Questioning continues as local law enforcement attempts to uncover the identity of the real Anthony Padilla
By TARA ROMERO — tcrome@ucdavis.edu
Ever since the October 2024 Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest took the Internet by storm, hundreds of celebrity look-alike contests have popped up all over the country. A bit late to the trend as always, UC Davis students decided to commemorate local Sacramento YouTube celebrity Anthony Padilla in a look-alike contest in the Memorial Union Quad yesterday afternoon.
The student who organized the event and asked to remain anonymous made the following statement: “Honestly, I just thought it’d be funny — I never thought it would’ve turned out like this.”
At 3 p.m. on March 31, 2025, the Anthony Padilla look-alike contest was up and running. It was a sad start — with only two contestants and roughly eight people in attendance. However, three last-minute applicants joined the contest upon realizing their uncanny resemblance to the other men. By 3:30 p.m., there were over 200 onlookers gathered to see these five Anthony Padilla look-alikes.
“I didn’t even know who Anthony Padilla was, but when I saw five men who looked exactly like one another…I could not look away,” Abigail LeMiller, a second-year theatre and dance major, said.
At 3:45 p.m., the unexpected happened. The real Anthony Padilla made his appearance at his own look-alike contest. Residing in Los Angeles, this YouTuber was allegedly visiting his hometown, Sacramento, when he saw that he was tagged on X about this contest. Upon further investigation, Padilla did, in fact, travel to UC Davis with the sole purpose of making an appearance at this contest after searching “Anthony Padilla look-alike contest” into the TikTok search engine every day since the first contest in October.
When Padilla first arrived, students assumed he was another last-minute contestant and pushed him up front to sign up for the contest. In front of the crowd, Padilla attempted to admit that he was the real Anthony Padilla, but the other contestants followed suit in an “I’m Spartacus”-esque fashion — all claiming to be the one true Anthony Padilla.
One of the potential Padillas claimed: “I’m here to film an ‘I spent 24 hours with my look-alikes’ video.”
Another claimed: “I came here not knowing the meaning of Anthony Padilla, but I believe I’ve found my identity thanks to the men here before you.”
Before anyone knew it, UC Davis was home to six Anthony Padillas — and none of them were backing down.
There are various reports on what exactly caused local police to get involved. Some claim that one of the Anthony Padillas started throwing punches. Others claim that all the Padillas had an identity crisis and burst into tears.
All we know is that at 4:32 p.m., six men claiming to be Anthony Padilla were detained for questioning by the Davis Police Department (PD).
In a press release this morning, April 1, 2025, the Davis PD released the following statement:
“The past 12 hours have been a troubling time for our small town community. We went from having zero to six Anthony Padillas in mere moments, and we have the whole country’s eyes on us. We take our responsibility of finding Sacramento’s ‘emo golden boy’ very seriously.
As many of you would expect, naturally we checked the collar of the suspect’s shirts first, to see if their owners wrote their name on it. To our shock, each of the suspects had the initials ‘A.P.’ sewn into the collars of their shirts. We have reason to believe that some suspects either happened to share these initials, are affiliated with the Aeropostale clothing brand or took Advanced Placement biology in high school very seriously; There’s no way to know for sure.
We next tried to decipher the real Padilla from his tattoos, however, during the chaos, a broad-tip Sharpie marker was passed around amongst the contestants. Only time will tell which tattoos are truly permanent.
Late last night, we attempted to fly in some of Padilla’s close friends and family for questioning. Upon calling Padilla’s childhood best friend and co-owner of their company Smosh, Ian Hecox, he simply told us to ‘just pick one and mail him back to me.’”
A reporter asked if they checked each suspect for identification or driver’s licenses. Davis PD reported that they are in the process of investigation and appeared to nervously motion to one of their officers to go check. As of the date of publication, the identity of the real Anthony Padilla is still unknown. Campus officials are moving to ban both look-alike contests and Anthony Padilla from UC Davis, in hopes that nothing like this ever happens again.
Written by: Tara Romero— tcrome@ucdavis.edu
Disclaimer: (This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
