Panic World - Whatever happened to Kate Middleton? (With Ellie Hall)

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Remember earlier this year, when people thought Kate Middleton was dead and or replaced by AI? What was up with that? We’re joined by Ellie Hall, a journalist with a focus on the British Royal Family, to trace the whole story behind #WhereIsKate—including a look at the interesting way that the Royal Family handles its press, the origins of all the conspiracy theories surrounding Kate, and who is/why did we ever need to care about the Marchioness of Cholmondeley? Our guest Ellie Hall is a reporter and Royal Family expert. You can find her (and her sweet golden retriever) everywhere @ellievhall.  Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is my sound okay? Do you need me to move? We're going to feed you and do an AI and make a model of your voice without reverb anyway, so it's fine. Yeah. You better not. You absolutely better not. You're going to be reading car commercials on the radio in about a couple weeks. Well, I mean, you've already been a head model in China, so I guess it's my turn to have something weird happen on the internet.

I sure. I sure have. Yeah. Today we're revisiting Kate Milton's disappearance, quote, unquote. I'm willing to bet some of you have already forgotten this happened, but. But back in the spring, this story was everywhere. Why did this blow up? What does this PR fiasco say about the state of our institutions?

Nothing good. Welcome to Panic World. A show about the various witch hunts, moral panics, and viral freakouts bubbling up out of the weirdest, most confusing corners of the internet. And joining me today is my lovely, dear friend and royal expert, extraordinaire, Ellie Hall. Hi, Ellie. Hello, thank you for having me. I'm always glad to help you with Royal Things. So, Ellie, can you just...

kind of walk us through how you fell down the royal rabbit hole. How did you become a reporter covering this stuff? Well, as you remember, early days, BuzzFeed, 2013, there were not many of us, and everyone was very happy to let me cover the royal family and make that my beat. If you can imagine that, crazy. I can't imagine that. Okay. So what really sets up this scandal is actually the last big royal scandal. William and Harry are brothers. Okay. They're the sons of Princess Diana. Harry marries Megan Markle, the lady from suits, and they're treated horribly by the British press. And the two of them get so tired of the tabloids and the infighting and the racism that they're experiencing in the UK that they flee the royal family entirely. Meanwhile, Will and Kate are the perfect royal couple.

And a lot of Megan and Harry fans feel like they either contributed to the racism and mistreatment by the UK press or at least allowed it to have. happen. Okay, so that's the prequel. That's the Star Wars text crawl here. So it came out earlier this year that Kate was one of the people that Megan was referring to in the Oprah interview who was worried about what color their child's skin would be. Basically, Kate was making comments where she was worried a royal wouldn't look white. So people really feel like Kate didn't do enough to help Megan and Kate might be a little bit racist. So that's the main source. of conflict between Harry and Megan stands and William and Kate's stands. Okay, so that's Kate's very broad background.

But when did all of this kick off? Okay. Before this whole thing started, Kate was seen walking to church on Christmas. And then we didn't see her at all. And then on January 17th, Kensington Palace, which Kensington Palace is William and Kate's press team. The King and Queens press team is Buckingham Palace. They don't work together.

And that's really obvious as this goes along. they announced that Kate had been hospitalized for planned abdominal surgery, and she would be in the hospital for about two weeks, and then she would go home and recover, and we probably wouldn't see her again until Easter. But there were some weird things going on while she was in the hospital because the king had to go to the hospital too. He had to get his prostate checked out,

and then we later found out he had cancer diagnosis. Okay, so Kate is absent from the public. After Christmas, King Charles goes into the hospital. It's like late January. And at this time, all we, the public knows that both King Charles and Kate are dealing with medical issues. But the way it's being communicated publicly is very different. And I think this sets the stage for everything that comes next. So, Ellie, the King's team is doing a good job keeping the public happy with his medical

issues. Why wasn't there a similar strategy for Kate? No. So the rural family does not have a centralized press operation. They tried it once in the past and it did not work. So what you have is each of the major players in the royal family are divided up into teams by who they're married. So it's pretty simple. You have the king and queen. Their press operations is Buckingham Palace. So if you see in the news, Buckingham Palace said that means that this is a story about the king and queen. Kensington Palace, which is Will and Kate's London home, where they live with their kids sometimes, that's William and Kate's press team. And if Prince Harry is to be believed in his memoir spare, There's a lot of infighting that goes on behind the scenes.

People backstab each other. And employees of one royal will very often feed the press information, bad information, about another royal, a royal they do not work for, in order to get their royal better press. So it's a whole thing behind the scenes. So every, like, group within the royal family has, like, its own Varies and Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, essentially? That's exactly it. Well done. Perfect. So once again, the King's team is doing a good job.

