Lil Tay, the foul-mouthed internet personality who briefly went viral in 2018 and resurfaced this year thanks to a bizarre death hoax, claimed in an interview with Rolling Stone that her father staged the hoax “as a last resort to sabotage me.” The interview, her first since the hoax, was orchestrated to tout her attempts to rebrand as a singer after a bitter custody battle between her parents finally resolved in September, allowing Lil Tay to live in L.A. with her mom. Tay was described as “evasive” by Rolling Stone, even declining to give her real age and changing subjects when the conversation drifted toward her brother, who was rumored to have been behind the hoax and behind the early stages of her career. The magazine also quoted an anonymous source who described Tay as “kind of numb... Like, not there.” She claimed she had been planning her re-emergence for months before the August hoax, and blamed her five-year absence from the public eye on her father. Her dad, meanwhile, denied orchestrating the hoax, saying, “Somebody has a strategy that a good way to get publicity is to make accusations against me. They’re all false.”