Viral Conspiracy Theories About Drake, Kendrick Beef Are Spreading Fast

Over the weekend, a Twitter user by the name EbonyPrince2K24 posted what appeared to be grainy surveillance footage of Drake’s alleged personal items, the same selection featured on the cover of Kendrick Lamar’s now-infamous Drake diss “Meet the Grahams.” The video, featuring a prescription pill bottle as well as a package of Ozempic with Drake’s name on it, quickly racked up over 10 million views and set off a firestorm of theories suggesting there might be a deeper and more sinister meaning behind Kendrick’s cover art.

EbonyPrince2K24 suggested they would post more incriminating footage of Drake unless he retracted the claim, from his response track “The Heart Pt. 6,” that he planted information for Lamar’s camp to find. Across social media, EbonyPrince2K24 quickly became referred to as “The Riddler,” Batman’s famously cryptic nemesis, and fan theories spread across Twitter and TikTok with fury. “You’ve had many things discarded over the years. I wonder if you can remember them all,” EbonyPrince2K24 tweeted.

At the center of the viral storm were screenshots of alleged surveillance footage from Drake’s stay at The Mark Hotel in Brooklyn. In one of the photos, freelance journalist and recent Columbia Journalism School graduate Christopher Alvarez, who lives with the rare skeletal disorder Thanatophoric Dysplasia and thus uses a wheelchair, is seen in the hotel’s lobby, with the ominous caption, “The issue in the photo should also jog your memory. Jimmy Brooks would not have been proud of you that night…” Since the post went up late Friday night, hundreds of thousands of tweets and TikTok comments have speculated Drake’s involvement, with many suggesting the rapper assaulted Alvarez, or worse. Now, Alvarez has come forward in The Brooklyn Eagle dispelling the rumors, and pleading for people to stop harassing him. “I don’t know what any of this means,” he said. “I was with Drake that night because we briefly met after dinner, but all the accusations are false.”

Alvarez, the only living survivor of Thanatophoric Dysplasia, which typically causes death shortly after birth, works with a number of nonprofits and has been photographed with celebrities in the past. (DJ Khaled notably gifted him a chain in 2016.) Alvarez wrote that he could confirm he was with Drake on the “night of Jan. 22, 2023,” and that he “was called to meet Drizzy at The Mark Hotel, and we had a blast listening to new beats. I am not in the position to talk about his character outside of our meetings but I can say I was not violated in any way.”

He went on to address the rumors of abuse that circulated online over the weekend. “I know the struggle and to be put in that light has been scary for my other friends in this community.”

Unlike conventional rap beefs of the past, and even Drake’s meme-able feud with Meek Mill in 2015, fan discourse online has played an outsized role in the rap industry-wide feud that came into public view with Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.” Kendrick’s verse on that track, in addition to the subsequent claims that Drake goes after inappropriately aged women, has fueled a firestorm of speculation online — with internet sleuths digging up blind items and blog posts in hopes of stitching together a possible deeper meaning in all of Lamar’s disses. Alvarez writes that he’s also been receiving spam calls, texts, and emails, suggesting he is the mole that Lamar suggested was in Drake’s OVO camp on the track “6:16 in LA.”

The ordeal highlights the increasingly parasocial norms attached to online fandoms and serves as a reminder to be dubious of information posted online. As for EbonyPrince2K24? After their proposed deadline for Drake to apologize came and went, the page continued to post cryptically — their seeds of misinformation having already multiplied across the internet. Their last post read: “Why is the truth so expensive???”