Everyone knows that King Charles has cancer, and it's not a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, no one is getting anything from Kate's team. The world has no answers, no explanation. And it's believed at this point that the King's team, his PR apparatus, sort of took a dig at how Kate's team was handling the situation. Is that right? When Buckingham Palace announced that the King had cancer, in that statement, They didn't reveal the King's diagnosis, which is a very important thing to keep in mind. But they said that they were releasing this information to prevent speculation, which that's a PR genius move.

Say, oh, we don't want people to speculate, but then don't tell them anything. I really, yeah, that's good. That's like, that's true for D. Chess. It's wonderful. I think that was a dig at Kensington Palace. I think that was them going like, yo, amateur hour over there. What's going on? Like what?

We don't know what's going on, but we can see. your comm strategy and we are not understanding what you're doing. And that includes the king not knowing what was going on with his own daughter-in-law. They kept this within a very tight circle of trust. They kept Kate's diagnosis. I would say probably fewer than 10 people knew. And the reason you can tell that is because it didn't leak. If they had told anyone in Buckingham Palace, it would have leaked.

And this sets up the conditions for everyone freaking out because there's this information gap, there's pettiness amongst the royals, and then, you know, an army of white ladies in their 30s with email jobs logged on and made everything much worse. So let's, before we get to this reaching escape velocity, can you sort of as simply and perhaps as politely as possible? Talk to us about the people who really care about the rural family because I, I've seen, so for listeners who don't know this, I used to live in London and I worked Harry and Megan's wedding. I was outside of Windsor all day in the hot sun, wearing a Union Jack Blazer and interviewing

people. And the best description I can come up with for people who really care about the rural family are like, you know, like in a horror movie when there's like haunted children in like a manor house? Yes. Oh, mommy. I've been trapped in this manor house for 400 years. Yes.

Please, free my soul, mommy. Come play with us, you know, like that kind of thing. Like that's sort of the vibe. Is that right? Would you say that that's sort of close? I would say that for some of the people who care about the royal family, that's very close. Because you have a lot of very old white ladies whose lives sort of revolve around the royal family, which, okay, good for them as long as you're not being racist towards Megan Markle online. You do you.

Which seems very difficult for them. It's quite difficult for them to do that, Ryan. I can tell you from experience. It's very difficult. You have a lot of, you know, people who's just are really into royalty. There's this whole group of people who will go into the mentions. If you ever refer to Kate as Kate Middleton and not Catherine or the Princess of Wales, you'll get a reply on Twitter saying, who's Kate Middleton?

There hasn't been a Kate Middleton since 2011. Don't you mean her highness, her royal highness, Catherine, the Princess of Wales? So there's some people who's like mission in life is to correct everyone on titles. Okay. Okay. Real feudal surf mindset happening on Royal Twitter, I see. So we have the Harry and Megan Defenders. They're also known as the Sussex Squad, correct? You're correct. Okay. Then we have sort of the mainstream royal fans, the haunted dolls that I mentioned earlier.

Yes. Okay. And within that is a subsection of people who's specifically like Kate Middleton. You got to understand that's a subset that can go two ways. there are the really crazy William and Kate stands. And then there are the people who just sort of are like, oh, we like Kate. She's a good mom. We like the clothing that she wears. So you've got sort of like the tame Kate fans.

And then you've got the really out there stands. So those are the core fan armies. And we also have the UK press who will become important in just a little bit. So we put together a timeline of sort of how this conspiracy. theory has spread. And I want to thank our fantastic researcher, Adam Boomis, for putting this together. He identified the first usage of the hashtag, Where is Kate? So it's from a, yeah, yeah. Oh, we're going, we're doing a full forensic analysis of this because it is extremely fascinating to me how this has spread. So the first instance of Where is Kate referring to Kate Middleton was on January 26th.

and it was from a user named I Love Lucci who wrote fingers and faces shoving incandescent rage screaming matches a sudden hospitalization a disappearance for months hashtag bulliam did something and like Harry Kate was told to shut up or else

she doesn't even have custody of her kids Charles does hashtag what will did hashtag where is Kate and then there's a animated gif of the Netflix reboot of Carmen San Diego with the caption, where in the world are you right now? Can you walk us through what that means? Explain all of that?

Yes. Oh, my God. This is, this is, I'm, I need to hug out of him the next time I see him. This is amazing. Okay, so I can tell you, just straight off, the person who wrote that is a Harry and Megan fan. They are not a regular royal family fan. You can tell that right off by the use of bullion.

So bullion is what a lot of people who only like Megan and Harry call William because, I don't know, let me see if you can stay with me here. You think he's a bully. Bullie, William. Bullying. Understandable. There we go. Yeah. And this is from, a lot of it's from how Harry described his brother in Spear.

And Spare is Harry's. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Spare is Harry's memoir.

