What Did Lauren Chen Want? 

Mother Jones; X.com

The most striking thing about Lauren Chen, in hindsight, is how she managed to be everywhere. Until earlier this month, when the Department of Justice alleged that Chen, a Canadian influencer and self-described “Christian nationalist” with ties to the far right, had been secretly funded by Russia, she wasn’t much of a mainstream figure. But, through a remarkable number of platforms, podcasts, spinoffs, guest appearances, and side hustles, she was undoubtably prolific in conservative spaces.

Chen, now 30 years old, began her public career around 2016 and had since managed to build remarkably diverse ties across the right-wing spectrum, courting conservative media, white nationalists like Richard Spencer, likeminded podcasters, “paleo conservatives,” comedians turned aggrieved libertarians, and many others. She even dipped her toe into lifestyle influencing, peddling both ivermectin and a chintzy soap line she co-owned with her mother. She appeared as a commentator on The Blaze’s TV channel, as a “contributor” for conservative activist group Turning Point USA, and made appearances on Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and in videos from The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, and PragerU. With a young daughter and a home in Nashville that she shared with husband Liam Donovan, who served as president of their video-making company, Tenet Media, it appeared to be paying off. 

All of that came to an abrupt end earlier this month, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that Tenet was secretly funded by RT, the Russian state media company that functions as a Kremlin propaganda arm. The department said Chen had received money from RT’s parent company since 2021, billing them for videos that she posted without any kind of disclosure of that financial relationship on her personal YouTube channel. (Chen has not been personally indicted or accused of criminal wrongdoing; the filing only charges Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, two RT employees, for their alleged role in the scheme.) A “reporter” for Tenet announced the following day that the company was shutting down.

The well-known conservative and far-right commentators who worked for Tenet—including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern—have all described themselves as unwitting victims in a scheme the DOJ alleges was meant to promote pro-Putin talking points and deepen partisan divisions within American society. But the indictment explains that at least one of them had suspicions. When one (who appears to be Rubin or Pool) began asking questions about the supposed French funder of the company, a French banker and philanthropist named “Eduard Grigoriann,” Chen sent that commentator a fake resume, which the indictment alleges was provided to her “by another fictional persona.” The resume claimed that Grigoriann had “held various positions in Brussels and France at a multinational bank,” and featured a stock photo of a model peering out a private jet’s window. That, apparently, was enough to quell concerns.

But while Chen and Donovan allegedly worked hard to conceal the source of the funding for Tenet from the commentators they were paying, they also continued building her brand outside of the company. She appeared at a Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA earlier this year, on a borderline-ludicrous number of podcasts, and made a constant string of videos on YouTube and elsewhere, mocking feminism, gender non-conforming people, migrants and anyone who might need welfare—standard conservative targets. In the course of doing so, she barely mentioned Tenet at all, focusing much more on her roles at The Blaze and Turning Point USA. 

But Chen’s motivations for allegedly partnering with Russia, if they go beyond simply making a buck, are still hazy. The indictment depicts her and Donovan as mainly preoccupied with money—how quickly “the Russians,” as they called their funders, would pay their invoices. Chen’s career seems to show someone of ideological flexibility, willing to promote a range of ideas across the conservative spectrum—if it comes with time in the spotlight: anti-feminism, fearmongering about migrants, barely-concealed racism. If the allegations are proven true, Chen’s career could be read as a cautionary tale not just about the dangers of foreign influence peddling, but about the kinds of mercenary domestic personalities who—out of self-interest, a lack of curiosity about how their actions might affect the world, or simple greed—are all too willing to help amplify any message. 

Chen was born Lauren Yu Sum Tam in Canada in 1994, but was raised in Hong Kong and came to the US for college, eventually graduating from Brigham Young University. (Unlike most of BYU, Chen is not Mormon and said in 2018 that she “wouldn’t recommend” the school to other Christians.) Beginning in 2016, Chen (a stage name she adopted at the start of her career) began making YouTube videos, calling herself Roaming Millennial. It was a time, as NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny points out, that YouTube was incentivizing engagement above all else: “Political and algorithmic incentives amplified the most extreme and entertaining voices and reactionary takes, making stars of creators on the ideological fringe.” 

In her videos, Chen was all too willing to platform people even more radical than herself, earning her first taste of true notoriety in May 2017 with a jaunty three-part interview featuring white supremacist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer. She seemed thrilled when the series earned a response video from YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who makes intelligent cultural commentary under the name ContraPoints; Chen joked on Twitter that she was releasing the next installment of the series early, just for Wynn. 

“No one (Richard Spencer included) is advocating people be killed,” she told one person on Twitter who objected to the series. “Calm down.” (Spencer would participate in the violent Unite the Right rally three months later, in which counter-protestor Heather Heyer was murdered by white nationalist James Alex Fields.) 

A quest for attention, whether positive or negative, seemed to drive many of Chen’s next moves, as did branding herself as a young woman in opposition to mainstream feminism. She began writing for the anti-feminist women’s site Evie Magazine in late 2018, contributing pieces deriding hookup culture, careerism in women, and, in early 2020, a column that argued it wasn’t racist to call Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and derided Chinese state media’s “propaganda” covering the disease. Later in the pandemic, Chen hawked ivermectin as a cure for Covid, entering into a partnership with an anti-vaccine, Florida-based company called The Wellness Company, whose “medical board” includes Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist famous for promoting bad information about Covid. Chen’s page on the retailer’s site is still live, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” (TWC did not respond to a request for comment about whether their partnership with Chen is ongoing.)

