episode 6: Meghan Markle’s Pregnancy Truthers

[00:00:00] KATE MIDDLETON:
I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you personally for all the wonderful messages of support and for your understanding whilst I've been recovering from surgery.

[00:00:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
On March 22, 2024, the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, released a video statement informing the world that she'd been diagnosed with cancer. In it, she looks polished, poised, and understandably exhausted. Her private health crisis had snowballed into a royal PR disaster. For weeks, practically all anyone was talking about was her: Where is Kate? To the point that some folks even doubted it was her in that video. Was it real, or was it AI?

[00:00:59] ELLIE HALL:
And this is the first time, really, that there have been conspiracy theories about Kate, and I think that's something the palace cannot deal with. It's definitely something the British press is not prepared to deal with.

[00:01:32] CRISTEN CONGER:
I interviewed Ellie the day before Kensington Palace released that video statement. At that point, speculation about Kate Middleton's whereabouts was still raging out of palace control. And we will circle back on that later. But Ellie wasn't here to talk Kate.

[00:01:54] ELLIE HALL:
The Venn diagram between Meghan pregnancy truthers and people who think Meghan is behind the whole online chaos about Kate Middleton being missing is a circle.

[00:02:06] CRISTEN CONGER:
You heard that right: Meghan pregnancy truthers.

Pregnancy truthers made a cameo in episode three on Beyoncé's Illuminati mess, but Queen B's bump deniers seem laid back in comparison to the pregnancy truthers who call Meghan Markle the Duchess of Deception.

This is Conspiracy She Wrote. I'm Cristen Conger. Grab your red string and follow along…

So, British tabloids obviously love spreading royal gossip. Do they also play a role in spreading outright conspiracy theories about the royals?

[00:02:59] ELLIE HALL:
Well, so here's the thing. UK law about what you can print and what you can't print is different from the United States. That's why you always see celebrities who don't like things that have been published about them—they sue in the UK because the laws are much better there for people who think they've been slandered or libeled.

[00:03:17] CRISTEN CONGER:
The main reason for this is burden of proof. In the U.S., if you want to sue a publication or author for libel, the burden of proof is on you. And the higher your public profile, the harder it is to prove. In the UK, it's the reverse. Sue a tabloid for libel, and the burden of proof is on them. Even if you're rich and famous, UK libel laws tend to favor personal reputation over freedom of the press.

For one ridiculous-sounding example, in 2009, Kate Winslet sued the Daily Mail for saying she lied about her workout regimen, consisting only of at-home Pilates videos. On the flip side, in 2014, Cambridge University Press opted not to publish a book about Vladimir Putin in England for fear of lawsuit-baiting Russian oligarchs.

[00:04:31] ELLIE HALL:
So, what the tabloids do is they hint at things. They can't say things outright, but they will give an impression about something or report a story in one way that's really shady, but the whole point is reading between the lines. You can get what the meaning they're going for is. The best example of this is how the tabloids have covered, ostensibly, Prince William having an affair. They have done a very shady job of just reporting on it, but they've never said the word and stuff. So, yeah, British tabloids sometimes are very out in the open about how they feel, and sometimes they are not.

[00:05:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
Sounds like a lot of innuendo.

[00:05:12] ELLIE HALL:
Tons of innuendo. And, you know, particularly with Meghan Markle, it was really—you could see they were talking about the fact that she was a biracial woman. And that was right from the very beginning. I mean, if you follow the royal family, everybody remembers the Daily Mail headline that said "Harry's girl is straight out of Compton." There was an editorial about how Meghan would bring exotic DNA into the royal family. Lots of stories about how her mother, Doria Ragland, had dreadlocks and a nose ring and what Doria Ragland would look like as a member of the extended royal family if her daughter married Harry. That kind of stuff.

[00:05:48] CRISTEN CONGER:
The royal family doesn't control the press, but it's far from powerless when it comes to coverage and media narratives. Ellie says that traditionally, there has been a so-called invisible contract between the royal family and the UK press. And the unspoken terms can be summed up as "we pay, you pose."

[00:06:16] ELLIE HALL:
Royal reporting is weird because no one ever goes on the record. It is very, very rare to get someone from a palace press team to go on the record. Instead, you will have people on the press team briefing reporters and giving them information, but they're not allowed to say it came from a press officer. They will quote it to, you know, a palace insider or a source close to the royal family. And that's also why, when you see stories about the royal family, you'll see phrases like "this reporter understands" or "we can confirm." They're passive. And that's what makes it easier for these sorts of scurrilous stories, like what we saw about Meghan Markle for years, to get published because there's so much plausible deniability for the people within the palace. They say, "Oh, it wasn't me. I'm not this palace insider. You know, I didn't talk to anybody. You can't blame this on me." So it makes life difficult for readers because you don't know who to trust. And it makes it very easy for you to start buying into all of these theories and narratives that the press is propagating.