Oh, sorry. He writes about a scene where William came to his house to have a talk with him about Megan. about like the Megan problem. And Harry was like, I don't, you're, you're going only off press reports of her. You're letting people influence you. This isn't what she's like. You need to chill out. And he walks into the kitchen to get a glass of water for his brother because his brother's

getting pretty feisty. And William grabs him and pushes him. Harry falls onto the floor onto a dog bowl, a ceramic dog bowl. The bowl breaks. And, oh, this is the dog bowl story. Yes. Yes, this is the dog bowl story. As I understand it, basically, this tweet was written by a Harry.

fan and they're describing William as a bully who's been accused of being violent in the past. And they're basically insinuating that it has, you know, he has something to do with Kate's disappearance. In a very strange little bit of irony, the people who really started these whispers about worrying about Kate's safety first were Harry and Megan stands. Were people who don't really like Kate because they think she might be a little racist. She wasn't nice enough to Megan. But because they follow all of this closely and they are inherent.

suspicious of the royal family and the royal family's press teams because of what they did to Harry and Megan, you started seeing people like this tweet you just quoted be like, okay, we don't like Kate, but there's something sketchy going on here. And there's a lot of other tweets of a similar nature going around at the same time. Starting on January 29th, though, that's when it does start to actually bubble up out of the fringes and starts to trend in the US on X. You said January 29th? January 29th is when the palace announced that Kate had left the hospital. So it makes sense that things would start bubbling up on the fringes around then.

So that's when the hashtag started to trend, at least in the U.S. on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. That makes sense, yeah. Cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool. So basically, so Kate leaves the hospital on the 29th and where's Kate starts trending? And what's really interesting is that there isn't a lot of notable online activity about this conspiracy theory. for about a month. So, Ellie, can you sort of explain to us what is going on in Meetspace, IRL, the real world,

like between late January and mid-February? So things keep coming, and we get a few media reports, one saying she's gone to Norfolk to have a holiday with her kids, and one saying that she's back. But normally, the British Chalbys will write about anything. They'll write about anything royal. will make things up. And they like to speculate.

So people started noticing, as January ended and we got it to February, there was no speculative coverage about what Kate might be up to. And nothing about her health, but also nothing, none of the kind of fluffy stories that you normally see about her in the tabloids, like how Kate's staying a hands-on mum while she recovers. They love. They love the Kate Mum stories. They do. Or like, what's Kate's favorite smoothie that she's drinking to recover?

Right. SIE, I.E, probably. Yes. You always see those kind of stories in the tablets and you didn't see any of them during this time. So people who follow the worlds were kind of like, what's up with this? Because if we're not used to this, we're used to all of these stories. And if Kate's not there to sell papers, shouldn't you be making up stories about Kate to sell papers? And that wasn't happening, which is very weird. And seems to be the engine that was driving a lot of the online theorizing. 100%. And like I said earlier, you know, Harry and Megan fans picked up on that first because they're used to assuming that something shady is going on at the palace or the palace is lying to them or something dark is happening behind the scenes. The next big moment in this sort of growing hysteria is what I'm going to refer to as the BBL tweet.

And it came out on February 27th by username Roast Malone, excellent excellent. username. Great name. And it is, the caption is, Kate Middleton hasn't been seen for about two months now. And then it's a screenshot of a Google search summary for Brazilian buttlift recovery time, which identifies it to be two to three months. And everyone's making jokes now. Like, I guess I can say this.

You know, I saw one that was like, King Charles wakes up from surgery and the doctors say, sir, you have a new butthole and he says, where did I get the new butthole from? And they say, well, Kate gave you the new butthole. It's a lot of stuff like that. I've actually seen people seriously think that Kate gave the King of Kidney. Well, I think this is important to note that these two

sort of halves of the discourse routinely intersect, because people cannot tell the difference between memes and real genuine posting anymore. The true breakthrough moment, though, happened a day

after the BBL tweet. And that was when the story was picked up by the most influential news organization of our time, Pop Crave. Of course. Yeah. So that's when we start to get memes. It's also when we start to get a lot of conspiracy theories. So, Ellie, I want to show you this is sort of when this makes the jump.

I'm going to send this to you. This was on March 4th. And this photo is allegedly of Kate Milton in a car with her mom. So can you sort of explain the process of how a photo like this enters the public sphere? I can. We reached the point online where everyone was worrying about Kate. And the palace had told us that they, in a very snarky sort of shame on you comment, on the record, which they rarely do, saying, we told you when Kate would be back in action, we're not changing that guidance.

You know, we're not going to give you a play-by-play commentary of our health. So they've responded to it, but obviously everyone really wants a picture. So this goes up on TMZ. It's Kate and her mom. Kate's mom is driving. Kate is in the front seat of the car. It's outside Windsor Castle. And they get this up fast.

