Kate Middleton is dead. Kate Middleton is recovering from a BBL. Kate Middleton is getting a divorce from her husband, Prince William, who killed one of his relatives with a shotgun the other day. All of these are rumors that have circulated online in recent weeks because Kate Middleton has not been seen in public for months, following an abdominal surgery. Nonsense, sure. The kind of thing that is easy enough to ignore if you don’t suffer from conspiracy brain and don’t care to keep up with the business of the royal family.
But a photo released Sunday by the palace of Kate and her three children, supposedly taken by William, means that I now feel duty bound to wade in, teeth gritted, to try to explain what the hell is going on with William and Kate. Because it has gotten very, very weird, ever more by the day.
So: a very brief précis of events up until yesterday. (If you want more detail, you can get it in my colleague Heather Schwedel’s thorough explanation here.) In January, the palace announced that Kate Middleton would be having a planned abdominal surgery and that she would then spend the next few months recovering at home and absenting herself from royal duties. Since then, she hasn’t been seen in public. This is not incredibly weird, although it is a little surprising—not so much as a snap of her leaving hospital, and you can bet that if the press were able to get those pictures, they’d have got them. These people are surveilled by the media up to the nines. This, in conjunction with William canceling events at the last minute and showing up in public with what seem to be bruises on his neck shortly after another member of the royal family was found dead, has been a perfect feast for people online to start going loco with conspiracy theories about what is going on in William and Kate’s marriage and in the royal family in general.
Then, on Sunday, an Instagram post went up on William and Kate’s official page, for Mother’s Day (only in the U.K.—don’t panic). The picture shows Kate sat down outside, flanked by her three children, and they’re all beaming in a way that suggests that nobody is dead or divorced.
The caption reads:
Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months.
Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day. C
📸 The Prince of Wales, 2024
So, supposedly, William took this photograph himself. But it seems like a pretty transparent attempt by the palace to put a damper on the conspiracy theories: “Look, here she is—are you happy now?”
People were not happy. Immediately, comments flooded in claiming that the image had been photoshopped. Initially, I saw this and felt annoyed—big surprise, the royal family touch up their official images. Given the circumstances, it’s not ideal from an optics perspective that she’s not wearing her wedding ring, but that could be for any number of reasons. Swelling after a significant surgery, for instance! People were saying that the children’s fingers are doing odd things, and therefore the image must be A.I. But children do weird things with their fingers. So what? I did not want to get sucked into the orbit of the tinfoil-hat brigade.
But I thought I would do my due diligence and ask some photographer friends what they thought of the picture. I was sort of hoping they would say, “Oh, yeah, just some routine editing mistakes here, nothing out of the ordinary,” and I could put this whole thing to rest. That is not what they said. They pointed out multiple places where the image didn’t make sense. The inexplicable blurriness of Kate’s hair and one of her hands, tiles not matching up on the floor beneath their feet, a truly hatchet bit of photoshopping around Princess Charlotte’s sleeve. “These are such basic mistakes,” one person said, “that there is something fishy happening here.” Another photographer said: “It’s mad how bad it is. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on her face being switched in it.”
Then, at around 10:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday, something truly unprecedented happened. Reuters, Getty, and the Associated Press all pulled the image. A notification from AP read: “At closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image.” The palace has also refused to offer any comment at the time of writing. (Update, March 11, 2024: Kensington Palace released a statement from Middleton on Monday: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”)
For an image issued by the palace to be so cack-handedly doctored that it has to be pulled from international news organizations is a big deal. Why, given that the palace are well aware of the frenzied speculation about what is going on with Kate Middleton, would they release a heavily manipulated photograph of her? Was this not a moment, above all others, to put out something unimpeachable?
Is this just incompetence? Is there a social media officer at Kensington Palace packing up their desk as we speak? Maybe. But my God. It is of course still perfectly possible—probable, even—that Kate Middleton is just having a rough time recovering from a significant medical procedure and wants to be left alone. Fine. But the royals have made an extraordinarily stupid mistake releasing this picture in that case. Nothing could have been better designed to stoke the flames of people being mental online about Kate Middleton than a clearly edited photograph of her.
To be clear, I don’t think Middleton is dead or has run away or is now the proud owner of a brand-new ass. But whatever it is that’s going on here, it is now, clearly, something.
For more on Kate Middleton’s ongoing absence and the internet speculation around it, listen to Imogen West-Knights on What Next, Slate’s daily news podcast.
