The so-called QAnon Queen of Canada won’t return an RV she rented for her convoy, despite the owners asking for it back after she voided the contract and cost them thousands of dollars.
The group, led by self-anointed “Queen” Romana Didulo, isn’t answering the owners’ requests to return the vehicle. During the spat, Didulo also posted the couple’s home phone number and information on Telegram for her tens of thousands of followers to see. And when she recently asked followers a vague question about what crime the couple should be charged with, many of her followers said it was treason and that the punishment should be death.
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“High treason. Deserves a milkshake,” wrote one follower, using the group’s code word for execution.
Didulo is a QAnon influencer who’s convinced a sizable number of people that she’s the true queen of Canada, a central figure in an existential fight against an international cabal of globalist pedophiles who control the world, and an extraterrestrial being with healing powers. Some experts even describe the group as a cult.
Since late January, Didulo and her closest followers have been driving around Canada in a convoy of rented RVs, holding meet-and-greets in parking lots and spreading conspiracies. Once, they attempted—and failed spectacularly—to conduct a citizen’s arrest on an entire police precinct. They’re currently in Eastern Canada telling followers that Hurricane Fiona was a hoax (after first raising money and goods to help those affected).
The latest RV that Didulo and her followers rented didn’t come from a business but from a family. The owners, Mike and Vicki LeBlanc, advertise their RV on Facebook and told VICE News that Didulo’s group reached out to them there. Didulo’s convoy picked up the RV in Manitoba in early September and is contractually scheduled to return it in early November. But the “queen” and her followers overloaded their RV and lied about where they’d take it, the couple said. The latter offense voided the contract they signed. Now, they want their RV back.
The LeBlancs are both shift workers and don’t get much time off together, so they frequently rent out their RV. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with Didulo’s group until after the agreement was made. While the group was loading up their newly rented RV, Didulo pulled up in a separate RV covered in stickers of her face and her title as queen. Once the group took the RV, the LeBlancs researched them and began to keep tabs on their vehicle through Didulo’s frequent updates on Telegram.
“I just started kind of tracking how much traveling they were doing and realized this wasn’t just, ‘I’m going to drive to a campsite and have a little vacation and maybe tour this landmark or that landmark,” said Vicki LeBlanc. “It was a full-blown ‘We’re going to drive all day, all night, hit as many places as we can, drive nonstop’ kind of tour.”
The conflict came to a head when the vehicle blew a tire. Didulo and her team were upset that the flat had bumped their schedule and told the couple they needed to replace all six tires. So the LeBlancs said they contacted a nearby store, purchased six new tires, and had them installed for a total of $2,695, according to a receipt the “queen” posted online.
But the mechanic told the couple that changing all the tires wasn’t necessary, and they learned the group had left the RV’s good tires behind. So they asked Didulo and her crew to help pay for the unnecessary costs.
That didn’t go over well with the queen.
“She just started bashing us on their [Telegram] channel,” said Vicki LeBlanc. “So that’s kind of where it kind of went all downhill.”
Didulo took to Twitter to express her frustration with the owners of the RV. In one of several posts, she added the LeBlancs’ personal information, including their phone number and email. It’s a tactic Didulo frequently uses to incite a deluge of attacks from her followers, but that didn’t seem to occur in this case.
“I panicked a little bit when I saw all our personal information posted, and I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ but most of the responses that we’ve gotten have actually been really positive and encouraging,” LeBlanc said. “There’s been very few people that have been angry and hateful.”
The group hasn’t responded to the owners of the RV since late last week, but they did make their most recent scheduled payment last Friday. The couple said they’ve spoken to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and lawyers about reporting the RV stolen but were told their best bet is to sit tight and wait until the contract ends.
If it’s not returned, they plan to report it stolen and are prepared to go to small claims court if it’s returned damaged.
Didulo has a bit of a checkered past when it comes to RVs. Her group had to relinquish the first set of RVs they rented back in January because they took them to Ottawa, which their contract forbade.
Corey, a former member of the convoy who defected with his wife over alleged abuse from Didulo, told VICE News that the queen’s obsession with moving nonstop from town to town put her team at risk before. During one of their trips, the electricity in the motorhome cut out, despite the generator being on, he said.
Instead of calling the RV’s owner, as Corey had recommended, he said Didulo called him a “saboteur” and demanded they continue. Upon arriving in Halifax, their destination, Corey did a walk-through and said he found the RV’s panel box had been burnt during the drive.
“The wires were sparking and burnt this whole panel and could have burnt the entire bus down along just on the drive,” said Corey. “They’re lucky it didn’t burn the whole thing down. Once that went, the whole bus would have just come on fire very quickly.”
“Daisy was in there, right, like in that motorhome. She [Didulo] almost killed my wife, for fuck’s sake.”
Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.
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