It was taken Monday morning and it's up by Monday afternoon. And everyone starts freaking out because it doesn't really look like Kate. But here's the interesting thing. It goes on TeamZ, American site. E.T. Entertainment Tonight pays for it, too. No UK outlets run it. And what's more, you're seeing a lot of royal reporters in the UK

be very high-minded. Like, shame on you Americans for running it. We're not running it because we're protecting Kate's privacy. And we later learned because a royal reporter tweets something that the palace put extreme pressure on British outlets not to run the image. Why? Because it would violate Kate's privacy. And it's an unauthorized image.

Wow. the press really don't understand what's going on here. They're not airing the picture that's circulating online, which is, of course, going to feed conspiracy theories and just make everything worse. If I had to sum up this entire thing in one sentence, it would be they really don't understand what's going on here, huh? So it's interesting because the Royal Family Press apparatus,

they've told you this before. They don't care about the internet, right? Yeah. There was a thing that happened a few years ago where this random blog said that the queen had died. And it got so big online that it in and of itself became an actual story. So I reached out to Buckham Palace, talked to a dude. I was like, hey, you know, I have to reach out to you about this because it's going crazy around the world.

Major outlets are writing about it. Can't you just tell me that the queen is not dead? If you wink into the camera to let me know that the queen is not dead. Yeah, it was exactly like that. And they said, no, no, we do not want to set a precedent where we're going to respond to online gossip. We don't want to set a precedent where we're going to do what the internet wants us to do. So I went around and I got the prime minister to confirm that, like, he had had his weekly

call with her. So obviously she was a lot, what we think, she was alive to do that. I mean, it could be like a weekend of Bernie situation. I mean, you never know what these people. So everyone's calling it a weekend at Ball Moral because that's the name of their Scottish home, I see. The world's Scottish home. Yeah.

So the royal family doesn't respond to gossip normally. That's why I was really surprised, and people who follow the worlds were really surprised when they issued a statement at all to everybody saying that, you know, they're not going to give commentary on Kate's health. Kate's fine. This, everyone freaks out about this photo because it doesn't really look like her. And to be fair, it doesn't look like the Kate we're used to seeing. Her face is fuller, a little puffier. She's wearing sunglasses.

Her hair doesn't look the way it normally looks. And this is where you see the British royal family, one of the oldest institutions, one of the oldest monarchies in the world, realizing that they cannot handle the internet. You have people who are already predisposed to conspiracy theories about the royal family, specifically because of Princess Diana and this pervasive belief that the queen had something to do with her death. And then, you know, Prince Harry puts out his memoir, which reignites a lot of that for a new generation. But beyond Royal Watchers, you have a big population of people on the Internet who are obsessed with body doubles and crisis actors and are inherently suspicious of most institutions. And they're just sort of over in a corner ready to go. So whenever there's a question about someone in a photograph or whether a video is real or not, they notice immediately. 100%.

You also have a huge audience on TikTok. for true crime. So there's like this Gen Z fascination with, well, particularly missing women. And I don't think it's a huge stretch to connect what happened with Kate Middleton over the last couple of months with something like the Gabby Petito disappearance in 2021. If you don't remember, she was on vacation, vlogging her trip, you know, across national parks and she disappeared. And there was an online manhunt trying to figure out what happened with her.

And when this kind of thing happens, you get this explosion of interest from citizen journalists, which is sometimes good and sometimes very not good. So there's an absence of the normal sort of fluff pieces in the UK media. And this car photo was not run by the UK press, as you said. And it all just adds fuel to the fire. And you have this convergence of weird internet forces pushing this story further and further up in the discourse. Yeah, this happens. And it becomes very clear that this photo isn't sufficient.

We need real proof of life. Right. So they decide to post an Instagram photo. And we're going to get to that after the break. On a scale of 1 to 10, how desperate are you four or $5, Ryan? If I could go higher than 10, I'd say higher than 10. So if somebody listening to this wanted to give you $5, you would really owe them a lot. I would.

I would be forever in their debt. I am entirely crowd-funded, listener and reader-supported. So, yeah. If there's a Patreon subscriber in, let's say, Nebraska, who needs a ride to the airport, you will fly from New York to Nebraska, drive to their house,

pick them up, and drive them to the airport, because you personally owe every Patreon subscriber that kind of favor. Nebraska. Ugh. Yeah, that's fine. I'll, even Nebraska. That's a lot.

nothing's a short drive in Nebraska. That's the problem. But yeah, fair enough. Ryan, what's the details of our Patreon? Patreon.com slash panic world. So now it's time to talk about Kate Middleton's Instagram post. So how did this happen? All right.

So I can start, I'll give you, I'll give you by my little tinfoil theory. I think this all started with the TMZ photo. I think that the British press went to the pals and said, hey, there's this photo. Everybody in the world wants to see Kate, there's this photo. Just to make things really clear for people trying to follow this. We're talking about Will and Kate's press team. I think the palace said, hold your horses, get your front pages ready for Sunday,

which is Mother's Day in the UK. You're going to have an even better picture than this of Kate on Sunday. So just don't print this one. We got this. We're going to help you out. So it was about a week later after the TMZ photo. Yeah. On Sunday.

