Transcript: Needle In

Transcript

Tiffany Dover Is Dead*

Episode 1: Needle In

TIFFANY DOVER: Hi everyone. My name is Tiffany Dover. I am 25 years old. I am from Higdon, Alabama. I graduated Northeast Community College in 2012. And ever since then, I’ve been at Memorial Hospital–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: That is the voice of Tiffany Pontes Dover. This is the video she made back in 2016. She’s sitting on a bed filming herself on her phone. There’s music playing and it seems like she made the video as part of an application of some kind.

Looking straight into the camera, she explains that she’s a nurse and a mom.

TIFFANY DOVER: I am married. I have two babies. I have a little girl and I have a little boy.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: This is the only video on Tiffany’s YouTube channel. On her other social media accounts though on Facebook and Instagram, she loves to post, selfies, first days of school, family beach vacations and camp outs.

They all convey the sense that she’s a really lovely and cheerful person.

TIFFANY DOVER: –and school will definitely be a challenge, but it’s a challenge I’m ready for so bring it on.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: It’s head hard watching this video now, because whatever challenges Tiffany imagine she might conquer as a nurse, there is no way she could have seen what was coming in 2020. When she became the main character in a wild COVID era myth (ph) and an obsession for total strangers on the internet.

GONZALO LIRA: She’s got those pretty bright blue eyes that are unmistakable. So all they have to do, all the system pigs have to do is bring her up on stage, but they’ve never brought her out since December 2020. Where is Tiffany Dover?

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The story goes like this, in December of 2020, Tiffany Dover was one of the first people in Chattanooga, Tennessee to get the COVID vaccine. She’s a nurse at one of the main hospitals there. She got the shot at a press event, streamed live by local news stations–

–and she briefly passed out afterward. She was totally fine. But some people who watch the video decided otherwise.

WOMAN: Holy mackerel, that chick might actually be dead.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: I cover the internet for a living, which means I cover misinformation and conspiracy theories and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out who’s behind them. But this story, this one hooked me. It hooked a lot of people.

BRIAN WILKINS: She’s just gone. She’s gone.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Because it unites two massive categories of paranoid communities, conspiracy theorists–

MAN: When they try and cover this up by saying she had some previous condition, don’t be buying it.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: –and anti-vaxxers.

ROBYN OPENSHAW: Here’s a lie that really, really bothers me, Tiffany Pontes Dover.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Activists like Robyn Openshaw who said this at a conference in Florida.

ROBYN OPENSHAW: Write her name down, find her, there’s $100,000 bounty to produce Tiffany Pontes Dover alive–

–totally dead serious about this.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: As a reporter sadly, I cannot take bounty payments. But when I heard Openshaw make this challenge I thought, I’ll take it, because I know that Tiffany Dover is not dead. I know that vaccines didn’t kill her and I know that debunking these ideas could do a lot of good. All I’d have to do is prove that a person who didn’t die didn’t die, how hard could that be?

From NBC News, I’m Brandy Zadrozny and this is Tiffany Dover Is Dead*.

It says a lot about where we are that I have this job at all. Misinformation specialist? I mean, I love what I do and I think I’m good at it. But I’d rather live in a world where a reporter like me struggles to find work. But that is not the world that we live in.

My colleagues and I are constantly overwhelmed with leads and tips about new conspiracy theories and older ones that just won’t die. Most of the time, all we can do is try to shine a light on something and hope for the best. We’re really putting out fires here. There just isn’t enough time before we have to move on to the next urgent thing and that’s how this podcast project came to be.

We’re calling it Truthers because that’s the label that true believers and so many of these bizarre causes give themselves. And in a way, we want to take it back–

–by taking the time to go deep and show authoritatively what’s true and what isn’t and the harm that happens when we get the two confused.

This first season is about Tiffany Dover. Why? Because she represents with this larger phenomenon of misinformation is really about, a regular person whose life becomes a weapon in a global information war. It’s a story that begins, ironically enough, in a moment of hope.

LESTER HOLT: Moderna announcing today its vaccine is nearly 95% effective. And with last week’s upbeat announcement from Pfizer about its shot, there is building optimism about a way out of this pandemic.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: It’s December 2020 and finally we have a COVID vaccine. Health care workers get the first doses.

