The Princess & The Rumor Mill

Up until a year ago, conspiracy theories about the Royal Family were reserved for the aunt you pretended not to know on Facebook. Her racist comments about Meghan Markle and insistences on a wide-scale cover-up of Princess Diana’s death served only as reminders to steer clear of the topic come Thanksgiving. But on Jan. 17, something changed: Kensington Palace announced Kate Middleton had undergone a surgery that would require her to be hospitalized for up to two weeks, and likely stay out of the public eye until after Easter. Of course, your aunt had her own theories. But this time, so did everyone else.

At first, suspicions seemed reasonable: The vague wording of “planned abdominal surgery” provokes more questions than it does answers. The recovery time didn’t square with the most likely procedures, nor the stamina of the woman who thrice cheerily waved in full glam on the steps of St. Mary’s Hospital hours after giving birth.

Soon, however, online chatter snowballed into accusations and whispers of divorce, decampment, domestic violence, and even near-death experiences. Not even an (admittedly Photoshopped) Mother’s Day photo or (annoyingly blurry) video of the royal could quiet the noise. Your most seemingly normal friend started posting side-by-side paparazzi photos of the Princess on Instagram Stories, and even you may have found yourself 15 videos deep into unconfirmed rumors about her marriage on TikTok.

But the story of Kate Middleton — who, it should be said, is probably (1) recovering out of the spotlight from (2) a planned abdominal surgery — isn’t really about Kate Middleton at all. While Royal women are no strangers to bearing the brunt of Buckingham Palace’s PR disasters, the sheer ubiquity of the discourse, and the palace’s inability to control it, has much more to do with us and how our distrust of news has gone mainstream.

In 2017, as then-President Donald Trump popularized cries of “fake news” for what he claimed was biased coverage from outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, trust in powerful institutions was waning in general. The New York Times published a bombshell report containing accusations of sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein that kicked off an overwhelming reckoning of women who came forward with their own stories that uncovered systemic abuse in the entertainment industry, politics, media, and beyond.

Instead of underscoring the importance of journalism, this domino of reports revealed that, in fact, institutions like movie studios and news outlets had been responsible for obscuring and perpetuating these crimes all along. For instance, NBC reportedly passed on journalist Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein report, which was later published in The New Yorker.

Prince Harry claimed that news stories are sometimes carefully planted by members’ press teams to hide and highlight certain issues and are not always altogether true.

Through this, individual voices were given new legitimacy, and social media (such as the hashtag #MeToo) became a tool to amplify them. While blind items — rumored stories that are reported with the subjects’ identities withheld — have existed for more than a century, they were a niche interest until social media accounts like DeuxMoi and sites like Crazy Days and Nights brought the practice mainstream.

Not only were the anonymous submissions claiming to have insider information on Hollywood’s seedy underbelly, but many ended up being legitimate. Reports of alleged abuse by actor Armie Hammer, for instance, were first amplified by DeuxMoi, only for more women, like creator Paige Lorenze, to step forward and put similar claims on record (Hammer has denied the accusations and was not charged over the allegations). Crazy Days and Nights, for its part, published one of the first puzzle pieces of the NXIVM scandal.

As the rumor mill continued to accurately foreshadow celebrity splits, new relationships, and on-set controversies, distrust in news reached an all-time high. A 2022 Pew survey found U.S. adults under 30 trusted information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets, and in the U.K, a 2023 King’s College London survey found that the U.K. had the second-lowest level of trust in the press of the 24 countries surveyed.

In January 2023, Prince Harry released Spare, a 416-page memoir that stoked suspicion about the Royal Family’s relationship with the British media. He claimed that news stories are sometimes carefully planted by members’ press teams to hide and highlight certain issues and are, according to Harry, not always altogether true — such as the “joint statement” he and Prince William released denying that the eldest brother had bullied the Sussexes out of the family.

This perfect storm has made it all but impossible for the Palace to be trusted with their own narrative, especially when it comes to the women. Markle has gone on to detail the ways she felt her mental health and safety were neglected by the Palace, and with this in mind, reexaminations of Princess Diana’s legacy poke holes in the reputation she had at the time as a petulant and erratic diva.

As general support for the monarchy dwindles, The Firm’s underestimation of its subjects’ intelligence and distrust has dug them an even deeper hole. If you “never complain, never explain,” as their PR strategy goes, then the vacuum gets filled by the public. If they’re going to confidently squash these rumors — as they seemingly attempted with reportedly leaked paparazzi photos, a reportedly staged farmer’s market appearance, and a happy-go-lucky Instagram post — then they need to have something better up their sleeves than a family photo in which Prince Louis is missing part of his finger.

Two things can be true: The Palace handled this situation poorly, but also, a video reportedly taken of Kate Middleton, featuring a woman who looks like Kate Middleton that bystanders claimed to be Kate Middleton, is probably the real Kate Middleton.

But it’s our own responsibility to know when our doubts have gone from responsibly skeptical to wildly unhinged. Two things can be true: The Palace handled this situation poorly, but also, a video reportedly taken of Kate Middleton, featuring a woman who looks like Kate Middleton that bystanders claimed to be Kate Middleton, is probably the real Kate Middleton.

And yet, enough people retweeted a post that accused the woman in the video of being a body double that even TMZ, the outlet that published the footage, began casting doubt on their own claims. The Royal Family may not be a fully reliable source, but neither are the tabloids.

Even if the Princess returns to public life after Easter as promised, the damage to the monarchy’s reputation has already been done. But if they can withstand the War of The Roses, then they can certainly withstand TikTok. The real problem is that no matter what institution becomes the subject of our distrust next, nothing, not even our own eyes, is enough for us anymore.