And, you know, one of the best examples of that when it comes to Meghan Markle is this idea that she's a bully, and she's mean and everything. Those stories—they were the first really big negative stories about Meghan because there was all this good press about the wedding and the first charity events that she did. When people started to complain about how she was as a boss, that was the beginning of the end.

[00:07:42] CRISTEN CONGER:
That beginning of the end arrived in late 2018. The Daily Mail published a sprawling story headlined, and buckle up because the Daily Mail loves a long headline: "Getting up at 5am, bombarding aides with texts and her eyebrow-raising fashion: Palace insiders reveal how Hurricane Meghan is shaking up the royals six months after the wedding." I mean, basically, the whole article is in that headline, but what do we mean by "palace insiders"?

[00:08:24] ELLIE HALL:
You can never really know where a royal story is coming from. And if Prince Harry is to be believed, people in different press offices will feed bad stories about certain members of the royal family to the press because another strange thing about palace press coverage is it's not one big team.

You know, you have William and Kate have their own press team. Charles and Camilla, the King and Queen, have their own press team. When the late Queen was alive, she had her own press team. So, everybody's working for different people. Everyone has different agendas. And they're always trying to get the best press coverage and get their—they call the royals "principals"—get their principals in the paper more.

So, it's Machiavellian. It's backstabbing. It's just a really, really weird press environment and media ecosystem. In the Oprah interview, one of the things Meghan said that's being brought up again and again now is that the royal press officers were willing to lie to protect other members of the royal family, but they weren't willing to tell the truth to protect Meghan and Harry from this bad press—this press that inspired conspiracy theories and honestly this press that inspired violence, like social media language and shit, violent language but also real violent threats towards Meghan.

[00:09:44] CRISTEN CONGER:
According to anti-Meghan conspiracy theorists, what kind of power do they think she wields?

[00:09:52] ELLIE HALL:
Like most conspiracy theories, there is this idea that the evil person—the person who is hated and at the center of this conspiracy theory—is always working to destabilize the people they don't like, is always conspiring. One thing you see online amongst people who really hate Meghan Markle is this theory that she's got 20 Twitter burner accounts, and she's following everything that she says and, you know, she's intervening to get this YouTuber who says mean stuff about Meghan Markle taken offline, which—no, she's got better things to do than that. Um, and you also have this idea that she is actively conspiring to bring down the royal family.

So, they think Meghan is a narcissistic, conniving mastermind behind everything that goes wrong with the royal family. And that's not true. And also that she pays obsessive attention. But you also start seeing some of those racist tropes circulating amongst these fans. One of the ones that I see over and over again is this idea that Meghan gets violent whenever there's good press about Kate.

[00:11:02] CRISTEN CONGER:
For example, Meghan Truther's dog whistle with dishes. Like, dishes are flying in Montecito. Wink, wink.

[00:11:13] ELLIE HALL:
To answer your question, people ascribe a lot of sinister power to Meghan Markle.

[00:11:18] CRISTEN CONGER:
Once Meghan and Harry's relationship goes public, how long did it take for actual Meghan Markle conspiracy theories to start popping up?

[00:11:30] ELLIE HALL:
It didn't take very long for conspiracy theories to start popping up and for people to start creating their own narratives about Meghan based on the stories that were coming out of the press. So, very quickly, um, when these stories about Meghan being a workplace bully came out, that started this idea of Meghan as—can I curse?

[00:11:50] CRISTEN CONGER:
Oh yes, yes.

[00:11:51] ELLIE HALL:
Okay. Um, Meghan—Meghan as a super bitch—that she, you know, was a horrible boss. She was sending emails at 5 a.m. and expecting too much and making people cry. So immediately this sort of counter-narrative of Meghan as an angry Black woman started being perpetuated in the press, and from there, everything just got insane. Really, we start getting into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff when she got pregnant because almost immediately, this theory started that she was faking her pregnancy. And this was based on people literally going frame by frame, looking at her stomach, looking at pictures of her stomach, looking at videos of her stomach, and saying that it was a moon bump—that she was wearing a prosthetic belly.

[00:12:39] YOUTUBER 1:
Hey everyone. So in today's video, I'm going to be talking about Meghan Markle and her pregnancies. Were they real or were they not?

[00:12:49] YOUTUBER 2:
When I was pregnant, I always kept my belly covered. Whereas Meghan was always exposing her belly.

[00:12:55] YOUTUBER 3:
I think that if Meghan was to actually get pregnant, this would have been to ensnare Harry, no other way about it—a royal child.