MAN: Two Northwell Health employees have volunteered to be the first to be vaccinated. One is (inaudible) Chair of Emergency Medicine–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The local news stories and live streams are all the same, it’s hope on repeat.

A nurse sanitizes her hands, puts on gloves, swabs the shoulder, the needle goes in, the needle goes out, a band aid and cheers.

On the 17th, the vaccine comes to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Local news stations are covering the scene inside the Catholic Health Initiatives Memorial Hospital, everybody calls it CHI Memorial. They’re live streaming on Facebook and thousands of people are watching.

In the video we see some doctors, nurses, hospital administrators. They’re milling about this large room. It’s got taupe walls and matching floor tiles. It’s sectioned into three vaccination stations and each one is separated by a black partition.

Dr. Mark Anderson is up first. He’s been the local face of the COVID fight. Today he’s wearing a Christmas ties dotted with little Santas.

WOMAN: All right. It is two o’clock so let’s start with the vaccination.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The mood is light. They can’t actually find the vaccine at first.

WOMAN: (Inaudible) is missing.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But eventually someone finds it and brings it over and they begin the dance.

Sleeve comes up, swab needle in, needle out, cheers. Next up is a nurse manager, she’s wearing navy blue scrubs. This is Tiffany Dover. She’s got wide electric blue eyes, slung straight, dark brown hair and she puts it to the left. She takes the open seat, she folds her hands neatly in her lap. Her sleeve comes up, swab, needle in, needle out, cheers.

A handful of other employees get their shots on camera and then three of the newly inoculated doctors speak to the assembled reporters about the importance of the vaccines. They urge members of the community to follow their example.

MAN: It’s important that those of us who have been trained for this set the example.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Things seem to be winding down when someone behind the camera asks whether the reporters would like to hear from a hospital administrator.

MAN: Or nurse.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: “Or nurse,” someone says.

Tiffany Dover walks back in front of the cameras.

TIFFANY DOVER: Okay. My name is Tiffany Dover and I am the manager in CCU. For my team, this has been a – it’s been a hard time–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Tiffany starts taking questions from reporters.

WOMAN: When you woke up this morning, did you know you’re going to be receiving a vaccine?

TIFFANY DOVER: I did, yes. So all of my staff, we are excited to get the vaccine. We are in the COVID unit, so therefore my team will be getting first chances to get the vaccine.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Then it happens.

TIFFANY DOVER: And I know that it’s really – sorry, I’m feeling really dizzy. I’m sorry.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Tiffany places her hand on her forehead and then turns away from the microphone, then she faints.

Some doctors are there to catch her and they helped her to the floor. And just like that, the world changes. Just a little bit maybe, but it changes.

Within a few minutes, Tiffany is back on her feet, recovered, surrounded by reporters and she’s explaining what happens.

TIFFANY DOVER: So I had a syncopal episode.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Syncopal episode is the medical term for fainting.

TIFFANY DOVER: I have a history of having an overactive vagal response.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: She’s describing a reflex where your blood pressure suddenly drops and you get dizzy and you pass out. It can be triggered by lots of things physical pain, emotional distress, dehydration, sometimes just standing up too long. It happens to some people a lot more often than others.

TIFFANY DOVER: And so with that, if I have pain from anything, hangnail or if it’s on toe I can just pass out. So what happened is I started getting – in I get an aura before of feeling weak–

–dizzy, disoriented and it just hit me all of a sudden. I just felt really diaphoretic. And I could feel it coming on, so it felt a little disoriented, but I feel fine now.

And the pain in my arm is very minimal, actually, but it doesn’t take much, so–

WOMAN: So you feel fine now.

TIFFANY DOVER: I feel fine now. And this is – I have passed out probably six times in the past six weeks, it’s common for me.

WOMAN: Okay.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: It goes on like this. Tiffany keeps saying this is about her, not the vaccine.

MAN: Never regret taking the vaccine?

TIFFANY DOVER: No. No. I mean, like I said, a hangnail can cause me to have this.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But by the time Tiffany had explained herself, it was too late. The seed had been planted and the people on the internet weren’t watching anymore anyway.

They were busy doing what they do best, sharing.

By the end of the day on December 17th, the Tiffany Dover story was getting all kinds of traction. On the 18th, she even made it onto Infowars, the internet show started by Alex Jones. That’s one of the main clearing houses for conspiracy theories.

