QAnon Broke Families Apart. One Journalist Spent Years Documenting The Fallout.

When Jesselyn Cook wrote about the children of QAnon believers as a HuffPost reporter in 2021, she didn’t expect the reaction she would receive ― hundreds upon hundreds of emails from readers, all of who had lived some version of the same story, and all of who seemed to have some version of the same question for Cook: What happened to the person I love?

In her new book, “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” released Tuesday, Cook sought to answer that question, profiling five real-life people who fell into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, and documenting the devastating impacts their departures from reality had on their loved ones.

These days, “QAnon” represents an umbrella of countless conspiracy theory beliefs. But it started with bogus claims on an internet forum by an anonymous account ― “Q” ― who claimed during the Trump administration to have high-level access throughout the American government, and who painted an unimaginably wide picture of corruption, sex abuse and revenge for their followers.

According to Q, financial elites and the “deep state” are in fact members of a vast child abuse ring, and they dictate global politics from the shadows. Donald Trump, in this universe, is secretly fighting against them with the help of QAnon believers, or devoted “digital soldiers,” and working toward the eventual “Storm” when QAnon’s villains will be either executed or imprisoned en masse.

Over the years, Q’s predictions have been widely debunked. And the “Q” behind QAnon has urged followers to stop using references to “Q” or “QAnon” at all, and instead to try and influence politics from inside the mainstream. These days, QAnon believers have largely fused with existing far-right