[00:13:27] ELLIE HALL:
And then once that got started, that hasn't died. That's still a big thing. And it's something that continued with Meghan's second pregnancy.

I've only gotten a few emails over the years from people trying to convince me that Kate Middleton was never pregnant. There's a very small group of people who believe that, but they're not vocal, and there's never been any big movement, you know, to seek the truth about Kate Middleton's pregnancies. I mean, royal pregnancies are always watched closely; royal babies are always huge news, but there's never been anything to this level about whether royal children were actually royal children. There's never been anything about surrogacy or anything like that. This happens for other celebrities. We've obviously—we've all heard of these pregnancy truther things with Beyoncé and other people, but it's never happened for the royal family before.

[00:14:16] CRISTEN CONGER:
It's time for a quick break. And when we come back, we're heading down the Meghan pregnancy truthers rabbit hole.

AD BREAK 1

[00:14:45] CRISTEN CONGER:
We're back with freelance royal reporter Ellie Hall. How did Meghan Markle pregnancy truthers first get activated?

[00:14:45] ELLIE HALL:
Her pregnancy announcement. That's the thing. Just when they announced that she was pregnant, it became part of the negative coverage around Meghan. You know, people were saying, "Oh, she's old. Would she really be having a pregnancy right now?" Immediately, there were rumors about whether she was using a surrogate. And once she started to show, that was when the fake pregnancy truthers started.

[00:15:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
The more visible Meghan's pregnant belly grew, the more obsessively it was surveilled. Case in point: A very pregnant Meghan's charity visit to an animal shelter in January 2019.

[00:15:26] YOUTUBER 2:
Do you see how big her belly is? Where did her belly go when she's leaning over trying to pet that dog? The dog doesn't even trust her in that photo.

[00:15:37] ELLIE HALL:
The story that has been my biggest royal story was a comparison of headlines about Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton. One of the first comparisons was Kate got pregnant—good press. And it was cute when Kate put her hand on her stomach when she was pregnant. But with Meghan, it was like, "ego," "a new age bonding technique," you know, "narcissism," "self-centeredness," all of that stuff.

But just what I'm getting at here is, besides the fact that Kate wore heels throughout her entire pregnancy, that was something that these Meghan Markle pregnancy truthers jumped on. Like, when I was pregnant, I couldn't wear heels. How could Meghan walk in heels? She has to be faking her pregnancy, all of that. From the very beginning, there were people who wanted to doubt Meghan's pregnancy for some reason. And I can't really pinpoint if there was any moment that all of these conspiracy theories started besides her pregnancy being announced. People were lined up and ready to go for this. I don't know.

[00:16:40] CRISTEN CONGER:
And who are these people?

[00:16:42] ELLIE HALL:
These people, for the most part, based on, sadly, my extensive research into Meghan Markle haters online, tend to be old white women. These women are in their 60s; that's pretty much a good age group, but 45 and up. You'll see a lot of people, especially when it comes to the pregnancy stuff, say, "You know, when I was pregnant 35 years ago, I did X, Y, Z," or "I couldn't do X, Y, Z." So you can sort of get a sense of their age by what they say. It's a very specific type of online person—people who are susceptible to things that are obviously faked, like photoshopped tweets that claim something about Meghan. You see lots of younger people who don't like Meghan.

But when it comes to pregnancy truthers, for the most part, the younger royal followers who don't like Meghan, they think the pregnancy truthers are just as insane as everyone else because it's such a crazy narrative. And also, there's the objective point that if Meghan had faked the pregnancies, it would have come out. Like, let's be real now. The British press wouldn't cover that up. It's not like someone would have reported that by now. If she had used a surrogate, someone would have reported that by now, but, you know, you can't apply logic to people who believe in conspiracy theories. Every piece of information that you put forward to try to disprove something, they'll say, "No, actually, this is actually proof. This proves my point. You're so wrong." But yeah, mostly older white women who are not very internet savvy. And the weirdest thing that's happened over the past few years is that pregnancy truthers have started congregating on YouTube.

[00:18:19] YOUTUBER 3:
Yeah, we've reached 100,000 subscribers for this community! 100,000! All unearthed in this community!

[00:18:28] ELLIE HALL:
It's really interesting to me. You don't see YouTube channels, for the most part, that are pro-Meghan. And all of these people have started to build online careers from trashing Meghan in all of their videos. And many of them have monetized their accounts, so they're literally getting paid to raise questions—ask questions—about Meghan Markle's pregnancies.

[00:19:05] YOUTUBER 3:
Thank you so much for the $3.99 sugar box. They're my favorite. Yay!

