Look — Lady Gaga has never been that invested in “truth” or “not lying” or “saying boring things.” Still, it is funny that the internet appears to have inserted a memory inside her brain. On September 11, Gaga commented on a fan’s September 10 TikTok that included a well-known screenshot of a Facebook group titled “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.” (For the straight people reading this: Stefani Germanotta is Gaga’s real name.) “Some people I went to college [with] made this way back when,” Gaga explained in her comment. “This is why you can’t give up when people doubt you or put you down — gotta keep going.” A deeply inspiring message! So inspiring, in fact, that a bunch of publications have covered the comment. But that group’s veracity has always been questionable, and the online position seems to have shifted against the screenshot being real in recent years. Did it really exist? Let’s run through the facts.Lady Gaga went to NYU Tisch for a brief amount of time before leaving in 2005 to pursue her music career. Her first No. 1 hit (“Just Dance”) on the Billboard Hot 100 was in January 2009. Currently, there are multiple Facebook groups called “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous,” but all appear to be run by Gaga fans, were created well after Gaga was already famous, and were likely created in response to the meme already circulating. There is another group, created in 2005, with the name “Stefani Germanotta Is Going to Be Famous and I Am Going to Be Able to Say I Knew Her When …” that is still up that could have been created in response to the screenshotted group.
Perhaps the most parroted quote online is that the Facebook Groups feature was introduced in October 2010, well into Gaga already being famous, so the group couldn’t be real. However, groups (like the above pro-Gaga one) did exist for colleges at the time. Still, the screenshot doesn’t appear to be in the 2005 Facebook style; it looks much more like the 2010 style, when Groups launched to the public. Difficult to say!
It is true that people have since said that Gaga was super-annoying in college — the Bachelor alum and fellow former NYU student Carly Waddell said on a 2023 podcast that she was “not a fan” of “Stefani” because she would “play and sing Wicked at the top of her lungs” during lunch.
The best evidence we have for the group existing thus far is from a personal essay by journalist Lauren Bohn, a former NYU student, who says she came across the group when she was a student and that it “broke my heart.” Snopes, for what it’s worth, considers the Facebook group “possible but unconfirmed.” But hey — none of this is off brand for Gaga either way. “The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment,” she told New York in March 2010 (before Facebook groups were invented). “It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.”
