In early September 2022, a video went viral that showed a young blonde woman auditioning for the television singing competition “American Idol,” which first aired in 2002. The reason the video gained so much popularity in 2022, a full two decades after that particular episode of the show aired, was because the woman bore a physical resemblance to U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia.
Here is a screenshot of the Sept. 4, 2022, post on the social media platform Twitter:
The woman in the video above identifies herself as Stefanie Sugarman from Alta Loma, a community in Southern California’s Inland Empire. The video of Sugarman’s audition has been online for years, apparently because she gained a degree of internet fame for giving an outlandish performance:
Our research confirms these are two completely different people, which we will explain below.
A few tells from the video itself: The woman in the video has a different talking voice than Greene and no Southern accent; the “American Idol” hopeful said she was from Alta Loma, a community in Southern California, and was 23 years old at the time of the audition; she also said she worked in marketing, specifically selling cheese.
In 2002, the year the episode aired, Greene, who was born in 1974, would have been 28. Greene has furthermore always lived and worked in Georgia, per some biographical information we found on her, and never lived in California selling cheese.
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