana Jungwirth goes outside in January 2016, staring at the ground, a blanket over her newborn baby’s car seat carrier—“heeled boots and a mini skirt a week after birth,” the Tumblr caption reads.13 The next day, she goes outside in leggings: “Heels and tights a week after birth.”14 A few weeks later, a friend posts a video of her eating a taco in the back seat of a car, wearing a long-sleeve shirt with a keyhole back: “I can only imagine not wearing a bra when you’re meant to be producing milk is a bit uncomfortable.”15 These were once the images that a young woman took or had taken as reflexively as any of us ask for photos of our lives, and now they were shreds of evidence.
The Babygate theory actually was convincing if you looked at it for a short time—when BuzzFeed published an explainer, it went viral because of how much fun readers had believing it.16 “There’s no way they would make up a baby,” Megan Collins, a fan from California, told me. “But then I found myself starting to be like, Oh, there are pixel differences between this photo and that photo.” She had to snap herself out of it. “I was like, wait, that’s insane, who would make up a fake baby? What value is there in that?”17
At first glance, Babygate was also just a gossipy good time and an opportunity to toy with an elaborate puzzle. But the theory that Briana Jungwirth was some failed criminal mastermind faking a pregnancy for vague reasons wasn’t an isolated story. It was similar to conspiracy theories about Meghan Markle or Benedict Cumberbatch’s wife, Sophie Hunter—both of whom have been baselessly accused by Tumblr users of physically abusing their husbands, faking their pregnancies, and trafficking drugs.18 These theories draw on blind items from well-known celebrity gossip sites and exploit the air of mystery surrounding anonymous contributions to online discussion. Over the last ten years, they’ve developed a common set of characteristics: The “victims” of the conspiracy tend to be famous men; the villains tend to be women. The women are sometimes acting on their own, but more often they’re a pawn of industry—a distinction that never earns them any sympathy. The victim is almost always being blackmailed because of a secret sexual identity, and the victim’s personality has almost always been changed somehow by the torture they’ve experienced. When they do things the fans don’t like, it’s because of that personality shift, but they would go back to the way they were before if only they were freed. (In Tomlinson’s case, Larries were upset by his transition into wearing more athletic wear, going out to parties, and being photographed with women, all part of a fake bro-y persona demanded by the industry.) The conspiracy theorists also tend to claim that they have personal sources who provide them with privileged information, and that they have expertise in a vast array of subjects like photo editing, psychology, obstetrics, contract law, passport protocol, journalism, etc. They usually claim to be progressive feminists, and insist that even their most personal criticisms of the women at the center of their theories are not misogynistic—it would be misogynistic not to call these women out on their many misdeeds.
They espouse a deep distrust of the media—a distrust that preceded the peak years of “fake news” discourse—and rely frequently on the idea that technology can be used to fake basically anything. Apart from the small circle of famous people they have chosen to defend, they see most people in the public sphere as self-interested, driven only by a desire for profit—journalists and music industry executives are likely to tell whatever story benefits them financially or in their abstract quests for power. This attitude has rubbed off even on Larries who don’t participate fervently in Babygate. “It’s very difficult, you know, especially when the media is involved,” Angela Gibbs told me. “It’s difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t and what’s Photoshopped.”19
Though Larries mostly want to keep to themselves, they sometimes tangle with the outside world in startling ways. They’re wary of betrayal, and they never let go of a grudge, as demonstrated by their public feud with Richard Lawson, a writer and critic who was once their hero. Writing cultural criticism and celebrity gossip blog posts for The Atlantic and then Vanity Fair, he’d become interested in celebrities who were popular with the young, extremely online generation. The stories were weirder and more interesting than your typical Brad-and-Angelina fare, and he thought Larry was “an interesting development,” he told me.20 Here were all these girls ignoring the point of the commercial boy band—that they were supposed to have crushes on the boys themselves—and insisting instead that two of the boys were together. He didn’t dig too far into it, but he decided it was fun. He started making stray straight-faced jokes in his writing about Larry being real just to entertain himself. He thought of it as a wink to whoever might be reading, and he assumed everyone was just being playful.
