Update (August 12, 2023): Meta has confirmed with TMZ that Lil Tay’s Instagram account was hacked. the company added that it helped her recover her account.
Update (August 11, 2023): TMZ today reported the platform was contacted by a Lil Tay spokesperson who said she is not dead and the statement about her and her brother’s death was posted by someone who hacked the account. The post announced the Tay siblings’ death has since been removed from Instagram, which hasn’t responded to inquiries about whether the account was hacked.
“I want to make it clear that my brother and I are safe and alive, but I’m completely heartbroken, and struggling to even find the right words to say. It’s been a very traumatizing 24 hours,” the statement said, adding that Tay’s real name is Tay Tian, not Claire Hope, a name she has provided media outlets with in the past. Over the years Tay has also claimed an array of ages. She is thought to now be 16 years old but may be as old as 21, according to The Cut.
A lot of confusion about what happened to Lil Tay’s account remains. We actually received an anonymous email claimed the entire event was a hoax arranged by Tay and her brother, Jason Tian, all part of an effort to relaunch her career. That said, as much chaos as the Tian siblings are known for fostering, it’s hard not to look at the email as potentially sent by one of them.
Original story below:
An unknown person posted a statement on Lil Tay‘s (real name Claire Eileen Qi Hope) account this morning (August 9, 20223), announcing she had died along with her older, half brother brother, Jason Tian. The last prior post on the feed that hadn’t been deleted was made in 2018.
Not long after the statement was published, a brand new, anonymous and possible hoax account @termanii sprang up on Instagram with a post from someone claiming to be Tay’s brother that emphatically stated in part, “TO BE CLEAR I AM NOT DEAD…”
Further questions arose throughout the day with multiple media outlets reporting her alleged former manager, Harry Tsang, could not “definitively confirm or dismiss” the news while Lil Tay’s Canadian-born lawyer father, Christopher Hope, told outlets he was unable to confirm whether or not she was dead.
Tay is the daughter of Hope and Angela Tia, who was born in China. Never married, the couple broke up when Tay was two. While they initially shared custody of Tay, when she along with her mother and her brother moved to Los Angeles in 2018 as her star began to rise, there were increasing battles over the direction of her career with her father pushing for her to return to Vancouver where he resides.
Tay’s brother has often been described as the main engine behind her public persona, and is thought to be the person behind a smear campaign accusing Hope of abusing Tay after she returned to live with her father in Vancouver sometime in 2018.
