Woman who fell prey to QAnon and went viral for destroying a Target mask display recounts her pandemic year
Melissa Rein Lively wasn’t yet the “most hated person on the Internet” last March, when COVID-19 was formally declared a pandemic.
But four months later, on the Fourth of July, the 35-year-old publicist who had found “comfort” in the QAnon conspiracy, was in a Scottsdale, Ariz., Target store when she noticed a mask display — and snapped. She filmed herself on Instagram Live, and her anti-mask tirade went viral. (She was subsequently treated for mental health issues, swore off QAnon and sought to rebuild her reputation.)
Lively recently spoke with Yahoo News about what led up to that incident and what her life has been like since.
The interview was part of an oral history of March 11, 2020, the day the virus became real for many Americans.
Here is Lively’s account, in her own words, slightly condensed for clarity.
On Jan. 27, I had this terrifying phone call with my brother. He was in China with his wife, who’s Chinese, visiting family for the Chinese New Year. They were starting to see images of people becoming very sick in the streets and keeling over on the sidewalk. Images that were not quite making it to the U.S. yet.
He freaked out. He was like, “We’re going to the airport and getting on the next flight back to the U.S. I have a feeling that they’re going to close the borders.”
But then I went to work the next day, and everything was normal. If I had come into a meeting with clients and been like, “I know we’ve got that big event on March 15, but we're gonna have to pull the plug on that because there’s a huge pandemic coming,” people would have thought I was crazy.
By the first week of February, I was the first person in the grocery store with a mask and gloves on. People were looking at me like I was nuts. I ended up canceling all my meetings by the middle of February. I just started saying, “I’m going to voluntarily stay home.”
When March 11 rolled around, and they finally announced that it was a pandemic, I kind of freaked out. In my mind’s eye, I’m seeing the compounding tragedy that was gonna unroll before us. I can see it like dominoes. The economy is going to crash. People are going to get very, very sick. If what they're saying is true, a lot of people are going to die. I just had a very private sort of mental collapse. That week the reality set in — the avalanche of information, uncertainty, confusion, panic, distress. I was just absolutely drowning. And I couldn't catch my breath.
Lively started to see COVID conspiracies on social media, and was drawn to them.
It started to trickle into my news feed: “Here's what they're not telling us about the COVID-19 pandemic.” You click on something about prayer or spiritual enlightenment or self-empowerment. And then it would transform into conspiracy theories.
Within weeks, I found myself in this echo chamber. I went into denial about the pandemic, as a coping mechanism. And there was QAnon to comfort me and tell me, “Oh, it's not real. It’s not happening.” It was a digital brainwashing.
By May, I had been pretty effectively radicalized. That’s when they opened up Arizona again. I ended up getting a lot of my business back. But this time, when I came back to work, I had a completely different mission. “You can’t force me to wear a mask” — all that stuff.
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