It was six days. yeah, it was Sunday. The photo went up on a Monday, and this is the next Sunday. This gorgeous photo of Kate looking like Kate, not looking like a wax figurine, goes up. She's sitting on a chair. Her three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis are around her. And Kate's got her arms around the two youngest ones who are sitting on the arms of the chair.

George has her arms over his mother, which, like, if I've had abdominal surgery, maybe I don't want my kid leaning on me, but that's just me. And I wouldn't be wearing skinny jeans. But again, I'm not going to tell Kate how to live her life. So this photo goes up. Everyone starts going, oh, look, she's great. She looks wonderful. She looks so healthy.

We don't have to worry about her anymore. And then people start looking really closely at the image. And not even really closely. People just zoom in on the image. And you start to see some very obvious signs of Photoshop. Part of Charlotte's sweater was missing. The pattern on Louis' jumper didn't line up. It was in a straight line.

And then all of a sudden you saw it. go up a little bit. Kate's hands around her children's waist were blurry. She wasn't wearing her wedding rings. And I got to tell you, this woman loves wearing her engagement ring, which was Princess Diana's engagement ring. And she wears her wedding band. So that was something everyone noticed at first. Like, where are the rings, Kate? And the closer you look, the more Photoshop errors you see. This is, I mean, it's amateur hour for the press team, but it's also amateur hour for whoever used Adobe Photoshop. And it seems like the real kind of, smoking gun of this was from fashion blogs, specifically the blogs that follow Kate Middleton's

outfits? Right. So these are blogs with names like dress like a duchess or what Kate wore. And literally everything that she ever wears on any engagement doesn't take within an hour for every single item to be identified. So people start looking and you see that in late November, she took her kids to a baby bank, which is sort of like a, it's sort of like a thrift shop, but you don't have to pay for it. People with kids come in and they can leave with supplies for their children and clothes and stuff like that.

So she took her kids there to help put together Christmas gifts, and they had a video of it that they released on YouTube. And Kate's wearing pretty similar outfit to what she was wearing on the day she did that video in the Mother's Day photo. And what's more, so are her kids. You look at the clothes her kids are wearing, and you see a few slight color variations. But the color variations look like maybe they were done in Photoshop if you look really closely at the Mother's Day photo. So there's a credible theory that the photo that they said was taken that week. Because that's another key thing. They say the Mother's Day photo was taken that week.

Then why are they wearing clothes that are very similar to what they wore in November? So that becomes a theory that gets a lot of discussion. I will identify one of the earlier accounts that sort of pointed out the Photoshop thing, which was an accountant called Truth Signal UK, which, Oh, God, him? Yeah. Can you tell us about Signal UK? I've gotten probably 150 tweets from him over the past week or so.

This is somebody who's really invested in this theory. I do not think this person is well. But, you know, you made sense. No, no, no. I think that's an important part of this, which is that. So, okay, so he tweeted, this was William's attempt to prove Kate is alive and with him. It's a Photoshop with fake Zim. fake Charlotte sleeve, fake Kate hand, fake Kate hair, and Louis crossed fingers, and wedding ring ripped off.

So here's the problem. This person is unwell and does seem to think that this is an AI generated image, which it's not, and that Kate is probably dead, which I don't think is true. But unfortunately, this very unwell person is correct about certain things. And I think that is sort of like the driving, like engine of this whole thing, which is that a lot of very very very, very unhinged people kind of got this right. That is the, you are completely correct. That is the thing that makes all of this so much more interesting and so much more insane and

so much more complicated. It's that like there's a massive chunk of people who are primed to think this way. And then we're like, yeah, that's a, that's a fake photo. And they were right. That's the thing. The photo they released was supposed to make everything better. It made it a million times worse. You cannot think of anything they could have done to give conspiracy theorists more credence.

If you have a situation where there are all these conspiracy theorists already saying things, do not release a photo that has obviously been edited, you idiots. Because this is proof, this is actual proof that they can cite, not crazy person proof, that there is a cover. So literally hours after this photo goes live, news agencies like the AP and Reuters issue a kill order, which if you are not familiar is essentially. an order that goes down from the top of an editorial institution that says you cannot use this material. And they cite the fact that it was heavily photoshopped, heavily edited.

And once again, I do not think this is AI generated because AI generation just doesn't work that way. You can't really use it the way that this would have been used. No. And I talked to the good folks at Bellingcat about this. And they told me it was not AI generated. It was bad. Here's a tip. If you're trying to figure out.

if it's bad Photoshop or bad AI generation, bad AI generation will be usually blue and orange because it's all trained on movie posters. So it is very hard to get a mid-jorney photo to not be overwhelmingly blue and orange. That's your first hint. The other one would be fingers, which the children are doing an impossibly weird thing with their hands for some reason, but that's not what an AI would do. In fact, an AI couldn't really do that. And then the other thing to keep in mind with an AI photo is that typically the AI gets lazier, the further from the center it gets.