On Tumblr, Larries noticed immediately and became Richard Lawson fans. He was “larry af,” and “a fucking gem.” Everyone loved him, which I know because one of the most reblogged posts from that time says, “everyone loves richard.” He engaged with a few of them on Twitter because he thought it was fun, he told me. “It seemed like a transgressive kind of modern thing that this was a theory going around.” But the Larries weren’t playing—they thought he was a whistleblower or the lone journalist speaking truth to power, and they expected more from him. In the spring of 2016, Richard went on a vacation to London with his sister, which some Larries found out about because they were monitoring his Instagram. Deducing that Styles and Tomlinson were also in London at the time, they decided that he was there to interview them both and write a Vanity Fair cover story in which they would come out. “That went from idle speculation to asserted fact among the Larry community within a couple days,” he remembered.
Richard tweeted apologetically that this was not what was happening. He kept joking about Larry throughout the summer, even tweeting at Mike Pence to ask if he thought Larry was real. But around that time, other One Direction fans started writing to him on Twitter to explain the full drama of the conspiracy theory. “I was like, Oh, well, this has gotten darker, or maybe it was always darker than I thought,” he said. “Basically, I disavowed the whole thing and was like, I really thought this was a joke. I didn’t know how serious it was.” The Larries turned on him immediately, calling him manipulative and a liar and a shill and homophobic, even though Lawson himself is gay. On Tumblr, he was accused of using Larry for “click bait,” and labeled “arrogant,” “uneducated,” and “insensitive.” He was shocked by his own failure to realize how deep Larry Stylinson went, years after he thought he understood most things about life online. He never mentioned Larry publicly again, but you can still find Larries talking about him. “That silly Richard Lawson guy … he got badly burnt by the Larry fandom,” one explained several years later for the benefit of those who might be new to things.21
Though Babygate focuses on the imagined crimes of one twentysomething woman, its investigation is often framed as an opportunity for the empowerment of women.
“The problem with babygate was that [the powers that be] assumed that the fan base consisted of teenage, impressionable girls who wouldn’t be able to put 2 and 2 together,” one Larrie wrote in 2020. “They learnt that we couldn’t be fooled.” Larries—because they are women—will be willing to wait as long as necessary for Babygate to end, she argues, the same way they—in a grand historical view—waited for everything else. “We waited for the right to education, we waited for the right to work, we waited for the right to vote, we waited to become Dr. Who, we waited for the nails to dry … we’ll wait for the other shoe to drop.”22 This hardly makes any sense, but there is an appeal to the argument, as it reframes a pursuit that appears irreversibly misogynistic as, to the contrary, empowering for its participants and possibly for women everywhere. The truthers insist that they aren’t puritanical; they are all for personal choice. But they can’t seem to stop themselves from fixating on individual personal choices, and they evaluate the women involved in their conspiracy theory based on the way their choices reveal them to be indecent caregivers. (Imagine the conversation about the night that Briana Jungwirth accidentally set the sleeve of her sweatshirt on fire while livestreaming on Instagram. With her child sleeping upstairs! Horror, from the people who insisted the child was a plastic doll for almost a year.) They are worried about how the women they don’t like are giving women in general a bad reputation, and they are most of all worried about how the women they don’t like are hurting men—manipulating them with false images, hoarding their attention, exploiting them for financial gain.
Now, I know some of the Larries’ impulses more intimately than I would like. Hunting for the artifacts they’ve left, some deliberately obliterated from the public record, available only in clunky cached versions or merely rendered unsearchable by the decay of Tumblr, I’ve sometimes felt the frenzy of a person digging up evidence and connecting the dots. After all, I was taking notes. I was talking about women I didn’t know and whom I mostly couldn’t even picture, who I saw only as spectral limbs, weaving plots behind the surface of my everyday experience of the internet. I found myself saying things like “This explains everything,” using my hands to make shapes in the air so my friends and family might grasp what I was dealing with. I wanted to lay it all out so everyone could understand. But the reality of Babygate is that it can’t really be explained and set aside. That’s why there are new master posts every year. It’s the articulation of a fantasy—our fascination with celebrities is not primarily about their wealth or their beauty, Anna Martin argued in 2014, but of living “a life in which love is the only concern”—and it’s the expression of an insurmountable divide.23 One Direction fans all came to Tumblr for the same reason, but Babygate allowed them to wield that desire as a weapon against one another, for no reason at all.
When Mary was in high school in the Balkans, milling around with her classmates at recess, she overheard someone argue that Harry Styles was definitely bisexual and dating Louis Tomlinson. “The impatient way she said it made it clear to me that she questioned the intelligence of anyone who disagreed with her,” Mary told me.24 When she got home from school she looked Larry up on YouTube. “Cue romantic music, millisecond clips of them looking at each other, decent editing, I was hooked.”