OWEN SHROYER: All right. I’ve got a bunch of other news, I don’t even gotten to the main story today, which is just so – such an illustration of where we’re at where a nurse is cheering, she’s cheering, she’s like, yeah, I’m getting the vaccine. It’s so great. And then boom, they hit her with the vaccine. She literally passes out, falls over and they have to take her to an ICU. I mean, I’m sorry, I’m saying not trying laugh but–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But there’s no evidence that she went to the ICU or needed any medical treatment at all.

But the story began to evolve radically. All the way from check out this nurse who was injured by the shot, to check out this nurse who died from it.

I watched the video spread, an anti-vaccine Facebook groups that I monitor and critically, it started popping up in places very far away from Chattanooga.

MAN: So this American nurse, Tiffany Dover, she takes a COVID-19 vaccine on live TV.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Within two days, it’s on Russian state television. The far-right Freedom Party in Austria posted the video to its Facebook in support of a campaign against mandatory vaccination. The top Google searches for Tiffany are coming from Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia.

MAN: (Foreign language) Tiffany Dover–

MAN: Tiffany Dover (foreign language)–

MAN: (Foreign language) Tiffany Dover.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: YouTube creators around the world made videos about Tiffany. They racked up millions of views and shares.

One guy in Italy made a music video.

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: There was one new video posted every 19 to 20 minutes during that first day.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: That’s Paola Pascual-Ferra. She’s an associate professor of Communication at Loyola University in Baltimore.

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: Most of the posting was done by pages where the main admin person was located outside the U.S.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The pandemic was creating dangerous new conditions for the spread of misinformation. Lots of anxiety, lots of people with time on their hands and a new context for a very old paranoia about vaccines. Anti-vax activists were already on the lookout for COVID stories to push. There had been a wave of false reports back in April that one of the early participants in the Oxford vaccine trial had died. Her name was Elisa Granato and she tweeted out a proof of life video that effectively killed the story.

ELISA GRANATO: I’m very much alive. Thank you. I’m having a cup of tea. It’s Sunday, the 26th of April. Three days after I got the vaccine–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Even the day before Tiffany got the shot, the Alabama Department of Public Health had to put out a statement disputing online rumors that an unnamed nurse there had died after getting the vaccine. That story didn’t catch on. Tiffany story did. Paola’s team watched it blow up as it happened.

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: The searches that peaked were in YouTube because people were really just wanting to see that video feed of when this nurse in Tennessee fainted.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The initial round of videos showing Tiffany’s faint, posters started to get more creative, compiling so called evidence to back their claims. They also begin to collaborate moving into something that researchers call participatory disinformation. It’s where they piggyback off one another’s work.

This kind of misinformation, we usually see it in moments of crisis.

The Boston Marathon bombing, school shootings, it moves fast.

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: Just people taking that content and then repackaging it and making it their own.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: On the first day, you just see the ripped video from the newscast. It’s literally just that, nurse faints, you put it on YouTube. The second day, the third day, now they’re reacting to how the hospital reacts. Now they’re going to cut pieces together, splice old pictures from social media–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: And you can just see the ball rolling down the hill–

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: Absolutely.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: –where like the investigators hops on and it becomes a chase, it becomes an activity, it becomes a goal or–

PAOLA PASCUAL-FERRA: A quest.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: –a quest.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: A quest. For some to validate an all consuming and constantly expanding worldview that vaccines kill, for others, a gain. Follow the clues to find the missing princess with the beautiful blue eyes.

Three days after the event at CHI, a man named Joe Leonard made a video about it. He’s an online game developer and software engineer from Annapolis. He’s also a prolific YouTuber. His Tiffany videos in which he calls himself the fact checker have gotten a million collective views.

Leonard declined an interview. He told me over Twitter DM that he had a new game coming out and he was trying to avoid controversy. He said he also didn’t want to upset his wife. This is from his first video about Tiffany.

JOE LEONARD: So I started diving down this rabbit hole trying to figure out what’s the truth of the matter, what’s going on here. And as far as I’m concerned, it appears to me that her – she actually did die.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The evidence that Leonard was relying on here was something simple, Tiffany had been someone who posted to social media nearly every single day. Her last few posts were proud pics of her new Jeep, a collage of nursing colleagues, a video of a pizza and milkshake date to celebrate her daughter’s 13th birthday.

