David Meade said his social media feeds have been bombarded with hateful messages. His office employees have been fielding hundreds of phone calls from foreign countries. His website had been so inundated that it crashed four times.
But Meade, a Northern Ireland native who describes himself as a mind reader or a mentalist, did not peddle doomsday theories. An American who shares the same name did.
The other David Meade, a self-described “specialist in research and investigations,” has been receiving a fair amount of attention online for claiming that a planet called Nibiru would soon bring about catastrophic events on Earth. Most recently, he said that destruction would begin Oct. 15, 2017, when, he claimed, the world would enter a seven-year tribulation period, a fairly widespread evangelical belief that catastrophic events would wreak havoc for seven years.
Meade’s claims, which are based on biblical verses and numerical codes, have been debunked by NASA and religious experts. But that did not stop the floodgates of vitriol against Meade, the mentalist.
“No matter what I said in response, people didn’t believe me that it wasn’t me,” Meade told The Washington Post. “I genuinely felt powerless in this online marketplace. . . . I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t worried about what this all means and what impact it might have.”
There have also been death threats, he said, some of which he had posted on Twitter.
One sender wrote:
“See when the bloody world does end I’ll bloody find you and punch the living daylights out of you as you cause me more anxiety and bloody stress than anything else in my life and I’ve thought about ending my life too no thanks to your f—ing claims. . . . Don’t ever do that again or I’ll put my bloody fist down your throat and rip up your vocal chords … ”
Another one just simply said, “I will kill you.”
“I think most of the vitriol came from confused people who panicked and worried,” said Meade, who has been responding to social media messages using #WrongDavidMeade.
He even pinned a statement to his Twitter profile to clarify the mix-up.
“I can’t be a passenger in this,” he said. “I need to let them know that it’s not true.”
Arrived here to talk about the end of the world? Well, read this before getting in touch pls :) pic.twitter.com/SqKlQyVfLW
— David Meade (@DavidMeadeLive) September 24, 2017
He said some media outlets and British tabloids had published his picture with stories about the apocalypse and linked to his Twitter feed and website, instead of the other Meade’s website, which is a repository of posts and videos about the arrival of Nibiru.
Last week, radio and television host Glenn Beck interviewed Meade, the doomsday theorist. Beck’s Twitter account, which has more than 1 million followers, promoted the interview last week and tagged the wrong Meade, who said he had to get his lawyer involved.
The tweet was the result of an innocent mistake from a staff member who posted it Thursday morning, according to Beck’s company. The post was deleted about two hours later, after a producer of Beck’s radio show saw a reply from Meade saying he had been tagged by mistake.
Beck’s company also confirmed that Meade’s lawyer sent an email shortly after the tweet was posted, but said it had been buried in a generic, unmonitored inbox and was not discovered until a Washington Post reporter inquired Wednesday.
Meade, the mentalist, said he understands why many people had been mistaken. For one, the spelling of his last name — with an “e” at the end — is not that common. He also admits that his job title tends to raise some eyebrows.
“When people arrive on my website, because I’m a mentalist, I guess that’s esoteric as well,” he said.
In a nutshell, part of what he does for a living is reading minds. But unlike psychics, he does not claim to have any supernatural powers. He said he’s more of an entertainer who relies on body language, perception and other psychological tools to find out what people are thinking or to convince them to think a certain way.
The father of two, an 8-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy, said his fascination with mind reading began at a young age, after his father died. In the rural part of Northern Ireland where he grew up, the bereaved coped by consulting psychics.
“So I did, and she blew me away,” he said. “I became fascinated with how she made me think and know that way.”
In 2011, Meade started a BBC television show, in which he played the role of a mentalist. He was also a part-time lecturer at the University of Ulster’s international business school, his alma mater. Now, much of his time is spent traveling around the world to perform and speak at corporate events, he said.
“Most of my work is working with organizations on how they can use communication and persuasion, how to use mentalism to grow staff and get better results,” he said.
Meade said the mix-up could pose a problem for his business, which relies on his name recognition. Potential clients looking to hire him as a speaker could be turned off if they looked him up online. A Google search for “David Meade” yields more than 600,000 results, and majority of the top searches are about the other Meade.
“I have a large international business. I really worry that the online digital footprint of this is indelible,” he said. “I worry that in seven or nine years, this is going to keep coming up.”
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