Haliey Welch, who became famous overnight as “the Hawk Tuah” girl, hasn’t even been a public figure for a year, and she’s already the subject of tabloid speculation about whether she’s pregnant.
Back in June, Haliey’s life changed in a momentous fashion for the most random of reasons, after she was selected to do a “man on the street” style interview, and her onomatopoeic description of a lewd act went hugely viral.
Before the pregnancy rumors circulated, Haliey had a genuinely wild 2024 — she was featured on a reality TV show, was invited to do big-deal podcasts like Bill Maher’s Club Random, and she launched the “Talk Tuah podcast.”
Remember, all of this happened between late June and December, and in December, Haliey became ensnared in what would ultimately become a “memecoin/crypto scandal” around a memecoin she promoted, $HAWK.
Mark Cuban and Joe Rogan both speculated that Haliey was in over her head with the memecoin situation — $HAWK launched on December 4, and before the month was over, angry investors had filed a lawsuit against “those behind the launch.”
Haliey went on an abrupt social media hiatus after December 4, presumably due to the memecoin scandal, returning once on December 20 to acknowledge the $HAWK controversy on Twitter/X.
In that silence, social media users dug up a fairly recent Instagram photograph of Haliey, and began speculating that the “Hawk Tuah girl” ghosted her followers because she was hiding a pregnancy.
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Fans Zeroed In On Haliey’s Bikini Pics
On January 6, a Twitter/X user shared a photograph of Haliey, with no contextual information.
The associated tweet speculated that she was pregnant, a universally loathed and unwelcome reason to be publicly pondered:
Broadly, the tweet and image leveraged Haliey’s social media hiatus and an image without additional context in a way that encouraged other users to fill in the gaps with speculation, and it racked up engagement.
Haliey’s absence from social media aligns neatly and clearly with the controversial launch and fall of the $HAWK memecoin, to a point where it seemed fairly obvious her sudden silence was related to it.
Moreover, there’s additional context for the image depicted in the tweet — it was from a carousel of images and panoramas shared by Haliey via Instagram back on November 24:
The image in question was a “live photo” of sorts, ninth in a group of 13 images.
Someone captured a still image from that animated shot, but the viral tweet didn’t include information about when the image was shared (in November), or where it was tagged as taken (Hawaii).
That was enough to start rumors that the “Hawk Tuah girl” was pregnant, generating news coverage worldwide — but one six-week old photograph was the sum total of evidence to support the claim, and it wasn’t very convincing.
