Lil Tay, a former child influencer, apparently died. Her followers don’t believe it.
When the Instagram account belonging to the child influencer Lil Tay announced her death at age 16 on Wednesday, August 9, it’s telling that the immediate reaction from many of her followers was, “This seems suspicious.”
For a three-month period in early 2018, the then-10-year-old Lil Tay took over the internet. She and her mother even went on Good Morning America to explain her popularity, which mostly centered around the fact that she was a cherubic-faced kid bragging about money, cars, and “haters” and starting drama with more famous influencers.
Then, that summer, her account went dark. It didn’t post until yesterday, when a statement saying that both she and her older half-brother Jason had passed away unexpectedly and that their deaths are “under investigation.” Many news outlets ran with the story, receiving confirmation from her “management” that it was true.
But for those who had an inkling of what was going on behind the scenes during that time, the news still seemed fishy. And a day later, someone claiming to be Jason said that it was all a lie.
A New York Magazine feature from 2019 describes Lil Tay’s origin story according to Lil Tay thusly: “She grew up ‘broke as hell’ in Atlanta but worked really hard ‘moving bricks.’ Eventually she got into Harvard and then dropped out. At one point, like her friend [Woah] Vicky, she claimed to be ‘partially Black.’ Now she lives in ‘the hills’ (which ones? She hasn’t specified).” The real story, as the piece details, is different. Born Claire Hope on July 29, 2007, her parents never married and shared custody. She grew up in Canada with her half-brother Jason Tian and their mother, a Vancouver-area realtor named Angela, who allowed the kids to film inside the fancy properties she showed, as well as in a co-worker’s Mercedes 550 SL, and pretend they owned them.
There’s always been a lack of clarity around Lil Tay’s age. When she first hit the scene, she was 10, but her camp claimed she was nine; after her apparent passing, media reports widely cited her age as 14, but if her previously reported birthday is accurate, she would be 16.
