Untangling Tommy Lee and Brittany Furlan’s Catfishing Drama

Tommy Lee and his Vine-famous wife, Brittany Furlan, are really going through it. For the past week, Furlan has been claiming she was recently bamboozled by a catfish, leading to issues with her marriage to Lee. Now, the man Furlan believed she was messaging, Ronnie Radke, claims there are so many catfish accounts for him out there that the FBI is getting involved. Furlan and Radke both claim the other won’t leave them alone; last we heard from Furlan, she’s living in a hotel and her marriage is on the rocks, while Radke hangs out with Marilyn Manson. If you think that’s a lot, Trisha Paytas is involved too. Let’s try to make sense of all this, shall we?

I’m sorry, who?

Great question. At the center of this drama is Brittany Furlan, a comedian who rose to fame in the early 2010s thanks to the now-defunct video app Vine. Also involved: her husband, Tommy Lee, lead drummer of Mötley Crüe, who was famously married to Pamela Anderson in the ’90s; and Ronnie Radke, front man of the band Falling in Reverse. You might be wondering, What is Radke’s whole deal? Well, his career has been dotted with several abuse and assault allegations, including from a woman who accused him of rape in 2015 (he sued her for defamation, though it’s unclear how their case played out). From 2008 to 2010, he spent two years in prison for assault.

Furlan and Lee, meanwhile, met on Raya, according to People. “I’ve been following her for years on Vine. I was like, She is so funny and stupid and cute and beautiful,” Lee said in the 2018 Netflix documentary The American Meme. They started dating in 2017 and tied the knot in February 2019.

So what happened between Brittany Furlan and Ronnie Radke?

Apparently, nothing happened between Furlan and the real Radke. On May 17, Furlan posted a TikTok video revealing that, until recently, she was under the impression she was chatting with Radke for several weeks via Snapchat after an account with the username “ronaldjosephhrad” reached out to her on April 28. Furlan says she believed she was speaking with Radke, and the person behind the account was “trying to seduce” her. She didn’t say what exactly they talked about, but it seems like a meetup was in the cards at some point: In a screenshot Radke posted a few days later, Furlan seems to be messaging him that she’s outside his old house.

Anyway, according to Furlan’s video, she told her husband what was going on, which caused Lee to DM Radke asking him if he’d been chatting with his wife. (Lee, who has not responded to any of this publicly, had posted an Instagram the day before asking, “Who’s been catfished?,” suggesting this was indeed a conversation he was having with his wife.) At this point, it seems, Furlan started messaging with the real Radke — she showed alleged DMs with him about the Lee situation and also played a snippet of a voice note from him, where he seemingly accused her of “stalking him” at a med spa.

So was it really Ronnie Radke or not?

For Furlan, it seems like the question of whether or not she was DM-ing with the real Radke is besides the point. “Basically, I told my husband everything,” Furlan said. “I said, you know, ‘I’ve been talking to whoever I thought this was on Snapchat’ — he says it’s not him, cool, whatever — ’cause I’m a good person. I mean, I’m not a good person for talking to someone while married. I’ve been going through a lot in my marriage. No excuse, whatever.”

Still, Furlan seemed to suggest that actually, Radke is the one who won’t stop messaging her now that he’s been dragged into this situation. “I’ve had enough,” she wrote in the caption, seemingly referring to Radke’s ongoing posts about the catfishing ordeal. “He’s been harassing me for two weeks. He’s been sent three cease and desists and has not listened. For the final time — Leave me alone Ronnie.”

The last update we have from Furlan is that she’s been living in a hotel and going through “a really tough time in my marriage.” “This is embarrassing for me, embarrassing for my husband,” she went on. “This whole fucking thing is embarrassing.” Since releasing this missive, Furlan’s social-media accounts have been quiet.

What is Radke saying?

On May 17 — the same day Furlan posted her TikTok — Radke put up a video of his own, vehemently denying being involved with Furlan and swearing that he’s the victim of a catfish. By Tuesday, he was still very open to discussing the situation when he was approached by TMZ. “I’m actually kind of flabbergasted as well because there’s multiple other girls that were involved with the same Snapchat and I just don’t want people getting tricked and duped,” he told the tabloid, claiming that “the FBI is now involved. It’s a felony. It’s a crime, so yeah, it’s pretty serious, I guess.”

“I see it a lot,” Radke continued. “I see multiple Ronnie Radke accounts and stuff like that,” but he added that “you can obviously tell it’s not real, so this one kind of took me by surprise.”

Radke also told TMZ that Tommy Lee had DM’d him, sounding “very upset. I thought they were pranking me at first and then they were serious and I was telling them that it’s not me,” he explained. Radke added that he’s never spoken to Furlan. “I want to prove to everyone that it’s not me,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

Since speaking with TMZ, Radke has doubled down on TikTok, showing alleged DMs from other people saying they’ve been contacted by impersonators. “Brittany, I swear on everything I love that this is not me,” he said.

You mentioned Trisha Paytas?

Amid all this drama, Trisha Paytas suggested that, actually, Radke is telling the truth about having an ongoing catfishing problem. “I’ve been catfished by Ronnie Radke myself,” she said during a recent episode of her podcast, Just Trish. “He’s notorious for having a lot of catfishes. But I was in, like, a relationship with him for, like, six months.” The incident happened in 2019, and Paytas says she ended up going to one of his shows before realizing the person she was talking to wasn’t actually Radke.

What’s up with Furlan and Lee now?

Honestly, it’s not that clear. While Furlan said on TikTok that she’d decamped to a hotel, fans have been quick to point out that Lee’s most recent Instagram post has Furlan’s voice in the background saying, “I love you.” Guess we will have to stay tuned in to a former Vine star’s TikTok account to find out.

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