It’s a unicorn of a summer’s day in 2020; the kind that demands factor 50 and flip-flops. I’m being driven around my neighbourhood by my husband, Arlo, my hair pulled up off my neck and a cool can of something fizzy in my hand. My daily medication has kicked in: a serotonin reuptake inhibitor that I’ve taken for 15 years to ease my low-level anxiety. Without it, I’m no longer sure I can stay with this man I have loved for 12 years. I am mute and smiling passively.
“There’s another one!” he points to the right. “At least it’s not disguised as a tree.” He shakes his head. “Do they think we’re idiots?”
Arlo is updating me on the new 5G masts that have been covertly installed through the Trojan horse of the pandemic. It’s not the day out I’d anticipated for our Saturday, but this is our life now. What began as a polite request to turn off the microwave after use and switch off the router before bed is now the dictum that if one of these emitters of radioactive deathrays pops up on our street “we need to move”.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment that Arlo went down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Today, he can’t even answer the question for himself. He thinks it may have started with a conversation he had in the park, or a film he saw. He’d read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at school and it had stayed with him. What came next was a slow radicalisation through his screens and the people he met online. Maybe a curiosity fed into an algorithm that became an echo chamber. Who knows?
However, there were indications that something as big as the pandemic might go this way for him. Arlo is the son of liberal parents, born rebels with anti-establishment leanings. He was conceived on the India hippy trail in the 70s. Meanwhile, I grew up in Surrey, in a mock-Tudor house opposite a tennis club. Being with me and my solid family anchored him for a while. Because, yes, I think these 5G masts are an eyesore but I don’t think they will fry my frontal cortex.
In 2020, life gradually became a battleground of conspiracies with little basis in fact. The threat of 5G radiation was just the entry point: by the end of the year, my husband also believed that nanoparticles in the Covid-19 vaccine would be used to integrate us with the Internet of Things (if the vaccine didn’t kill us from myocarditis first); that digital ID would limit our travel and affect financial independence; that debt was a social construct and could be avoided using “maritime law”; and that only cryptocurrency could save us.
“What’s the package?” I asked after I handed over a plump brown envelope.
“Stickers,” he replied gleefully, spreading them out on the office desk. “You vil eat ze bugs!” he announced in a crude impersonation of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, an organisation that conspiracy theorists were convinced was plotting to have us all eating insects by 2030. I laughed. We were still laughing together at that point.
“We do not consent to lockdown,” he read aloud from another sticker as he raced downstairs to slap it on our front door.
“Oh please, not there,” I begged him. Too late. It was already glued tight and I couldn’t get my nails under the edges.
On Thursdays, we hid behind the curtains of the spare room to watch our neighbours enthusiastically pound their saucepans with wooden spoons for the NHS. “Yeah, that’s right, get those jabs in,” he mocked. He sure as hell wasn’t getting his vaccination.
“They’re going to close the borders,” he warned. A relative of Arlo’s had already packed his family into a van and made a break for Portugal to start a new life. Arlo was manically arguing the case for us to leave, too, but I managed to talk him down.
I didn’t recognise my husband as the man I married four years earlier: a charming and adventurous photographer who missed his calling as a lead guitarist, is solid on the tennis court and does uncanny, but not unkind, impressions of our friends. Nor did those friends, or my family – most of whom blocked him from sending streams of warning content and some of whom would only see me alone. “I’ll meet you in the woods for a dog walk,” agreed Arlo’s old friend Justin. “But can you not bring Arlo? He’ll just do my head in.”
Arlo knew he was being blocked by his friends, but the distancing rules meant their absence wasn’t as obvious as it would have been in different times. Which meant it increasingly fell to me to be Arlo’s sounding board. I felt battered. I took my mobile phone into quiet corners of the house to phone my closest friends, but I don’t think anyone but my family really understood the assault on my mental health.
“Do you want to come round here to get a break?” my sister offered, since she lived just 10 minutes away. She could hear my distress and was angry. “I’m going to text him.”
When she did, that opened a dialogue for Arlo. “Just watch this, please,” he wrote back, with a link to a documentary on vaccine injuries, and then another link to a podcast episode from Joe Rogan, and then another. There was an answer to everything if you challenged the material. Everything was binary, nothing was nuanced. Arlo had “Question the Narrative” printed on some T-shirts. At least now people could see him coming.
