I’m submitting this because I have some real legit questions on the many twitter and Facebook sightings over the last 2-3 years. I’m someone who thinks the kids are real (we can agree to disagree), but there always tends to be some odd ball anecdote included with the sighting. I personally find it odd that there’s been 4-5 times where only one of the children were along. It’s understandable if one of the kids was back at home being watched by a nanny, a time or two, but how many times does this happen? Who goes out to eat with their family and leaves one of their kids at home multiple times especially when they are very young?
These oddities of some of the sightings will tend to make people believe these are made up. People have the right to make their own conclusions on things. But, here is where my questions come into play. There have been many(maybe over a hundred??) of different social media pictures and sightings of Ben with Soph and the kids over the last couple of years, are they ALL false and made up? I am not naive and I know that PR does push things on social media, there are fake accounts, and that there always are fake celebrity encounters or stories on the web. I do agree that the nanny fans can make up crap as well (some are very obvious). But, there are twitter accounts that have no sign of being a Cumberbatch fan or no relation to media/journalism/PR, how are they a lying nan? And IF all these occurrences are truly set-up/false, is it a couple of nans making multiple accounts? A big spiderweb of a conspiracy? PR paying a boat load of money to multiple people? Is this all possible? A mixture of true events and made up stories?
This submission is not to be mean to you or to squash the reasoning why you and other skeptics are suspicious over these sightings. I too believe some of the sightings have some weirdness to them and have my own suspicions. But, as you question things, I think it’s okay to have honest questions to how it’s possible all these sightings have been all fake over a couple of years. My questioning was spurred with the latest vegan dinner story on Facebook, the person was serving Ben at a restaurant. The mention of, “my husband is vegan” was laughable, but then I thought, is this server a nanny fan or just a random Joe?
If you post/answer this submit, thank you.
Hi Oddball Anon and welcome in our midst! I took the liberty of naming you, but if you don’t like your Anon name, let me know and I’ll alter it for your next submission.
Yours is a very pertinent question and one that I keep asking myself whenever I feel my tinfoil hat has grown a bit too tight for my sanity.
Fortunately, it’s also a question that keeps getting answered for us (with a bit of time delay involved), and the answer is always the same: we’re being baited through and through.
Let’s take a look at the social media family sightings from this summer for instance (I don’t have my USB with the timeline and pictorial evidence with me today, so I might miss some sightings)
Back at the start of June, Ben was spotted in Spain along with Weirdo and one of the pillows (we still don’t know which one of the two) on a (family?) holiday. The sighting came complete with a picture of Ben sitting alone at the table of a restaurant perusing the menu. No sign of Weirdo or either pillow or any baby paraphernalia surrounding him. Fair enough, I can understand why someone would focus on Ben taking a picture... Now, I didn’t follow all of the fanfiction surrounding that sighting cause I was on holiday at the time, but what I do know is the person who spotted him and took the picture turned out to be the sister of a Nan and there were some details they were both fuzzy on regarding Weirdo and the pillow. The local press seemed to pick up the sighting and started reporting on Ben taking a family vacation in Spain and eventually we even got papped pics of Ben and... Adam strolling along a pier. The pictures from that pap walk weren’t nearly as cropped as the restaurant pic was of course, and funnily enough, there was no sign of a brunette or a baby anywhere near Ben and Adam. What’s more, it is speculated that Ben and Adam were looking into filming locations they could use for the Melrose series. Make of that what you will...
In July, Ben was filming his parts for Avengers in Atlanta. Interestingly, we got a whole lot of pictures of Ben from his time there. Going to a baseball game (alone), celebrating the 4th of July (with RDJ and friends), going to the aquarium and taking selfies with pengwings, filming, taking selfies with fans, etc. We even got quite a few mentions of family sightings on social media. From seemingly random accounts. Just the type of thing that would seem believable if the sightings at the aquarium weren’t debunked (Ben reportedly took a “backstage” tour of the aquarium, and some people mentioned he was joined by Weirdo pushing a pram, but it turns out prams are not allowed on this particular “backstage” tour) or didn’t sound outright ridiculous (bicycle riding in the sweltering heat to go to brunch with one *why is it always one??* of the pillows in tow that was mentioned as an afterthought after we started questioning whether either of the pillows was present and debunking the sighting / mocking the lack of pictorial evidence). It later turned out that Weirdo was in London at the time, attending a Letters Live reading. I’d just like to take this opportunity to ask the Intern reading these blogs to thank Byng for that lovely (blurry) shot of Weirdo in the audience.
In August, Ben read at the Wilderness Festival. He was photographed looking very casual with colleagues prior to his going on stage on the first night, he reportedly went to a party in the meadow later on, he read again the following day, we got a plethora of pictures as well as video footage of a brunette that may or may not have been Weirdo at the Festival on the second day, we had a radio host ask Ben if Wanda was babysitting (to which he replied in the affirmative), but we never got a clear pic of the brunette that may or may not have been Weirdo’s face. Interestingly enough, the festival seemed to be (literally) crawling with babies and it turns out that quite a few people took their babies and toddlers to the LL performance, but no one mentioned seeing Pilo or Pilo 2.0 anywhere near the venue. Probably because there were no Nans there...
In mid August, we finally got to see Pilo 2.0′s face in high resolution, spread all over the pages of German tabloids. In what turned out to be a pap op extravaganza, we first got baited through the Fail with a pic of Ben properly enjoying an ice cream cone, then the pic was pulled from the Fail to be replaced by a stock photo of Ben in costume for Sherlock (quite interesting, considering the Fail had already paid for the rights to the pics and presumably had first pick over the baby photos, which would have generated the most clicks for them. Pictures they paid for but never ran either in print or digitally on their site). Anyway, that was quite obviously a set up pap op that turned out as ridiculous as one would expect from the people who also gave us the christening pap walk at the IOW in 2015.
And the list goes on and on and on.
The point I’m trying to make, in a very jumbled up way, is that social media sightings can not be trusted. Not when they come from Nans who have an agenda to push, and certainly not when they’ve been debunked more often than not by pictorial evidence turning up after the fact.
That’s why I keep asking for pictures in order to trust a sighting and that’s why I dismiss so many of the sightings without even considering them plausible.
Obviously set up (and proved paid-for) pap walks don't count as far as I’m concerned. Precisely because both of the pillows involved in this showmance only seem to appear to true believers and paparazzi; and even that only seems to happen when DaddyBatch needs to promote the Family Of the Year image.