So in most AI photos, if you look at the edges of the photo, the AI just sort of gives up and things aren't rendered. Whereas this photo has details in its corners. They just aren't correct for whatever is going on in the photo. No. So after the photo is released, people are tearing it apart. There's a whole new wave of conspiracy theories. And it also seems like the British press were particularly mad about this. Intentionally, unintentionally, who can say?

But they then do something that makes everything much, much harder to follow. And that means it's time to talk about everyone's new favorite royal character. And her name is, uh, how do I, Ellie, how do I pronounce this woman's name? Her maiden name is Rose Hanbury. Everyone calls her Rose Hanbury, but her correct name is Lady Sarah Rose Chumley, the Marchy Mess of Chumley. And in the most unlibellous way possible,

can you describe how she factors into this story over the next couple of days? I can't, because I have had to explain this in an unlibellous way a few times now. Since 2019, there have been rumors that were started by the British press, but then sort of got picked up on by people who follow gossip, that perhaps something happened between Rose and William,

and Kate found out about it, and Kate tried to kick Rose out of her social circle, and that didn't really work. So for about, I'd say, four or five months in 2019, the British press was doing a lot of really coded reporting, saying things like, there's been a falling out between Rose and Kate,

wonder why. Rose is such great friends with William. And then all of a sudden it stops. And there is a theory that has a pretty fair amount of evidence behind it that the royal family fed the media, particularly the tabloids, stories about Harry and Megan to get them to stand down on this story of a possible alleged affair between William and Rose. So this was for five months in 2019 and then everything sort of went away. I was not aware of this woman until the Independent on March 12th tweeted, The Marchness of Tumbly has been wildly hailed for her style over the years, drawing praise from her ensembles at events,

including the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. And then the thumbnail is her in like a weird hat, making a face that kind of looks like she just drank rotten milk. So the UK media brings this woman up out of the blue. People start to connect the dots. They remember that she is allegedly Prince William's affair partner, which she has denied many, many times. But obviously she gets sucked into the vortex of conspiracy theories circulating on the web right now. And that leads to more theorizing about everything.

There's a pretty active contingent to people who believe that this is all covered for a divorce, that William asked Kate for a divorce. and in December, and she went absolutely not. And this is all her staying out of the public eye as they negotiate. I do want to point out that the funniest thing that happened in this entire saga was that the media tension on Rose Hanbury made its way across the great firewall of China. And now Chinese internet users are very aware that her manor house appears to be full of stolen Chinese relics. And they're not happy about it. That's my favorite.

That's the funniest punchline of this entire thing. Is that the only real thing of consequence that has happened is that like a very very, rich British woman was outed as like a relic thief. Rose has never issued a statement before. Lady Gossip said she's not speaking out because of the rumors. She's speaking out because of the Chinese artifacts thing. Like she's so angry that they've messed it up so much with their PR that she's back in the New Year.

And now people know that she's in her husband's family have been stealing Chinese artifacts. That's why they have stolen Chinese artifacts. Now, that's a PR disaster. Okay. So that was one conspiracy theory, which was ignited by the British press mainly. But let's talk about what the internet was coming up with all on its own. So here's a TikTok. All right.

Oh, God. I'm just terrified. Actually pregnant with Thomas Kingston's baby. And this hospital stay is because they're forcing her to get. Oh, here we go. And that's why he apparently unaligned himself. Oh, God. I'm going to pause it because you got the gist.

So a lot of this is very confusing, and there is like a whole dimension involving a racist brooch and Megan Marco, which you can Google if you care about it. But the gist is that Thomas Kingston was a negotiator for the British Army. People believe that Kate had an affair with him and that she got pregnant and that he did not kill himself but was actually killed by William or a member of the royal family. none of this is true. All reports say that he did kill himself, but according to British media, William dropped out of the memorial service and his team issued a statement to the press saying that William isn't attending. But it's not because he had anything to do with Kingston's murder, which is like one of the craziest things I could ever imagine happening. and I don't know why they did that. And of course, it led to conspiracy theories like this one.

Why did they tell the press that? Oh, before you guys ask, he wasn't involved in Thomas Kingston's death. Anyways, uh, what that is, dude, the, the, the royal press team needs to all get fired. Like, this is crazy. Okay, wait, hold on. This is my favorite conspiracy about this whole thing. I think it's so good. So towards the end of this month, Obama was spot.

about it at, um, okay, Barack Obama showed up, uh, at Downing Street for probably a routine meeting. But there is a contingency of people online who believe that because Barack Obama has a, a law degree or is some sort of law professor, um, he has gone to the UK to deal with a constitutional crisis that has been triggered by Kate's disappearance. And that if Will possibly killed Kate, uh, that would cause some sort of, um, governmental crisis in the UK because Americans do not understand how British politics work. And so they believe that Barack Obama has been sent over to orchestrate what's going on here.