She made a Tumblr and a Twitter account, each devoted to Larry, and she selected only Larry accounts to follow. All of her One Direction news came from whatever Larries reblogged, and from the Larry Stylinson tag. She immersed herself and became part of the community. “There was an intense ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” she said. “Poor Larries. All of us just blogging about two boys in love.” It was around this time that she started identifying as queer, and though she didn’t want to be out in her offline life, she was proud to be out online. She joined the online collective Rainbow Direction, which was dedicated to LGBTQ+ visibility within One Direction fandom, and was added to a Telegram thread for Rainbow Direction insiders that was all about Larry—they analyzed every GIF, every tweet, every quote, every way that Larry could possibly come out. “Looking back, it was all so far removed from everything they said or did,” she told me. “But that’s conspiracy theories for you.”
For the years that she was involved in Larry, she hardly ever saw a photo of a woman Styles was dating in real life. The Big Larries ignored “stunts,” and they wouldn’t reblog updates or photos about “beard” relationships, she said. If Harry spent time with openly gay friends, that was ignored too, because it didn’t fit a narrative of him as an oppressed gay man. Anytime Tomlinson talked about his girlfriend in an interview or told Larries off on Twitter, Mary didn’t hear about it. Those tweets didn’t get shared on her Tumblr feed—or if they were, they were attributed to “@Louis_Tomlinson,” the fake Tomlinson. “Unless it was something cute,” she said. “Then we ignored the fact that it’s supposedly management tweeting for him and it was all sweet, pumpkin, precious, oppressed Louis, he’s shining through despite their best efforts to break him.”
But when Tomlinson’s son was born and it was obviously his child, Mary snapped out of it. “The homophobic and sexist stereotypes I was arguing against were the same ones I was perpetuating,” she realized. She’d spent two years saying “It’s happening” and waiting for them to come out, and for what? She resented that she had wasted her time, but also that she’d soured her entry into the queer community. “It taught me a lot about myself,” she said. “Through all the ugly things I said as a Larrie, I learned a lot of things I need to work on.” When we first spoke, she called it a growth experience, but later she revised. “It’s mostly a lot of regret.”
Now Mary still keeps an eye on the Larries, because Babygate is far from over. A new generation of Larries is posting on TikTok and starting celebrity gossip accounts on Instagram. A Reddit forum dedicated to Larry Stylinson had fewer than three hundred members from 2012 to 2018, but experienced a growth in membership starting at the beginning of the pandemic, making a steep climb to six thousand members a year later. (The tagline is “A community for those who know the truth.”) In the spring of 2020, Lisa published an updated Babygate primer for the uninitiated, writing, “This document aims to explain why people think Louis is not the father of Freddie, even four years after the announcement.”25 Larry Stylinson started trending again on Twitter around that time, and new Tumblr gossip blogs sprung up like weeds to discuss Styles’s fake relationship with Olivia Wilde, known in these spaces as “Ho-livia.”
Larries suffered from outside scrutiny and from internal policing, but they’ve made conspiracy thinking easy for the next group of fans. There is no one fandom community to deal with now because of the way Babygate ripped it in half. And over the years, the Babygate taboo has eroded, particularly in spaces like TikTok where attention metrics reward absurdity. There has already been a Babygate 2.0, centered on Liam Payne and the singer Cheryl, and more recently a Babygate 3.0, centered on Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid. (Some One Direction fans believe that Zayn Malik and Liam Payne are the band’s second secret couple.) “I can’t believe they’re trying to pull off a Zigi baby,” one person wrote after Gigi Hadid’s pregnancy was announced. “Zigi is literally the most obvious PR stunt of all time.”26 Another, who appears to believe in all three Babygates, offered their predictions about how the ruses would end: Tomlinson would get a paternity test, Payne would simply admit that he “knew from the beginning” he wasn’t the father of his child, and Hadid would have a miscarriage, they wrote, acknowledging in a parenthetical that “this sounds harsh.”27 (Hadid gave birth to a daughter in September 2020.) The format of the original Babygate let these new theorists move quickly. They use the same style of posts—annotated photo collages, screenshots of incriminating digital evidence, etc. But they spread these things to more platforms than the last Babygaters, and are comparatively shameless.
Within days of Hadid’s pregnancy announcement, a popular Instagram account was circulating a speculative timeline of her menstruation cycle and possible conception dates. At the end of the post, there was a caution: “If zayn confirms [the pregnancy] in his social media dont worry, he doesnt really have access to his [Instagram] or twitter, it is all his teams.”28