JonBenet Ramsey, Katy Perry Conspiracy Right Out of Philip Roth

What would the Internet be without bizarro conspiracy theories? But the latest of those grabbing attention — the strange belief that singer Katy Perry is actually the late JonBenet Ramsay — isn’t just the kind of thing the Internet dreams up. Nope, the idea of taking a young girl famously murdered and saying, wait, no she’s still alive and living under an alias isn’t new. In fact it has a predecessor in National Book Award winner Philip Roth‘s work. In The Ghost Writer Roth famously created a character that may or may not have been Anne Frank, the doomed diarist who perished at the hands of the Nazis — and whose story has inspired millions to persevere. Roth, instead of being ridiculed for his fiction, won prizes.

Ramsay was murdered in 1996, but the conspiracy theorists believe she was kidnapped as part of a “Jewish/Illuminati conspiracy” according to a funny, disturbing article in The Kernel. They base this on a video called: “JonBenét Ramsey” is singer “Katy Perry” – Parents give up the game. False Witness Death Liars. Perry and Ramsey bear some physical resemblance to one another. Just as Roth’s character Amy Bellette looked like Anne Frank. Crazy conspiracy theories clearly look more palatable between hardcovers than put across as Internet videos.