Now, she’d stopped posting entirely. Thousands of people posted new comments to her pages. She didn’t answer a single one. She went dark.

There are a lot of reasons why someone dragged into the middle of an internet conspiracy theory might just log off and never look back. But it certainly didn’t help calm the storm.

JOE LEONARD: There has not been any activity on those accounts, nobody’s responding. I even sent her a direct message.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: More from Joe Leonard’s YouTube channel.

JOE LEONARD: But I have not had any response and nobody’s had any response, because it’s pretty hard to respond if you’re not alive. So let’s look at the data here. This is pretty much of a 99%. If a woman is not on social media for five or six days, I mean, come on–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: The other piece of evidence that she died, screenshots, supposedly of a death record found on a Data Broker website. Here’s one of the most popular YouTube videos that made that claim.

MAN: Okay. Just so you see this with your own eyes, let’s put Tiffany Dover in here. This is searchquarry.com. And we’re going to look for record type death, all states search. Okay. Tiffany Dover number 12. Tiffany Dover 30 years old, white woman from Alabama. What was the name of her–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Tiffany actually does live in Alabama, just over the Tennessee line. It’s about an hour’s drive from the hospital. But the death records were bogus. The sites were basically people search engines. And when you put a name in the box like Tiffany Dover, the first page you get back is an ad asking you to buy a report, suggesting that there are all kinds of records available for the person including death records. When you click on the report and buy it–

–the records that you were looking for aren’t always there. And in Tiffany’s case, there was no death record. Truthers screenshotted that first page and claimed that with some kind of record, it wasn’t.

By the way, if you’re trying that search at home right now, it’s not going to work. A lot of the Data Broker sites just deleted Tiffany’s whole profile after all this happened.

A separate issue is that on some of the sites, anybody can create a record for anybody else. Dozens of fact checking organizations put out articles debunking the death claims. Reuters, the AP, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Pointer, USA Today, India Today, Les Monde (ph) in France, Estodao De Rafika (ph) in Brazil, you get the picture.

MAN: This claim is false.

MAN: The hospital says they want to clear up rumors circulating online.

WOMAN: No, Tiffany is alive and well and the hospital–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But all of that fact checking didn’t resolve the issue. Actually, it got arguably worse. In the days and weeks followed–

–Truthers started scraping all of Tiffany social media profiles. They took her photos and videos, that included hundreds of photos and videos of her children. They also expanded their investigations. They included Tiffany’s husband and in laws, literally any family members with public profiles became fair game. They accused them of being in on some kind of cover up.

Truthers called Tiffany’s hospital repeatedly, one of them, a guy named Jimmy Poole. He recorded himself and set it to dramatic music. We reached out to him, he didn’t get back to us.

JIMMY POOLE: I’m a citizen journalist.

MAN: Okay. The only thing we can tell you about Tiffany is jut go to the Memorial website, okay?

JIMMY POOLE: Is she still alive?

MAN: I can tell you just go to the memorial website.

JIMMY POOLE: Well, can you tell me if she’s alive or not?

MAN: No, sir.

JIMMY POOLE: She’s not alive or you just cannot tell me?

MAN: No, all we can say is just go to the memorial website.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Other Truthers suggested going to Chattanooga to get answers, at least one guy did.

JASON GOODMAN: People might find this crazy, but I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee and I’m standing in front of the CHI Memorial Hospital. I’m just – I was here to follow up on this story people might recall.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: That’s Jason Goodman. He makes Crowdsource The Truth. It’s an internet show. A federal judge who ruled against him this year in a copyright case said he, quote, “traffic in wild conspiracy theories’. Goodman used to work as a cinematographer making 3D movies, now he’s a just asking questions brand of truther.

His videos like the ones exploring so-called false flags around the Las Vegas mass shooting and the Sandy Hook massacre have gotten him banned from YouTube, at least five times.

JASON GOODMAN: I just followed some directions, went to the information desk. Security guy basically told me to get the hell out of there.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: From the start, the hospital had been cast as a major suspect in the Tiffany story. To Truthers, every move CHI Memorial made wreaked to have cover up.

