Anne Hathaway’s Bump: What the Celebrity Fake Pregnancy Conspiracies Reveal About, Well, Everything

“Fake hair, real bump,” wrote Anne Hathaway in a recent Instagram post. She shared a video of her glam routine before the premiere of her latest film, The End of Oak Street (yes, she’s in no fewer than five major films this year), where she wore low-rise jeans and a flowy top that showed off her baby bump. The post was her cheeky response to social media tinhat chat that she is not really pregnant and is wearing a fake bump for… well, for some reason. They couldn’t quite decide why. The majority of comments on Hathaway’s post were supportive, but, of course, there were a few dissenters. She’s lying, they claimed. That’s not what real pregnancies look like. She’s hiding something from us. You know the drill.

Hathaway is not the only famous woman who has become the focus of the fake pregnancy conspiracy. If you believe certain corners of the internet, no woman in the entertainment industry has ever gone through natural childbirth. There’s a forever-in-demand prosthetics designer somewhere in the Hollywood hills whose sole job is to make a series of fake bumps to put on famous women so that they can fool the world into believing they’re expecting. And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling TikTokers.

Beyoncé famously received cruel speculation that her pregnancy with Blue Ivy was just padding and angles. Meghan Markle was accused of it too, with one especially racist royal commentator sharing the lies on social media. Kim Kardashian faced it too. So did Amber Heard. Many moons ago, Katie Holmes was the focus of such claims. Sophie Hunter, the wife of Benedict Cumberbatch, has been accused of either trapping the actor into marriage with pregnancies he did not want or of faking her pregnancies and using dolls as substitutes for babies (this was detailed in a piece in The Atlantic.) The mother of Louis Tomlinson’s son has been harassed and stalked for years, with some One Direction “fans” getting their hands on the kid’s birth certificate to “prove” Tomlinson isn’t the real father. A fake pregnancy rumour is now as expected a part of standom discourse as “PR relationships.”

Fake pregnancies are the stuff of soap operas and later season episodes of Law & Order: SVU. They are an inherently ludicrous concept that usually signals a moment of pop culture shark jumping. Yet they seem to have taken on a strange aura of late, partly through a couple of notorious true crime documentaries but mostly because conspiracies are the default mode of culture discourse in the 2020s.

Conspiracies form not out of thin air but from the idea of probability. Even the most outlandish and fantastical theories have some grounding in, if not reality, then the possibility of it. Governments do lie to their citizens, so of course some people take that to bananas conclusions. Rock Hudson had to marry his boss’s secretary to stay in the closet, and that’s enough evidence for some stans to believe that every celebrity they love is chained to a woman they hate. But the endless claims of fake pregnancies are an odd one. We don’t have a ton of famous people who did this, nor even high-profile rumours of it. We do have the opposite. Loretta Young hid her pregnancy from the world, then “adopted” her own child. Still, that was a very unique case involving a deeply Catholic unmarried woman in pre-War America who was date raped by Clark Gable. This apparent sea of moon bumps? It’s not real.

The conspiracists seem stuck on the idea that bodies are an unchanging concept, even when you’re growing another little body inside yours. The Hathaway tinhatters keep claiming that “bumps don’t look like that”, that her third pregnancy in her 40s looks too different from her prior pregnancies to be real. Meghan Markle, a devotee of yoga, could not possibly crouch down while pregnant because no “real” pregnant woman can do that. Why is Katie Holmes’s belly getting bigger and smaller?!

We know that sex education is all but dead in some corners of the world, but the genuine ignorance over what pregnancy does to the body is concerning. Seriously, have you met a pregnant person? Have you seen how genuinely terrifying it is when the kicking baby leaves a wee footprint on the stomach?! Having a body is bloody awful, and then using it to make a whole human that sits inside you for nine months, pushing against your organs and sucking all the nutrients out of you, and sometimes causing you to lose hair and teeth?! And it can also kill you?! I feel like I owe my mother a lifetime of apologies and fruit baskets.

Ignorance is one explanation for the conspiracy, but there’s a simpler reason they keep happening: we hate women, and we’re always looking for new ways to show that. At the heart of these fake pregnancy claims is the assumption that women are liars and schemers, and every move we make is done with a ghoulish agenda at its heart. Any woman who dares to be associated with one of the internet’s boyfriends knows this all too well. Look at how Meghan Markle can’t post on Instagram or close her own car door without three dozen tabloid headlines claiming she’s the antichrist. Adding parenthood to the equation makes their theories all the more dastardly. They see it as a further sign of how femininity is intrinsically rotten.

Pregnancy is policed with fascistic thrall. We’ve seen the slow chipping away of reproductive autonomy by the state and how it directly impacts families and communities. Miscarriages are criminalised. Birth control is restricted. Tradwife propaganda is elevated. And throughout it all, every aspect of pregnancy is derided as wrong. Female celebrities become the board against which our darts of criticism are thrown: Meghan’s too performative for holding her bump; Rihanna’s not appropriately dressed; Kim got too fat while pregnant; Anne’s too fit so her pregnancy must be fake; she didn’t lose the weight quickly enough; she lost it so quickly so it must have been surgery; she’s got too many children; why won’t she give her child a sibling, isn’t that selfish; why won’t she let us see her kids; ugh, she shows her kids off too much. If you repeatedly insist that everyone is doing pregnancy “wrong” then you make it easier for others to control it.

The thing about conspiracies is that they encourage people to invest in nonsense under the guise of high-intellect strategizing. They believe the world is more complicated than it is and that by seeing what nobody else can or will see, they’re beating the system. Such speculation is also far easier to swallow than the mundane horrors that actually do run everything. I’m 100% stealing this from Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (which you should read now because it just explains our current hellscape so perfectly): people would rather believe that secretive cabals use impenetrable puzzles and labyrinthine plots to perpetuate Bond villain-style schemes than confront how the rich and powerful just do what they want in the open with impunity. Jeffrey Epstein and his goons didn’t need code-speak to plan their abuses. They just bragged about them in the open.

And that’s what I keep coming back to with the fake pregnancy conspiracies. It seems a lot less oppressive to imagine a farm of padded bellies and untraceable baby farms somewhere in Los Angeles than to deal with the continued loss of our own rights. We live in a panopticon of endless surveillance, and it’s being used to target our bodily autonomy. They know the game is unwinnable, so they imagine there’s a secret way to take home gold if you just double down on snake eyes. If you’re the one leading the charge of hate, then you won’t be burned by those same forces, so the reasoning goes.

People can’t be normal about Anne Hathaway’s bump because they no longer know how to be normal about anything, much less pregnant bodies or the decreasing freedoms of parenthood. It’s gross and scary and kind of funny but also just deeply depressing. And the goalposts will forever keep moving. There is no way to satisfy this kind of misery. Hathaway knows that, so she’s just going to live well and move on.