Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Lillee Jean - the teenage influencer extraordinaire whose life was exposed as a fraud

PART 1 WHO IS LILLEE JEAN?

Lillee Jean Truman

 Instagram has been getting a lot of flak the past few years. A lot of perfect, attractive people living perfect, attractive lives, perpetuating an image or lifestyle some view as damaging to viewers. Beacause in reality, it is all fake.

All of us are guilty to ean extent, of faking it a little bit. Maybe those perfect holiday snaps of you lounging at the pool or stretched out on the beach don't show your tens of mosquito bites, or the fact that it rained all week apart from the half hour interlude you managed to snap your photos. Heck, maybe you even slimmed down you arms and thighs and cinched in your waist to give yourself a perfect silhouette for future you to remember you by.

Or maybe those loved up pictures of you and your man hide the fact that you spend most days arguing about who last did the washing up and the fact that you never pick your towel up off the floor after showering.

Everyone knows that Instagram and Facebook show the best of the best of our lives - a distorted version of reality that even the Stepford Wives would galling in it's version of perfection.

But there are those who take it to a different level altogether. Everyone knows the case of Anna Sorokin or Delvey as she became known; the penniless German student who moved to New York, transforming herself int a German heiress socialite, borrowed hundresd and throusands of dollars off her new found rich friends as well as loans from banks, knowing full well she had no means of ever paying anyone back. Anna lived the high life until she was busted and sent to Rikers Island, (from where she has just been released after serving ... years, with book and movie deals galore. But for the purposes of this article, we'll overlook the 'crime does pay' narrative Anna's story perpetuates. Am sure Rikers Island wasn't that much fun.)

Anna Sorokin-Delvey in court

But who has heard of Lillee Jean?

Lillee Jean Truman was, is, an Instagram influencer who presented herself as a 19 year old entrepeneur from New York. She started her Instagram page in 2017, and over a very short time period, garnered herself an impressively large million plus following.

She preseented herself as a 'Beauty Guru', but also an Instagram model, artist, motivational speaker, actress and reviewer. For a teen influencer, with over a million followers, Lillee Jean is among the elite, with her face on billboards for Covergirl, on magazines such as Teen Vogue, she even won a much coveted invite to the Met Gala - Lillee would have us believe that Anna Wintour, who apparently approves every ticket, invited Lillee Jean to New York's most exclusive fashion party. Remember the hoo-ha when Kanye couldn't get Kim a ticket because Anna thought the Kardashians were too low rent (not Anna's actual words, but I imagine what she was thinking.)

Lillee's faked Met Gala picture

Suddenly Lillee Jean's story was starting to raise questions. And people were asking. For instance, Lillee has under 10,000 followers on Twitter and 13,000 on YouTube. Where did these million Instagram followers appear from?

Lille Jean started to get renewed interest in 2019 and 2020 when people noticed the disparity between her different social media platforms and their followers. It was also noted that she gets very little interaction on her posts. Compared to the amount of followers she appears to have, very few were reacting, liking or commenting on them. Most reactions were simply emojis.

Her account has swung wildly, losing and gaining thousands of followers each day. For example, according to analytics tool, Social Blade, Lillee Jean in August 2018 gained 142,000 followers. But the following month this figure had crashed down to 6,000 followers. This picture happened several times until recently, stabilising around January 2020.

Her Youtube channel also paints an odd picture. Despite regularly posting videos, her growth has been painfully slow. On Twitter it is virtually stagnant despite a wave fluctuation in 2018.

So what is going on? The answer is simple. Lillee Jean has allegedly been buying up followers on platforms like Instagram to boost her profile.

Buying followers on social media platforms is relatively easy to do, and there are companies you can pay who will create fake followers for you. You can also buy likes, views and even comments, but all of this can only be sustained if you continue to pay. If your cash dries up - so do all your fake followers.

Initially Lillee Jean's make up posts were what drew unwanted attention. For someone claiming to be a professional Make Up Artist and 'Beauty Guru', her skills left a lot to be desired. Particularly for someone boasting a million plus following becasue of these purported skills. The same was said of her artwork, with her claiming to be a well-respected artist, despite her drawing and painting skills being somewhat basic. 

