“Whatever Happened to Alice Monroe?” is a work of fiction hosted by Verb Theatre's BLUE LIGHT Festival 2020. To start from the beginning, go to www.verbtheatre.com/alicemonroestart .

Alice Monroe Insurance Fraud??

Posted August 21, 2019.

Alright, I know it’s a little taboo to speak ill of the vanished(?), but I have to CALL IT AS I

SEE IT: Alice Monroe’s disappearance may be an insurance scam. 

Let’s go through the evidence, shall we? 

It might be tempting to paint Monroe as wealthy, given her relative fame online, but I think
that would be a mistake; her primary account for the first four years of her rise was the now
defunct Vine (RIP), a platform that was almost impossible to make money on. While some
lucky viners were able to snag sponsorship deals, there was no ad money of the kind one
might be able to make on youtube, and it’s unlikely Alice was ever sponsored. I know there
was some controversy surrounding a potential gatorade product placement a few years
back, but honestly, I think the girl just likes gatorade. It was typical at the time to tag sponsored
posts, and there’s nothing like that attached to the infamous clip. Besides, I don’t think this is
necessarily how Gatorade wants their product represented. The below clip was titled "I Turned
21 Yesterday".

Besides that, Monroe herself documented her financial difficulties pretty thoroughly on Twitter. Though she stayed away from politics in her early years, the rise in power of President Trump appears to have [persuaded] her to shed her vapid funny girl persona and start tweeting increasingly seriously about the political landscape. Following the 2016 election she more and more frequently tweeted about the state of modern healthcare, referring to it as “broken” and “fundamentally immoral”, citing the need for universal health insurance.

 In 2017, in response to a number of her former fans dismissing her concerns as ‘attention-seeking’ and pleading with her to return to comedy, Monroe released a series of tweets divulging a cancer scare and subsequent hardship she endured, even going so far as to release a picture of her medical bills, an amount totalling $1,367 for what turned out to be a benign mole. Though her social media was all wiped clean the night of her disappearance, I was able to ferret out some screenshots of that twitter thread, which, while missing some sections of the thread, paints a pretty clear picture of the burden this medical procedure placed on her, as well as her growing anxiety surrounding money.

In late 2018, just a few short months before her disappearance, Monroe tweeted again a personal experience with the cost of healthcare: an unspecified ‘family member’ in a minor car accident, who was taken to the hospital without consent in a dazed/ not fully conscious state of being, who was then charged $700 for the ride, not to mention the cost of treatment for his or her injuries and following physiotherapy. Monroe then briefly circulated a GoFundMe page for the cost of the bills, stating in her tweet, “I shouldn’t have to beg for scraps from strangers on the internet to take care of my loved ones, but I guess that’s just the world we’re living in, huh?”. The tweet was deleted within a few hours, presumably in an attempt to stem the flow of vitriol directed at her from many who derided her as looking to profit off of political divisiveness, and suggesting that the accident was a fiction.

All of the above is to say, regardless of whether you agree with her socialist leanings, Alice Monroe was likely in a good deal of debt, and struggling to pay it back. (She also, by the way, mentions extensive student loans for her degree in sociology and archaeology from the university of Denver) She also had a documented scepticism and good deal of resentment toward her insurance company and her landlord.

Now, I am not a detective, insurance agent, or private investigator, but a girl in a great deal of debt
with an avowed hatred for the system she was living under and for the company that insures her
vanishes into the night after her house burns to the ground? That leads me to a pretty strong
suspicion. But there’s one more nail in the coffin, as it were.

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the missing person poster. Alice Monroe was reported missing by
her parents on April 11th, 2019, and the internet collectively exploded. Of course it did! For many
years, she was ubiquitous online. Even before she started regularly posting on Twitter and Instagram,
you could hardly open an app without one of her vines, crossposted by a fan, crossing your feed. I
would be hard pressed to name a more instantly recognizable internet celebrity. 

And then, four days later, April 15th, the missing person alert was quietly rescinded. When questioned,
the Denver Police Department would only answer, “the matter is resolved,” a statement that seems to
have been made policy, as it is all any of us ever got from them. And yet, Alice has not emerged, four
months later. 

What do I think happened? I think Alice is hiding out in Venezuela, or Korea, or Timbuktu, it doesn’t
matter where. Her family collected the insurance money, and, after a healthy cut for their silence and
for rescinding the missing person report, passed along the rest to Alice, who cannot return, lest she
be caught and charged with insurance fraud.

I’m well aware that I’ll probably catch some flack for this, and that some of her particularly intense fans
will be ready to leap to her defence, but I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’ve said my piece,
and it's up to you to decide whether or not you agree.