The short answer, as far as anyone who knows anything about it knows, is NO.

The long answer is still no, but involves a Twitter experiment, which turned into a viral storm.

It started on Saturday, June 25, when a fan posted a picture of Anne Hathaway (below) from Elle France magazine. When I last checked, this post had over 300,000 likes, 23,000 retweets and 4,600 quote tweets.

That’s where it got complicated, because while most of the comments declared undying love for her, one of the quote tweets, from a user named hotpriestt, stated 

“every tweet about anne hathaway going viral like police didn’t find human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013”

The original quote tweet was later deleted, but others have since tweeted the same, rather confusing, text.

This understandably caused some consternation, since we are all sure that everything printed on the Internet generally, and Twitter in particular, is invariably true.

One tweeter demanded: SHOW PROOF, to which the original tweeter replied with a picture of the supposed house in which the purported cannibalism had taken place. Not sure that evidence would stand up in a court of law as proof, but apparently it was pretty convincing for some Twitter users.

Some thought that the fact she never seems to get any older indicates that she is eating human flesh, or at least bathing in the blood of virgins like Elizabeth Báthory. Or else eating human fetuses, like Mrs Li in Dumplings.

One Hathaway fan declared that she “doesn’t look like” she had eaten people. Another replied:

“What are you meant to look like when u eat people?”

After leaving this internationally important debate to brew for a few hours, the tweet’s author returned to Twitter on June 26 to say:

Harvard University has provided no information to the media regarding this purported study, or any evidence that Anne Hathaway has any connection to cannibalism, and it seems unlikely that a University would involve itself in a study that sounds decidedly defamatory. Meanwhile, the user who posted the viral tweet cancelled their Twitter account.

So it was, amazingly, all a fake. One Twitter user admitted to having spent “15 minutes googling this shit.” Another admitted:

There’s a moral there somewhere.

Hathaway does have some odd eating habits though. She went vegan in 2011, not for ethical reasons but to lose weight for the role of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. She kept it up until a dinner with Matt Damon during the filming of Interstellar in 2014, when she tried some fish and “my brain felt like a computer rebooting”.

That statement of course is somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation. She felt like fish and ate it without qualms, because she had not gone vegan in order to spare fish or other sentient animals from the agony of being farmed and killed, but simply for her own appearance. The idea that anything other than drugs can instantly affect the brain before even being digested, let alone distributed to the cells of the body, is absolute bullshit (which is also not vegan). To me, the fish story is the silliest untruth of this blog, more so than the cannibalism story.

 Hathaway went vegan again recently (raw vegan this time) to prepare for the role of Rebekah Neumann in the new series We Crashed, which premiered on Apple TV+ in March 2022. That didn’t stick either, and she is reportedly back on burgers.

So. Anne Hathaway is not a cannibal, in that she doesn’t knowingly eat human flesh. She is a mammal eating mammalian flesh though, so I guess that makes her (like most people) a kind of cannibal.

And after all, who knows what was in that burger?