Two days after Tiffany fainted, CHI Memorial issued a tweet that read, “Nurse Tiffany Dover appreciates the concern shown for her. She is home and doing well. She asked for privacy for her and her family.” Conspiracy theorists were not satisfied. They called the hospital staff liars and demanded they post a photo of Tiffany holding up the day’s newspaper like you do with hostages. And two days later, the hospital actually tried.

They put out a video which is what you’re hearing now, but the thing is, no one speaks except for a few people off camera. The video is 21 seconds long and shows Tiffany at the foot of a staircase. She’s wearing maroon scrubs, a white vest and a pin that reads I’m vaccinated against COVID-19. Posing around her are 20 co-workers, they’re wearing hospital badges. A few look to be nervously giggling, but it’s tough to tell because everyone’s wearing those blue surgical face masks including Tiffany.

Four of the women are holding signs with the date December 21st 2020 and messages of support like, nursing leadership supports Tiffany. Christmas garland hangs from the staircase. Behind them there’s a photo of the Pope. You’re going to hear from a hospital spokesperson in the next episode.

In short, they feel like they did the best they could in the situation. But suffice it to say, it’s a strange video to watch. And the fact that Tiffany appeared but didn’t speak naturally it just made matters worse.

BRIAN WILKINS: And they have this woman that now is not only about 25 pounds heavier than Tiffany is, but her hair is different or the partner hair is different. They were–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: A reasonable person might look at this video and think, “Okay, poor lighting.” Different camera angle. But Truthers decided that it was proof, clear proof that the hospital and an ever expanding list of co-conspirators including drug manufacturers–

–the government, the media, the Catholic Church had used a body double to cover up Tiffany’s.

JOE LEONARD: Like the hair is totally different. You see how it lays flat, they’re really flat. Tiffany’s got some whoop dee doo batch (ph) and you see this, she got the swoop dee doo going up here?

WOMAN: Her eyebrows look really different. It makes you wonder if people maybe went to an extreme to make it seem like she’s okay and she’s really not. Is her family being paid to be quiet, is other things going on?

MAN: We’ll take these eyes, which are blue by the way, have a fleshy part that points curls down towards her nose as you see here. The other girl doesn’t.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: They may channels on YouTube and Telegram and they made groups on Facebook. They created fake Instagram profiles and websites like whereistiffanydover.com. They used what they said was facial recognition software to compare stills from the stairway video to the ones from the day she fainted.

MAN: This image right here, okay, matches this image right here. The other images do not match.

This is not the woman that died, Tiffany Dover, this is a phony, which adds even more speculation and more concern about the scumbaggery at play here.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: CHI Memorial’s video was like throwing chum in the water. Jason Goodman, the Truther who went to the hospital told me he knows where they went wrong.

JASON GOODMAN: If there was a ton of conspiracy theories swirling about me, Jason Goodman, I would go on the YouTube channel and I would say, “Hey, I’m fine, everybody. You saw me passed out in the news, no big deal. I’m totally fine.” Why wouldn’t they just put out something definitive with her speaking with the hospital administrator, we’re here to squash the internet conspiracy theories, the QAnon trolls, the morons out there, why haven’t we seen that video? Serious question for you, Brandy, don’t you agree that it’s strange?

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Of course, that seems like a fair point.

But what it does, it takes all the responsibility and all the blame off the Truthers and puts it on to Tiffany and her employers. We’ll stop harassing you if you just do what we’re asking and if you don’t, we’re entitled to keep going.

WOMAN: This is my plea to Tiffany Dover. Tiffany, if you’re still alive, for the love of God, please say something.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: More than a year later, views and comments on Tiffany Dover videos continue to climb, and people are still making new ones.

WOMAN: So do you guys remember that nurse that went live and talked about her COVID-19 vaccine and she passed out live on camera? Well, nobody covered what happened to her next, so watch this next video and find out what happened to her next. This is insane. What they’re trying to cover.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Tiffany social media pages. They’re inactive, but they’re not deleted.

They act more like Memorial walls. Every single day, there’s a new comment on our old posts saying stuff like RIP, fly high, angel, where is Tiffany? Some comments take a much darker turn, which raises the question, why doesn’t Tiffany just delete these pages? And why, if the first action that the hospital took failed so spectacularly, why didn’t they try something else? Why didn’t they make Tiffany available for an interview or encourage her to post? On the other hand, none of that would be necessary if people would just stop falling for this stuff. So why don’t they? That’s after the break.

