The PR Nightmare Nobody Sees Coming: When Your Biggest Problem Isn’t the Scandal-It’s the Fans

Most people assume a PR crisis happens because someone did something wrong - a bad statement, a scandal, or a brand partnership that flopped. But sometimes, the real PR disaster isn’t the person or brand at all. It’s the fans.

Not the trolls, not the haters - the ones who claim to love you the most.

When Devotion Becomes Destruction

The internet has given fans a direct line to their idols, and the result is... chaos. Social media, fan forums, and obsessive Reddit threads have blurred the line between admiration and intrusion. Fans think they’re supporting their favourite celebrity, but in reality, they can be the ones making their lives harder - and even putting others off from ever supporting them at all.

Take the Swifties, for example. Taylor Swift’s fans are famously loyal, but in one of the stranger turns of online activism, they took it upon themselves to track private jet data and analyse her carbon footprint. What started as an environmental critique became an ethical debate: should celebrities have zero privacy just because they’re famous? Is it normal behaviour to monitor flight paths like you’re an air traffic controller?

While Taylor herself had nothing to do with it, the extremity of the fanbase started shifting public opinion. People who might have been casual supporters suddenly didn’t want to be associated with the intensity of it all. The same thing happened when fans started bombarding journalists or influencers who made even the slightest critique. At some point, supporting a celebrity becomes exhausting - and people opt out entirely.

The Curse of Parasocial Relationships

We’re living in a time where people think they know celebrities personally, even though they’ve never met them. Parasocial relationships - where a fan forms a one-sided emotional bond with a public figure - fuel most online hysteria today. A vague Instagram post or a cryptic tweet is enough to send people spiralling into detective mode, convinced they’ve uncovered a hidden scandal.

Fans 99% of the time have absolutely no idea what’s actually happening behind closed doors - and that’s how it should be. I’ve seen TikTokkers make entire assumptions about a public figure’s happiness or mental health based on a few paparazzi shots of them walking down the street - as if that’s some kind of definitive proof. I’d love to meet the person who walks alone down a street with a huge smile on their face. It’s absurd. Public figures might share snippets of their lives, but that doesn’t mean outsiders have the full story. And yet, fans latch onto whatever fragments they can, building entire narratives out of moments that were never meant to be dissected.

This becomes a problem when fans feel entitled to access. Take Ariana Grande’s relationship with Ethan Slater. Fans went straight to his ex-wife’s Instagram, crafting full-blown betrayal narratives, despite knowing absolutely nothing about what went on.

It’s this level of intensity that puts people off from even casually supporting certain artists. No one wants to tweet a simple “I love this song” and be met with a thousand replies demanding they prove their loyalty or be dragged into some years-old fan war. It stops being about the celebrity’s work and starts being about the social baggage that comes with it.

Collateral Damage: The Problem of Proximity

Sometimes, you don’t even have to be famous to get caught in the storm. Just being near a public figure is enough.

Hailey Bieber has spent years being harassed online purely because she married Justin Bieber. Selena Gomez fans created decade-old conspiracy theories to ‘prove’ Hailey was a stalker. Entire TikTok accounts are dedicated to analysing her facial expressions, convinced they hold the secret to some imagined feud.

And it’s not just people in the spotlight. Journalists, PR agents, brand managers - even random LinkedIn connections of celebrities - have been targeted just for existing in the same digital space. Fans think they’re ‘exposing the truth’, but most of the time, they’re just spreading misinformation that fits their chosen version of events.

For brands and the wider public, it’s often easier to distance themselves entirely rather than risk the wrath of an overprotective fanbase. The more aggressive a fandom gets, the more it alienates potential supporters. And if a fanbase becomes synonymous with toxicity, the artist’s entire brand can suffer.

I’ve walked through New York, London, and LA with certain public figures and witnessed this firsthand. Once, someone even took a creepy photo of me and my client, shared it on Reddit, and fully dissected who I could be. We got it taken down, but by the end of it, they had written that I was probably one of their secret romances - they came up with an entire explanation about me. It was ridiculous and somewhat amusing, we both had a giggle about it.

In the mix of lovely, well-meaning fans, there are always a few who speak to the celebrity as if they’re lifelong best friends. You can see, sometimes, how deeply uncomfortable it makes the person, but they smile, nod, and play along because pushing back isn’t worth the backlash. It’s an odd dynamic where a fan can feel entitled to a level of familiarity that simply doesn’t exist, yet the public figure has to go along with it to avoid seeming ‘rude’ or ‘ungrateful.’ Cameras are everywhere, and people will film them without asking, meaning they have to be performative at all times. If they’re filmed even once looking anything less than incredibly friendly and overenthusiastic, they risk being cancelled or labelled rude, ungrateful, or even unhinged. You have to realise how overwhelming it can be to have a crowd suddenly surround you without security - it’s actually quite nerve-wracking. It’s a constant pressure to be ‘on,’ and it’s becoming more exhausting than ever.

The Unfixable Crisis

You can’t control it. You can’t send a cease-and-desist to thousands of anonymous Twitter accounts. You can’t put out a press statement addressing something that doesn’t actually exist. And you definitely can’t ‘correct the record’ when the record is being rewritten in real-time, a hundred different ways.

Traditional crisis PR deals with a specific issue, with a clear beginning and end. But when the crisis is coming from fans, it never really stops - it just evolves. Today’s harmless fan theory becomes tomorrow’s PR disaster.

So where does that leave public figures? Constantly trying to balance accessibility with privacy. Share too much, and you invite scrutiny. Share too little, and you spark wild conspiracy theories.

The real PR challenge isn’t just handling a crisis - it’s preventing your own fanbase from becoming one in the first place. Because when your biggest supporters start making people turn away, you’ve got a problem even the best PR team can’t fix.