Some death hoaxes – like the one about Matt Damon and the treasure hunt – are quite obviously fake.
And then there’s Lindsay Lohan. If someone was to tell you that Lindsay Lohan had died, whatever the story – be it a drug overdose or a car accident or a violent beating or a shark attack or exposure to a radioactive sex toy – chances are you’d respond by rolling your eyes and saying something along the lines of “This does not come as a surprise to me”.
Which might be why large swathes of the internet yesterday bought the rumour, spread on Wikipedia and Twitter, that Lindsay Lohan had died. Which is, of course, ludicrous – Lindsay Lohan has got so much left to give. Like, you know, that pornstar film she’s making. And that book she’ll self-publish after she inevitably replaces alcohol with hardline evangelical christianity. And… no, actually that’s it.
Let’s get straight to it. Some people thought that Lindsay Lohan had died yesterday, when actually she hadn’t. Examiner has details:
Around midnight, Lindsay Lohan?s page on Wikipedia was edited to read that she died at the age of 24 on July 14, 2010… Second in the list of culprits is an avid tweeter, under a bogus impersonator by the name of ?kimkardashain? who tweeted, ?Omg!! Is @lindsaylohan dead?! I keep hearing these rumors from my friends n stuff!! Is it true?!?
So why did people think that Lindsay Lohan had died? Well, that’s easy – she’s Lindsay Lohan, for crying out loud. She has a fairly prominent self-destructive streak. She appears to be ageing faster than anybody since that bloke from the end of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Newspapers are so certain of her premature death that they’ve already stockpiled her obituaries. It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise, in other words.
But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe the simultaneous reports of Lindsay Lohan being on suicide watch ahead of her prison sentence helped to fuel the rumour, or maybe the fact that a new song of hers called Too Young To Die was also leaked onto the internet at around the same time as the hoax had something to do with it. Or maybe she’d been watching Die Hard. Or maybe she’d just dyed her hair. Or maybe she’d just eyed something in a shop. Or maybe something else. Look, she’s not dead, OK? Get over it.
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Keisha says
Well who has the most to gain from this? Lindsay herself. A little girl who doesn’t want to go to jail might actually be suicidal or else she might just want the attention she knows that statment will cause. Spreading rumours that she has died just brings publicity to this idea of her being suicidal, whether true or not, and could just be a lame attempt to make people feel sorry for her selfish butt. Same with the song. And if she does die, what a lame and deceitful way to bring a death anthem to stir up support for an acctress who squandered her own talent, really before she had produced much to show for it. Remember how Selena was all over the radio after her death? Selena actually had talent and we can feel bad that she was murdered. However, Lindsay’s stock as a dead celebrity is not worth very much because we’ve watched her become a selfish egotistical low life. Can we be so certain that people aren’t trying to prematurely bank on her certain premature death?