So people who were theorizing that William killed Kate think that there's some law that prevents someone from killing their wives becoming king, which history shows is absolutely not the case. I would say, I would say like the core project of the British royal family. from the beginning has to make it is to make it easier to divorce and or kill your wife. That is essentially the entire project of the British monarchy. So obviously, Americans haven't heard of Henry V.A. But anyway, so all of this is. So, okay, so take us through the moment the world learns about the cancer diagnosis. What does this do to the gossip, all the media coverage, the memes, the conspiracy theories?

What is the reaction? I will say about before in the hour leading up to it it was very interesting getting messages from people all over the world

like what's going on have you heard there's something about happened about Kate in an hour I would say the first reaction that a lot of people had even if they're now

saying not they don't feel guilty I think lots of people's first reaction was oh shit like oh man I

I'm going to hell. I think a lot of people's first knee-jerk reaction was, oh, God, we've been having so much fun with this, and it turns out this is a woman with cancer. Now, as I said, I think that was a need-drip reaction. I think, to be fair, you can't talk about this without talking about how the PR mess-ups made people even more interested in this and made people theorize even more. I mean, I think you make a really good point here, which is that, like, the dark reveal of what was actually happening. doesn't take away from how strange this is. And the internet does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, it's deeply reactionary.

It almost exclusively just reacts to things. Well, from the very beginning, the Buckingham Palace team, the King's team, were way more transparent about what exactly was going on with the King than the Kensington Palace team has been about what's going on with Kate.

So just to start, we didn't see him go in, but we saw the Queen, Camilla, visit him four times. And Kate was in the hospital for about two weeks, and we only saw William going to visit her one time. And then from there, Buckingham Palace put out a personalized statement from him, not just a press release saying, here's how he's doing. It was, thank you so much for all your good wishes. And the same thing happened when they announced his cancer diagnosis. And then we got a video on the official Buckingham Palace social media accounts of him reading

cards that members of the public had sent him. Oh, he got my card. Great. Oh, he got, yeah, he got your card. Those are be sweet of you, Ryan. I was like, I love how big your fingers are. Yeah, but anyway, so we were getting updates from the King. We were seeing him in public. And, you know, obviously there are these concerns about Kate's medical privacy and about, you know, just her own level of comfortableness.

But let's be real. A comms person could write up a statement from her or a letter from her and just post it without her even knowing that it happens. Like, there are things you can do to make it seem more personalized without involving the person who, you know, is recovering from surgery, say. Maybe you feel differently, but like, I put the blame on the PR team for making her go through this. I think that the PR team probably had a very different rollout strategy that they had. And I think that as soon as William and Kate got the news, and they've been running the show.

I just, that is what my instinct tells me that, you know, probably their head of PR who used to work for NBC Universal. Like, he's, he's a very experienced comms guy. I can see him, like, banging his head against the wall because they're saying, no, don't do anything, don't do this. We are going to take care of this ourselves and we're going to default to never complain, never explain. But obviously, you have the Mother's Day photo issue.

You can't look at that in any way except a huge, massive comms failure, even if only in that no one saw it. Like that seems like comms 101. Check to make sure there are no visible signs of Photoshop. The thing is, if you're a fan of Kate, you get really mad when you hear people start talking about PR. Their whole thing is everyone should feel very ashamed of themselves and you're evil and you're going to hell, which I also think a really important dimension here is the way we process

information, the way the average person gets their news is now inherently conspiratorial. You see it in bits and pieces across feet. and inboxes and in your phone and little fragments. And so you're forced to piece it together. So what it's done is it's made the act of piecing information together extremely fun. And the average person does not really care if that information is good or bad. So do you think people are going to stop spreading conspiracy theories? Do you think people are going to, like, do you think people believe that she has cancer and that this is what has happened?

I am very sorry to inform you about this, Ryan, but the internet loves a conspiracy theory. There are people who are claiming that the video of her on the bench was AI generated. I've seen this, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of speculation. AI cannot do that. The things that you think AI can do, it cannot do, it cannot generate a like hyper-realistic video of Kate Middleton on a bench.

It's just not possible. Yeah. And the internet does not like being told that there's, I go back and forth a lot about whether those people are telling the truth. Like the people that you see online talking about conspiracy theories, do they believe this? And I'm split between people just enjoy doing this. They're bored or people truly believe this stuff. And it could be a bit of both.