About conspiracy theorists, not all of them are the same.

Within a single conspiracy theory, individual beliefs can vary pretty wildly and there are different levels of intensity. You have your dabblers and then you have your true believers. The dabblers are more easily persuaded like the Utah woman who ran the Justice for Tiffany Facebook group before Facebook took it down.

She told me that she’d shut down the entire thing if she could just see proof that Tiffany was alive. She told me, this is a quote, “I’m not really one to start things like that group nor do I like most of the things that the groups become.” She was talking about the way that group kind of veered off topic to include a lot of conspiracy theories and sometimes targeted specific individuals for harassment. She asked me not to use her name as she didn’t want to, quote, “be portrayed in a story as some crazy person”.

Then you have the true believers like Donald Potts. He’s a retired Army reservist. He travels the country with his wife in a luxury RV. For about a decade–

–he’s been posting anti-semitic content and fringy videos under the name Sergeant Major’s Truther Info. We reached out to Potts several times for comment. He’s never responded, but he’s an aggregator. His channel acts like a repository for Internet conspiracy theory videos like this one.

MAN: It seems this elite (ph) has a long term plan for the destruction of your world and they’ve been doing it systematically through raising your culture, rewriting your history, introducing–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: He had about a thousand followers when Facebook and YouTube banned him last year, but a lot of those people have moved over to alternative platforms with him and his videos there, about Tiffany have hundreds of thousands of views.

Posted all over his site are his rules. Rule number one, everything you were ever taught is a lie. If you want to shut down a conspiracy theory, you need to convince both the dabblers and the true believers. It’s not easy.

KAREN DOUGLAS: Hi.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Hi, Karen. It’s really good to get you on the phone.

KAREN DOUGLAS: Yeah, it’s really nice to see–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Karen Douglas is a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K. She studies the psychology of conspiracy theories. She says people turn to them when certain needs aren’t being met. The first being the need for answers.

KAREN DOUGLAS: They to know the truth. They want to know why it happened. They want to have an explanation and feeling uncertain about what might have happened is a very negative or aversive sort of state to be in, so we–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: That tracks with what I’ve seen. For a lot of the people who are obsessed with a Tiffany story, the question of why she just digitally disappeared is really what keeps them hooked.

The secondly need Douglas says is more existential.

KAREN DOUGLAS: So in other words, people are generally quite keen to feel safe and secure in the world that they live in. And some research does suggest that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when they feel powerless or when they feel out of control.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Of course, the pandemic has made all of us feel powerless and out of control. It seems like for a lot of the truthers, rallying around the Tiffany cause was a concrete action, they could take. A way of imposing some sort of order on a chaotic world.

KAREN DOUGLAS: The final set of needs that we tend to talk about are social needs. If you feel that there are bad groups out there who are keeping these secrets and doing these activities, like behind the scenes that usually are to their advantage and not to your advantage, then you can maintain the feeling that you’re a good person and that the groups that you belong to are good as well.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: So Tiffany truthers think they’re the good guys and that makes everyone else start to look very sinister.

KAREN DOUGLAS: Is that if someone is going to the conspiracy believers and saying this is not true and coming up with counter evidence and showing them the facts, then it’s very easy for the conspiracy believers to dismiss that information.

Because they can just rationalize that and say, well, this person who’s trying to convince me otherwise is obviously in on the conspiracy as well.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Oh, no. Karen–

KAREN DOUGLAS: I’m sorry.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: No, it’s okay. Well, I mean, I would like to prove at the end of this project that Tiffany is alive. So taking in mind what you’ve just said, is there anything in the literature about whether and how to refute a conspiracy theory in a way that can convince someone or am I on a fool’s errand?

KAREN DOUGLAS: No. No, there are definitely things that you can do and often debunking efforts do work. It’s just sometimes that task is much more challenging. You just have a tougher time when someone believes something really, really strongly.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: So from here in New York, I started reaching out to the original Tiffany truthers, the super spreaders about what it is they’re looking for. Actually, I’ve tried contacting every truth or you’re hearing from in this podcast.

