In 2011, a Brazilian blog called Avril Está Morta (Avril is Dead) put forth a ludicrous theory. What if Avril Lavigne wasn’t Avril Lavigne? What if she had been replaced by a lookalike shortly after the release of her debut album, 2002’s Let Go, and this lookalike had pursued her career for nearly a decade?
The theory quickly caught fire online. The story goes that Lavigne was plunged into a deep depression after the death of her grandfather and, her stresses compounded by the pressures of fame, killed herself in 2002. But the cynical, money-grubbing record executives who controlled her career couldn’t let go of this cash cow, so they drafted in a lookalike named Melissa to play Lavigne.