But it is extremely depressing how prevalent it is compared to even five or ten years ago. Like this is not a, this is, this is, this is not how it always was. Before we knew her diagnosis, when things were just crazy, people were making jokes. It was feeling more like a community of joking people and not, you know, an Elon Musk owned health site. You know, obviously that ended. Her diagnosis has made all of this different and it's made looking back on that time when the internet was fun.

We feel differently about that now because there's, is the question of were we doing this at the expense of a woman going through something absolutely horrible. And I think some people don't want to have to do that self-reflection. I don't think that some people want to ask themselves those hard questions. And it's much easier to not ask them if you continue from a place of doubt. If you continue from a place of, you know, oh, I don't believe she has cancer or, okay, well, maybe she has cancer, but they were still trying to pull the wool over our eyes with this and with this and there is still something going on. I think some of that is self-elage.

A website like X or TikTok has an algorithm that is looking for content that makes you emotional, reactive, angry, conspiratorial, and it goads you into making more of that content. So, you know, you post like Kate Middleton is a lizard person. And then it starts recommending you other people who are also saying Kate Middleton is a lizard person. And it is, I think, very hard to then publicly say, I don't think this. This isn't true because you start to feel like it has been tied to yourself worth because all the internet points that you're racking up, the retweets, the shares, the likes make you

feel good about this. It's like going into a casino and then being told, hey, all the money you just made isn't real. And as you can see from the world of cryptocurrency, people do not accept that the money they've made is not real. They have to double down. They have to triple down and say, no, like, this is my whole life now. Because I think it's psychologically very difficult to pull out. So there is a doppelganger theory that a fake Kate has been used in all of the images

and video that we've seen of Kate up until the bench video. And the funny thing is, because the UK is a crazy place, there are people who have a career being doppelgangers for the royal family. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, that is a thing. That is a real thing. People called up some of the more famous ones and were like, was that you? And they said, no, that wasn't me. I was doing like a birthday party in Shropshire at the time. So lots of people think that either the royal family or the media have been hiring fake kates

and putting them out there to try to get all the discussion to go away and to try to calm everything down. BBC is Mariana Springer. I think that's her name. She does disinformation reporting for the BBC. She reached out and talked to a bunch of TikTok people who are making doppelganger videos. And they have a discussion similar to the one you just had. Some people who are very openly admitting, like, nope, I'm going to keep going with this because I have suspicions and so do my followers.

And this is good. The algorithm is rewarding this. I do think we're probably going to look back on this, this incident. as a real turning point for a certain kind of internet usage because there is no way we can pretend that conspiracy theories are for like, you know, the Qaedaan shaman storming the capital. They're for everybody.

They're for the average reader of the Daily Mail Celebrity section. This is not a niche problem. This is something that you and your mom could talk about together. This is a mainstream thing, and I don't think you can turn the dial back on that. Yeah. And what we found out now that is fascinating, especially because it concerns an institution as old as the British monarchy. What we've found now is that it can affect everyone. I can't tell you how insane it is as someone who's covered the royal family for 11 years now, that they have responded both in statements and in action to what is essentially online gossip. It's funny you say that. The model of internet development, I see. subscribe to is this idea that the internet is evolving as real world institutions buckle underneath

it and get absorbed into it. You know, first you have the media and it gets uploaded. Then you have the music industry and it gets uploaded and Lars Ulrich freaks out at Congress or whatever. Then you have protests and they get uploaded, Occupy, Arab Spring. Then you have politics, Donald Trump. Then you have finance with the GameStop pump, crypto, Web 3. All of these very old analog institutions get absorbed into the.

the internet and now we're seeing what happens when that same process is applied to monarchies. It's it it's the same thing every time. There's a flurry of discourse and memes and conspiracy theories and everyone freaks out and it's kind of funny and then it gets way too dark, way too fast. And eventually there just won't be any more institutions that need to go through this process, which is, you know, a brave new world that I'm very excited to check out. Me too, man. I never thought that something like this would affect the royal family.

So in such a profound, insane, precedent-changing way. If this is what we've got to do to get those Chinese relics back in China, that's all that matters. Ellie, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing with us your fantastic, deep knowledge about this subject. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? you can follow me on Twitter or X at Ellie V Hall. I post all my stories there. And yeah,

if you want to follow the insane royal updates or see pictures of a cute golden retriever. If you want to send Ellie proof that Kate Milton has been replaced with a lizard person, her DMs are open, and just fire away. Just flood that inbox. People have been sending me emails.

I've never been sorry or that I have my email address in my Twitter bio because people, and God bless, And Ellie's phone number is... Don't you dare. Thanks, Ellie. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Panic World is a Garbage Day production.

You can subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by me, Ryan Broderick, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. Video editing by Kat Rasek. And our incredibly derange logo was drawn by Gabby Cash. If you want to give us $5 a month, you can do that at Patreon. com slash panic world and in return will give you more content to consume. If you want to buy an ad on the show or sponsor it in any way, you can contact the fine folks at multitude at multitude.

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