As the indictment lays out and her internet footprint makes clear, Chen worked directly for RT prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By 2021, Chen was writing op-eds for RT serving the same fare she produced everywhere else, although with more overt pro-Russian messaging. In February 2022, for instance, argued that Americans who opposed “mounting calls for war”—she named Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and Tucker Carlson—“can expect to be smeared as unpatriotic.” 

While that was the last of dozens of pieces she wrote for RT, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chen tweeted and posted to Telegram in opposition to US funding for the Ukrainian military. The Canadian citizen positioned her stance as an America-first approach, writing in February, “Neither Ukraine nor Israel should be allowed to loot the coffers of the American taxpayers. Especially when America’s borders are in such neglected disarray.” 

Donovan kept far less of a public presence than his wife. When Donovan did tweet about foreign policy, he presented himself as simply too naive to have an opinion about Russia. “I approach Russia (and some other topics) with complete agnosticism,” he posted in June 2023. “It would take far too much effort to gain reliable knowledge about something I can have very little to no impact on. I just hope for the best and leave it at that.”    

But according to the indictment, about two years before that tweet, Donovan and Chen had exchanged messages on Discord in May 2021 discussing payments from “the Russians” for her RT op-eds. “Also, the Russians paid,” she wrote. “So we’re good to bill them for the second month I guess.”

That money was only a prelude to the sums that the indictment pictured at play since August 2023, when Chen and Donovan began sending bimonthly invoices to a UK shell entity that would eventually total more than $10 million, including both payments to commenters and Chen and Donovan’s own “fees and commissions.” 

RT did not respond to a request for comment; the closest they’ve come to issuing a statement is an unbylined, English-language story about the indictments, which states that “Producing videos that highlight social and political divisions in the US is not a crime.”

Chen’s overt Putin boosterism attracted little attention or outrage among her conservative peers, where it stood out little from what others were also saying. In November 2023, more than a year into the invasion, she called him “pretty reasonable in regard to Ukraine.” In praising a rambling interview he did with Carlson, she called his performance “a two-hour dissertation on Russia’s history and its place on the world stage,” comparing him to President Biden, who she said, “could not finish a cohesive sentence in a five-minute carefully choreographed setting.” On Ukraine, her politics resemble not only those of people like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s made attacks on Ukrainian military aid a cornerstone of her public policy, but those of JD Vance, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee.

Nor did anyone who appeared with Chen at public events seem to notice anything amiss. “I knew nothing about Lauren’s business endeavors,” says Erin Elmore, a Trump surrogate who featured alongside Chen earlier this year at the Turning Point women’s summit. “We only spoke briefly and this topic never came up. She was always cordial and we kept things very surface.” 

The end, when it did come, was exceedingly swift. After the DOJ indictment was unsealed, Pool, Rubin and Southern all quickly declared themselves to have been unaware of the ultimate source of their paychecks, with Pool announcing he would be “offering [his] assistance” to the FBI. Chen’s YouTube account and TikTok were both deleted within a week, while her Instagram, Twitter, Rumble, GETTR and Telegram accounts remain online, but silent. 

The reaction from the conservative galaxy, whose every planet Chen worked so hard to visit, has been muted. One of the only visible defenses came from far-right personality Candace Owens, who appeared many times with Chen on one another’s podcasts, and whose work was reshared multiple times by Tenet Media.

“Just pathetic to see what the conservative movement has become,” Owens tweeted. “Lauren Chen was always nice to everybody. At the first hint of trouble, everyone is throwing her under the bus and believing the DOJ.”

Through a spokesperson, Owens elaborated to Mother Jones: “In the limited capacity that I knew Lauren Chen, she was always very kind to me. While I have nothing to do with the case at hand, as someone who believes in due process, I will never enjoin myself to the media culture of ‘guilty until proven innocent.'”

Tayler Hansen, a self-described “field reporter” for Tenet, said on Twitter that the allegations against the company came as “a complete shock,” and that he has always been free to report whatever he wanted. Before his association with Tenet, Hansen was best known for filming drag performances and posting them online as part of a purported crusade for child safety, telling the Texas Tribune, “Drag queens do not belong around children. Neither does gender ideology.” Hansen has claimed that YouTube shut down his personal channel following the indictment; the Daily Dot reported that YouTube says Hansen shut it down himself, a version of events he denied. 

Hansen told Mother Jones in an email that he had not been contacted by the FBI, and that he learned that Tenet was no more in a message from Tenet’s ownership: “Hosts received a message from the owner explaining that due to the ongoing investigation we would not be able to continue with TENET Media.” He didn’t respond to questions about how he’d met Chen, and why the arrangement with Tenet didn’t strike him as suspicious. 

In contrast to Chen’s well-lit trail of podcasts and public appearances, the paths of the two RT employees accused of secretly funding Tenet are murky. One of the few English-language traces of either is a Twitter profile appearing to belong to Astafaneya, which she used to ask people posting on the platform about hot-button issues to come on TV. (When pursing such guests—someone who blamed a loved one’s Covid death on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, say, or Afghans seeking to flee after the US withdrawal—she identified herself only as a “producer,” not identifying the outlet.)

While Chen has nuked any chances of a career with a more credible outlet, the people paying her did a far better job covering their trail. And it seems exceedingly likely that, should someone in the Russian government want to further shape US conservative opinion to their benefit, there are more influencers who, for the right price, will be willing to act as eager salespeople for whatever they’re trying to peddle.