I got dizzy trying to extract the logic from some of his arguments.
“How the hell was 9/11 an inside job?” I asked, exasperated.
“You should look into building No 7 at the World Trade Center. It was the biggest faux pas of mainstream media when the BBC said it had gone down … before it actually did. They knew it was going to happen. Why? Because it had debt bonds that were due to mature the next day. Then Bin Laden was flown out of the country, despite airspace being shut down.”
“And how does Arlo from Crystal Palace know that?” My jaw clenched, braced for another fight. The idea that this man from a corner of England was privy to an international cover-up was ridiculous. I couldn’t accept his worldview. I had to believe in the good in people. I had to hope the pandemic was an accident and not, as Arlo believed, something inflicted on us to sell vaccines and facilitate the biggest wealth transfer in history.
I remember fighting back tears after these interactions. I felt as if I was losing my grip on what was real and what wasn’t, and sometimes the evidence was even convincing. There was a link between the Covid vaccines and an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, that was true; the British Heart Foundation wrote as much.
I tried to dig into my journalist roots, the need to corroborate information with several parties, to find out if evidence was peer-reviewed, to show due diligence. But Arlo was impassioned and articulate and it was too overwhelming to keep up.
In early 2021, we sold our holiday apartment in Mallorca. Neither of us had worked much in the pandemic, living off the small furlough we received from his limited company. Arlo gave me 30% of the money from the sale and immediately started investing the rest in a slew of “alternative” crypto coins.
Along with the trading came a barrage of shouty, red-faced shock jocks: BitBoy, Krypto Karl and Elon Musk were often in his ear. There was much furtive exchange of intel on Telegram. Something about cryptocurrency aligned with the ideologies he’d adopted: it promised decentralised power and transparent data on a ledger that could be read by all. I wasn’t against it, in principle.
By May, Arlo had invested thousands in Dogecoin, which was also known as a “joke” or “meme” coin, namechecked in various tweets by Musk. The billionaire was due to appear on Saturday Night Live and Arlo was galvanised for a big increase in value. I also needed a night out.
We went to see Cabaret in the West End of London. Arlo wasn’t into musicals, but he had always been a “yes” person; culturally engaged and up for any new experience. I loved that about him. We had cocktails, laughed and flirted. Away from any devices, we talked about the show as we walked back, hand in hand, along the Strand.
Seeing the “old” Arlo being fun and caring, I felt sorry for him. He just wanted to feel control in a world that was spiralling out of it. That’s what these conspiracies gave him: a sense of being in on “the truth”. He was looking out for those he loved, worried that they would be corralled into taking vaccines that had been rushed through without a lengthy period for testing. He was our protector and the threat was a global pandemic. How could anyone behave normally in those circumstances?
Still, we came home and within minutes he had his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong?” I asked nervously.
In the time we’d been at the theatre, Musk had been an awkward host of SNL and took part in a skit that branded Dogecoin a “hustle”. It didn’t give the market confidence. As a result, the coin had crashed in value by 29.5%. We’d lost thousands. I was too tired and overwhelmed to fight about it.
“I met a guy at the park who’s made a million,” Arlo told me the next day, trying to convince me that he needed to stay in the game. Then a friend from the coast gave notice on his job, able to retire on his bitcoin haul. Happy endings were just a few degrees of separation away. But Arlo was not an early adopter, and while bitcoin and ethereum were established coins, the market was flooded with “alt” currencies, and for every big winner there had to be a multitude of losers. We were losers and the debts were mounting.
He’d lost about £30,000 from the Mallorca property sale by this point and our credit cards were almost maxed out. I was less angry about the waste of money than the impact of Arlo’s stress on me. The more he lost, the more I had to endure his temper and the manic energy that followed as he tried to rectify things.
I was alarmed and disempowered by this new shift in our marriage and by my financial vulnerability. I tried to manage our living space, constantly racing to the radio to change from news of more confusing lockdown parameters to 6 Music, and deleting emails in his inbox from YouTube channels he subscribed to. It was exhausting, and just when I’d asserted some control, he’d find some documentary about how the moon landings were faked and the world was suddenly a place filled with lies, manipulation and fear again.
