News about Colucci’s alleged death broke out and went viral in the entire world early last year after hackers gained access to Colucci’s reps’s email servers and impersonated them for journalists.

Colucci's manager, Justin Rosen, tells Outlook India with exclusivity that the artist was already having a hard time with his mental health while working in South Korea for the last three years.

The artist moved to South Korea and worked there for three years at a music company. He has recently terminated his work contract with the company, citing extreme bullying from his coworkers and discrimination.

According to his managers, the death rumours and conspiracy theories online surrounding his existence were the tipping point for him.

They blame the online trolls and those malicious members of the media for causing him trauma.

“When you think of online trolls and cyberbullies, you usually think of teenagers or middle-school children with lots of time on their hands and social media accounts. Never in a million years would you think of grown-ups, 30, 40-year-old self-titled "journalists," digging the web to find modelling pictures of a 16-year-old Colucci, photoshopping them to make them as unflattering as possible, and posting them on their social media accounts just to defame, humiliate, and bully him while falsely accusing him of things and using slurs to dehumanize him. That’s just evil. Only low-life adults would do such a thing. ”, says Alex Lee.

Lee states that he is the most insecure and sensitive boy in the world, and the online trolls and conspiracy theories just made things worse for him.

“He thinks of himself as the ugliest guy out there and has never been in a relationship because of it. His insecurities were at an all-time high while living in South Korea due to their strict beauty standards; therefore, he found peace in using a little bit of Photoshop in his pictures to make them more attractive and artsy, but when the journalists started saying all his pictures were generated by artificial intelligence, that drove his insecurities up through the roof. He will look at his past pictures and not recognize himself anymore. Thanks to them, he is suffering from detachment now”, says Lee.

The artist has been in the darkest place of his life in the past few months, according to his managers, but things took a darker turn when he tried and failed to take his own life on Christmas Eve.

The family had found a note he had written and left in his bed saying that the news articles saying he does not exist and he is an artificial intelligence-generated character was too much for him.

His managers will be filing lawsuits against the malicious individuals spreading false information online about Colucci in the following months, while he continues at the hospital to treat his mental health until he is fit again to come back to work and to social media.