Lauren Murphy
Take your pick of the hashtags: there’s #KateGate, #Katespiracy or the cut-tothe-chase #WhereIsKate. Whether you intended to or not, you may have already lost several days of your life venturing down the royal rabbit hole, regarding the Princess of Wales’s whereabouts.
Even Kristi Cook, the American vlogger and pop culture enthusiast best known as Spill Sesh, has become wrapped up in the multitude of online theories.
The Los Angeles-based Cook, who finally revealed her face last November after five years of anonymous “tea spilling” on YouTube, agreed that the American obsession with the British royal family has gained legs ever since Meghan Markle began dating Prince Harry.
“They’re probably just so happy to be away from all of that right now, and that the conversation is not about them – for once,” she said.
Cook, who has 710,000 subscribers and 347 million views on YouTube, said the interest in this story has been “crazy”.
She speculates that a combination of “Megxit” and Netflix series The Crown has raised Americans’ awareness of the potential for drama with the British royals.
“I’m not one to ever really cover the royal family, but everyone is hearing about it, whether they want to or not,” Cook said.
“And I think people just get so drawn to hearing about something that is so different from how things are in the US; they’re just fascinated about how it all works. Plus, we love gossip and there’s plenty of that happening over there.”
When a story involving a high-profile figure begins to snowball on social media, it can become difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Cook, a former staffer for gossip site TMZ before she began making her own YouTube videos commenting on celebrity stories, is familiar with how the industry works – but the speed at which this story has developed has surprised even her.
She said the chatter started last month when Prince William was supposed to go to his godfather’s funeral but cancelled because of a “personal matter”.
“That’s when people started to really talk,” said Cook. “People began saying, ‘Hmm… they said that Kate was doing well, but what’s really going on here? What are they not telling everyone?’.”
The Mother’s Day photo-editing furore was an obvious tipping point in the story, and was what inspired Cook to cover it on her YouTube channel.
She said she was willing to accept the whole thing as a bungled PR job until that point.
“But this Photoshopped photo is so crazy to me. This is what really got me thinking, ‘There is something going on’. I don’t know why they didn’t just say, ‘Happy Mother’s Day – this is an old photo’, or something like that,” Cook said.
“Yes, people would be questioning that, too – but to try and say that the photo that was issued was recent, and then for it to be so heavily Photoshopped and edited to the point that AP is retracting the image… that is such a big deal.
“And then for the statement to come out where Kate said, ‘Oh, I’m just playing with Photoshop’ – it wasn’t just a slimming of the jaw, or ‘let me cinch my waist’-type Photoshop. Why were they messing with the windows? Why are they messing with the kids’ clothes? So that statement really had me buying into the conspiracy theories.”
The image of Kate and her three children spawned a plethora of wacky hypotheses, including one that her face from a Vogue cover shoot from last year was superimposed on to the image.
“I’ve seen that [Vogue] theory, but she was wearing a hat in that cover photo and that would be a very hard Photoshop job,” said Cook.
“But I’ve seen another TikTok about the fact that someone had found photos from last November where Kate was out with two of her children, and they all seemed to be in the same clothes that they’re wearing in the Mother’s Day photo, but they’re different colours. I was sold on that theory – they were even wearing the same shoes.”
Cook said it is human nature to be pulled along and swept up in these sorts of gossipy celeb stories that can provide a moment of levity for Joe Soap on the commute or around the office watercooler.
She said it could all be entirely innocent, but the way Kensington Palace is handling it is certainly not helping.
Cook recalled some of the more bonkers (and at least, less sinister) theories out there, including one that Kate cut herself a bad fringe and is in hiding until it grows out again, or that she was part of the recent disastrous “Willy Wonka Experience” in Glasgow.
So, does Cook believe there’s ultimately going to be a happy ending to this story?
“I hope so,” she said. “I hope at Easter, everything is fine.
“If they have the family photo op and all seems well, maybe we’ll never know what happened during this strange period of time.
“Or maybe not… maybe we’ll find out something else that’ll be a giant bombshell.
“I think all we can do is wait.”
“One of the theories out there is that Kate cut herself a bad fringe and is in hiding until it grows out again”