If you were looking for a reason to bash Lillee Jean, you could say her claims were starting to appear strange. However, if you wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt still, you could argue that perhaps Lillee was opearating by the old adage of 'fake it til you make it'. She wouldn't be the first to burst into her chosen field this way. And anyway, isn't art subjective?

However, it was soon to become apparent that her seeming lack of artistic skills was not the only discrepancy in her professional resume. Her modelling 'career' was also showing crater sized holes in it's narrative. For instance, all her modelling shots appeared to be from inside her home. In fact no photos were taken outside.

Lillee Jean's Malvie cover

While she did appear in a French magazine 'Malvie', apparently anyone can submit shots for consideration in this publicaton.

Lillee Jean claimed she auditioned for a Marvel movie, but the photo of her flight to the audition was taken in 2014 at the earliest, and by someone else, as it is available on Shuttershock, the stock image website.

Lillee Jean has no acting credits on IMDB, and no motivatoinal speaking performances appear online.

Without any credits, real followers, or genuine popularity, why were brands working with her? Was Lillee Jean the Frank Abagnale of her day? Had she managed to fool all these people into thinking her a genuine teenage ingenue? but in fact had no real talent, other than her deep rooted self-belief and fiery desire to succeed? Was she a con artist who lived for the thrill of pulling off a great scam, the longest of long cons, whereby she fooled others into believing her whole life was something it was not? Or was she a deluded teen with too much time on her hands, living in an online fantasy world? Did Lillee Jean just get carried away with the online persona she'd created, and not know when to stop?

As for the brands she was involved with, brands need someone with either a strong potential for growth, or an already well-established online following - someone with 'clout', essentially. It is unheard of for them to put their precious products in the hands of nobodies to promote them. Branding deals are what every influencer chases - the are the golden egg, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the signia to show that you've made it, in other words, highly coveted. Why were they choosing the likes of Lillee Jean to ally with? Unless of course, they had been duped?

Let's start with one of her biggest achievements - her Teen Vogue cover. This appared on her Instagram account and it is overwhelmingly clear that the picture has been photoshopped. It was uploaded to Lillee's account after Teen Vogue axed it's print edition across the world.

LJ's faked Teen Vogue cover

The notorious photo of LJ at the Met Gala? 100% faked! It is a composite of a picture of Lillee Jean taken on her birthday, and placed over an image of Katie Perry who actually did attend the Met Gala event.

As I briefly mentioned, Met Gala tickets are gold dust and highly sought after in the fashion world. Every invitation is personally approved by Editor in Chief of American Vogue, Anna Wintour, a woman who, as suggested by her 'affectionate nickname 'Nuclear Wintour', does not suffer fools gladly. Add to the fact that there are only 700 tickets released every year, and one wonders how Lillee Jean could ever have bagged one of these 'golden tickets'.

According to her mother, Laur Truman, Lillee Jean never claimed that she was invited to the Met Gala, and that the picture of her superimposed on the body of Katie Perry was in fact a fan edit. However, this is not what was originally suggested by Lillee and her mother on her Instagram account.

The Covergirl Times Square Ad

Another infamous claim is that Lillee Jean appeared as a cover girl in Times Square. Images on her account show her whooping and screaming with unbridled delight, and hugging her mother at the news that she had apparently just heard, that she would be gracing a billboard in the most famous city in the world's most iconic thoroughfare.

Believe it or not, this in fact, did happen. However, there is a revealing caveat to Lillee Jean's great accolade, and it is that (again) anyone can do it. As it turned out, if you submitted a pledge to PETA, the animal rights organisation, that you would go cruelty-free when using make-up, you could momentarily appear on a moving billboard.

Lillee Jean has declared that she has been photographed by paparazzi, though no pictures have ever been seen, shared or printed.

Lillee tweets picture from her Bite Beaty collab

Lillee Jean also claimed that she worked on a collaboration with 'Bite Beauty' on a range of lipsticks. She even showed videos showing the production process. Again, this was misleading - Lillee was not 'invited' or 'chosen' by the company for a collaboration. In fact, anyone (see the pattern here?) is able to design their own shade of lipstick with the company by visiting various locations in the US/Canada and making an appointment to design your own beauty products. You even get to name them. Lillee was speicifically asked by 'Bite Beauty' to stop spreading the collab story as it was patently untrue. 

Part 2 THE BACKLASH in next weeks blog.