Okay. Day seven, truther Watt (ph), I’ve been reaching out to the administrators of all of these Tiffany Dover groups on Facebook, on Telegram, on MeWe, every place that I can think of, on Instagram. And once I contact the administrators, they usually kick me out of the group and that’s happened a couple of times now.

We didn’t find any Truthers who recanted or change their minds. And most of those we did reach, didn’t want to talk.

MAN: You’re not going to believe this, but somebody at NBC wants to talk to me about Tiffany Dover. And in this video, I’m going to give you five reasons why I’m not going to talk to them about definitely Dover.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But a few are willing. This is Dave Murphy. He lives in England.

DAVE MURPHY: My name’s Dave. I’m known as Allegedly Dave. I am an author. I’m a speaker and what I do most of the time is I help people for free. So yes, I am – I have a lot of time to look at things and to – and research things.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: He thinks that the earth is flat.

DAVE MURPHY: The horizon is always at eye level. Well, that would be impossible on a spherical earth.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: And that drinking your own urine is the key to health. He thinks that elite families secretly control the world and that your birth name is a form of government subjugation.

How did the name Allegedly Dave come up?

DAVE MURPHY: Okay. It comes from, if you look at common law, you will find that your name isn’t actually your name. You know your name–

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Okay.

DAVE MURPHY: Okay. That’s not you.

It turns out it’s a corporation that was made in your name and you think it’s you and your – that makes you liable for things.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Dave’s interested in conspiracy theories started with 9/11. It’s a popular starting point for a lot of conspiracy theorists. He says he was an IT consultant for a company in Hoboken, New Jersey and he watched the twin towers fall from across the water.

By 2009, he had been through a midlife crisis and a divorce and he moved back to England to start an off the grid village with like minded people. It didn’t work out. Now he lives in a camper and he travels around giving talks and making YouTube videos.

DAVE MURPHY: I’m here looking for truth and I’ve been on this journey for something like 18 years now. You start putting the pieces together for 9/11. And you find other pieces that lead off somewhere else and you follow those and it leads you into the new world order.

And you start filling in those pieces and there’s pieces that lead off into the monetary system, and then the legal system, and then the healthcare system, and so on, and so on and so on.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Dave’s YouTube channel has 57,000 subscribers. These days, it’s a lot of antivax content. When I called him he had just gotten home. He had spent the day issuing verbal citizens arrests at a local vaccine center.

DAVE MURPHY: So we went to a vaccine center to serve a cease and desist and actually shut that vaccine center down. We were met by several police and I asked them to assist us to shut the vaccine center down. And when they failed to do their duty, I arrested them. Eight more police arrived and I asked them to arrest those previous officers. They refused, so I rested them too.

So it was a long – we were there for an hour.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Dave believes a lot of things, including that Tiffany Dover was killed by a vaccine.

Just for the record, do you think that she is no longer alive?

DAVE MURPHY: Absolutely.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Because you haven’t seen her on social media?

DAVE MURPHY: Because of several things, actually. No, it was a – it’s a ridiculous thing. It was hastily concocted and this was at the beginning of this rollout. The last thing they could have is a death, a very public death while they’re still trying to convince people to take the thing. So they had to cover it up and it literally stinks of a cover up. And it’s the entire system. The entire system is behind this, which sounds – does sound like all conspiracy theory-like but there it is.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: But he says he’s open to being persuaded.

DAVE MURPHY: Yes, if you had a picture of Tiffany today, yeah, and it can be verified, then I would change my mind in a minute.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Sounds like a challenge, okay.

DAVE MURPHY: Please do. Bring it on, let’s see it, bring it on, show me.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: “Show me,” Dave said. “Show me proof that Tiffany is alive and well in Chattanooga and I’ll change my mind in a minute.” Well, challenge accepted. That’s next time on Tiffany Dover Is Dead*.

From NBC News, this is Truthers. And this is the first five episodes of Tiffany Dover Is Dead*. The series was written, reported and hosted by me, Brandy Zadrozny. It’s produced by Frannie Kelley. Our Associate Producer is Eva Ruth Moravec. Sound Design by Rick Kwan. Original Music by Alicia Bognanno of Bully. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Reid Cherlin is our Executive Producer. Madeleine Haeringer is our head of editorial. Footage courtesy of Local 3 News, WRCB in Chattanooga. Special thanks to Callie Starnes.