We went to see the James Bond film No Time to Die. When Léa Seydoux’s character infected herself with a nanobot, Arlo turned to me and whispered, “I told you that technology exists!” Confirmation bias was everywhere. Not even the Picturehouse was safe.
We did agree on something. Well, someone: Russell Brand. In 2021, he was still a figure we could both get behind. He believed we should all form our own self-governing communities and stay free by being informed, yes, but more importantly, by being hopeful and proactive. It helped that he was also easy on the eye, and funny.
But I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, spending longer on dog walks and more nights in the spare room to give myself space and conserve my sanity. I still loved Arlo, despite the stress his ideologies had caused me. And by the end of the year Covid seemed to be dissipating; a new dawn in sight.
The following spring of 2022, Arlo left me for six weeks to start an off-grid commune in Portugal. The crypto trading was going badly and he was still losing our money, hand over fist, but land in Portugal was the latest plan – a place where he thought he could shield those he loved and live a self-sustained life away from the grip of big pharma, invasive tech and authoritarian governments. His relative had been reporting back from the Mondego valley and encouraging him to invest there.
Portugal has tax incentives for populating the rural regions with eco-friendly businesses and, most importantly, any profits made from crypto are tax-free. I didn’t fight the idea; I looked forward to the peace and quiet.
“I’m not going anywhere near this Portugal plot unless there is a 30-metre lap pool,” I declared.
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“Fine, but first we need a composting toilet!”
It was a Wednesday and I was home from hot yoga, a coffee in hand. Arlo sent me a video. He was at a place called the Pineal Foundation he’d found on Instagram; a community of flat-Earthers who identified as a “sovereign autonomous nation state”. His relative had stayed there and learned skills that Arlo thought might be useful for his build. I was pleased he hadn’t lost his sense of humour when we giggled at their 3D model of the Earth – a contradiction in itself – and earnest explanations of how the horizon doesn’t align with our taught mathematics.
He described a community leader dressed in ceremonial white and purple robes; a kindly man who was in a polyamorous relationship with a few women in the group. The food was delicious, Arlo said. He showed me plates filled high with farm to fork produce: crispy kale, foraged mushrooms, grains and pomegranate seeds.
The next day, I woke to find the car being clamped for an “unlawful” fine that Arlo had challenged. One of many, as it turned out. The dog needed walking and I needed the car to get to the park. I was fuming. I stormed out to meet the bailiff without shoes on my feet and a face like thunder.
“This is my husband, right?” He read out the name on the paperwork, as if it needed confirming.
I stumbled attempting to explain Arlo’s rationale for nonpayment (something to do with strawmen and maritime law), before stabbing my pin number into the bailiff’s card machine and parting with £600. He gave me a tight smile, intended to show empathy. “Yup. I hear it more and more, that conspiracy talk.”
When I relayed the incident to Arlo, he suggested that while more fines were being contested I should hide the car around the neighbourhood to avoid detection. My coffee tasted bitter and the froth had dissolved. I wished he’d come home.
Arlo returned after six weeks, as promised, buoyed up by the co-purchase of five hectares of verdant land in the Mondego valley at a cost of £20,000. He took out a loan for his part in it. “It has 60 mature olive trees to make our own virgin olive oil and huge monolithic boulders full of quartz crystals. The land is so fertile. And it has three stone ruins we can convert – and spring water!”
“What will I do there?”
“You’re an actress, you can start an amateur dramatics society.”
My heart sank.
Meanwhile, I read some bad press about the Pineal Foundation. A 13-month-old baby in the community had died from an unspecified health problem. The infant had never been seen by a doctor or taken to hospital. They didn’t register the death, choosing instead to honour the child’s memory with a ceremony of their own, cremating the body and scattering the ashes in a river. It was probably deeply meaningful, surrounded by nature, but it also set a dangerous precedent. If we don’t register births and deaths, then we make ourselves vulnerable to those who mean us harm. Thankfully, Arlo agreed, and didn’t go back to the foundation after that.
It was summer and Arlo had been hanging out at a London wellness space founded by some conspiracy theorists, where he heard about a company called Matrix Freedom. Without my knowledge, Arlo paid them £8,000 to write off his loans, credit card and mortgage debt using “maritime law” and access webinars about the process.
Their website states: “The surname on your birth certificate, deliberately written in capital letters, is not you. It is your agent of commerce, known otherwise as your ‘Strawman’. Your strawman is a debtor operating in commerce under the law of the sea.” I wondered if the Tin Man and the Lion were also complicit, but of course it turned out that this was just another discredited conspiracy theory. The Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning about the company in 2021, but Arlo didn’t heed it. Six months after handing over that £8,000, Arlo was asking for a refund and not having his emails or phone calls returned.
I couldn’t believe that he had fallen for that rubbish, furious with the people who’d scammed him. I wanted our money back, so we needed to go to their office and confront them. Arlo accepted he’d been conned and wanted answers, too.
So, there we were, in a ghostly industrial estate on the outskirts of Chessington, Surrey. Each door in the building was protected by key codes, but we managed to slip in behind the one person who seemed to be on site. I was simultaneously fired up for confrontation but also a bit excited to be on a covert mission of our own. Eventually, two female bruisers who looked as if they were married to the mob came out from nowhere. I felt immediately under threat. These were not people I wanted to mess with. I surreptitiously wedged my phone between crossed arms to video the conversation.
“You’re keeping our money and you’re not returning it, that’s why I’m angry,” I began.
“At the end of the day, the process has changed,” one of the women said. “We’ve explained all of that … we’ve said about going on to the webinars.”
Fifteen minutes went by and nothing they said made sense. They were evasive; they said the payment terminals were not working to authorise a refund; that their boss had the final say, in any case. They used the word “process” a lot. I suspected they knew they were being filmed.
“There are no refunds,” they eventually told us, glibly. We followed up by email, but it came to nothing.
Taking stock of where we are now, we have lost a lot of money, but with that has come acceptance for Arlo. The magic beans have not grown us a fortune and he has stopped trading the little remains of his crypto “investment”, and returned to his photography career with a renewed enthusiasm. I am grateful for this innate talent. Without it, I don’t know if he’d have found purpose, coming out of that hole.
The Matrix Freedom debacle helped crush some of Arlo’s more radical theories. Then Russell Brand, our go-to voice of the alternative media, became a Christian and the subject of allegations of sexual misconduct (which he denies), and we both went off him. His channel has become another shouty, manipulative shopfront, appealing to a new US audience with clickbait tropes such as, “This is really happening!” and, “It’s started!” We aren’t even alarmed by the content, just bored.
Arlo acknowledges that he needs to raise investment for the Portugal retreat and not treat our bank account as its money pit. He has opened a joint bank account to give me more financial say and security. He admits that some of what he had prophesied has not happened. Our borders have not closed; we travel as much as we always have. He’s learning that old adage of focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you can’t.
“I’m sorry I didn’t handle myself better; I was a wrecking ball,” Arlo says to me in the darkness of our bedroom at night. “I didn’t have the tools to express myself properly. I was scared, but I’ll do better.”
Our marriage survived Arlo’s radicalisation because I knew his heart was in the right place, because I was medicated, and because, to my surprise, I’m able to concede that some of what he was shouting about has come to pass.
As I write, Mark Zuckerberg has just penned an open letter to the US House Committee chair regretting that he censored material related to the Covid pandemic under pressure from the Biden administration. A perfect example of government overreach.
As a result, I acknowledge that there may have been a kernel of truth to some of the theories he shared.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s scar tissue. My parents took a long time to start inviting him round again, and a few friends still won’t “go there” if he triggers any kind of polarising debate. We never used to argue about money. We absolutely do now. And yes, I’m still on high alert for anything shouty coming from his headphones or suspicious withdrawals from our bank account.
Arlo was on a big commercial shoot this summer – three days in Lisbon for a food brand. I knew he would be back from Gatwick knackered and starving, so I had some dinner on the go when he walked through the door.
“I got us these,” he said and handed me two exquisite pastéis de nata, boxed and tied with a ribbon, so I popped them in the fridge for afters.
When I turned back around, Arlo had transformed some leftover tinfoil into a stupid hat.
“I’m sorry I went a bit mad,” he said out of nowhere and, just like that, we were finally laughing about it.
Some names have been changed.