[00:19:08] ELLIE HALL:
And you even see some people who appear in the media, who will appear on British media channels or be quoted in papers, who are doing this. One person is a woman named—she's a huge grifter. She has never explicitly said that Meghan faked her pregnancies, but she will mention things like, "Oh, isn't it interesting that the birth announcement used this language instead of that language." Total dog whistles. And all the pregnancy truthers follow her. But, I mean, she's appeared on British TV channels, and she's been quoted as a royal expert in these tabloid stories. And yet she's attracting these crazy people because she knows if she leans into the pregnancy truther—even without saying it explicitly—she'll get a lot of followers. She'll get more clicks on her YouTube videos.

But it's such a problem that YouTube had to go into the search results and de-rank these videos from these creators who were making videos about Meghan Markle pregnancy truthers to make them go down because they were the ones coming up in search. It's ridiculous. You will see all of these mostly older white women talking about how Meghan is evil and how she faked her pregnancies and how she used a surrogate or how Meghan doesn't even have any kids and she has borrowed children from people to use in her photographs of the people who are ostensibly her children. And she used a doll when she appeared before the cameras with her son, Archie, when she and Harry posed for the photos like the royals do. That was actually a doll.

[00:20:38] CRISTEN CONGER:
In 2022, Ellie's investigative reporting identified someone else who'd been fanning the truther flames.

[00:20:48] ELLIE HALL:
I did a story about how Meghan's half-sister, Samantha Markle, was talking to some of these pregnancy truthers, and Samantha was raising questions about Meghan's pregnancies and saying, like, "Oh, my father told me, you know, she did IVF, and she picked out her eggs," and stuff like that.

[00:21:04] CRISTEN CONGER:
Ellie interviewed the biggest YouTube pregnancy truther at the time, who'd been in contact with Samantha.

[00:21:12] ELLIE HALL:
As a result of that interview, and as a result of me absolutely bugging YouTube's press people to get them on the record about her content, her account got deactivated, and she is banned from YouTube, and she cannot make another account. But yeah, people are still very mad at that.

[00:21:30] CRISTEN CONGER:
Why are they so invested?

[00:21:34] ELLIE HALL:
So, they say they are invested because it has to do with the integrity of the royal family—that the royal family is so important and particularly the line of succession is so important. There is this little bit of language in UK law that says that all heirs who inherit titles must be born "of the body." And there's actually been an example in a British court where—I can't remember the title—it might've been a Viscount. I'm not sure, but the son of a peer wasn't allowed to inherit his father's title because he had been born by a surrogate and not "of the body" of his mother. So, there is a question about whether a child born by a surrogate could ever become the monarch of the United Kingdom.

And let's be real: The crown is never going to get to Harry. Like, we know. Nothing's going to happen. It's going to go to William, and then it's going to go to George. That's how—I mean, if the monarchy is still around by that time. But the big thing, how they justify this pregnancy truther shit and convince themselves that they're doing a good thing, is that Archie and Lilibet, they're either not really Harry and Meghan's kids, or they were born by a surrogate. So, they need to be removed from the line of succession for the good of the British royal family and the good of the realm and everything like that.

But one of the things that I think is a huge factor in all of this is Prince Harry was an object of adoration and fandom for a long time. And I think even if it's subliminally, a lot of these women thought, like, "Oh, you know, maybe one day I could marry Harry."

[00:23:23] PRINCE HARRY NEWS CLIP:
I know you don't want to have a wind at the press and make—because I know that you realize it's part of who you are to have interest in you, but it's not just you that is affected; it's obviously anyone you're with, particularly a girlfriend, your girlfriend. How do they react? Do you feel protective towards them?

Hugely protective. I would be very concerned if I wasn't protective. Obviously, it is part of my life. It's something that—it's part of the baggage that comes with me, and she understands that, and my friends understand that as well. But I think it's fair to say that that is something that comes with me, but also the lies isn't something that comes with me. That is something that—I probably shouldn't be talking about, but it's something that happens, you know? That is—I suppose that is the media in general. There's truth in those lies.

[00:24:10] ELLIE HALL:
And the reason this didn't happen so much with Kate Middleton is because they could see themselves in Kate Middleton because she was, you know, a nice middle-class white girl who was unobjectionable in every way. But Meghan was so different from their idea of what a princess or a duchess should be that when she came on the scene, they were like, "What the hell is Harry doing with this Black girl?" And it was over for her from the beginning because there's no other way to explain why people hated her from the beginning, before she had done anything. And there were people who hated her before the wedding. And that's just—what are your reasons? Draw your own conclusions.

[00:24:51] CRISTEN CONGER:
What are your reasons is what I would like to ask one Meghan Truther in particular. This was back in early 2019. Meghan Markle was in New York City for her baby shower. She was staying at the Mark Hotel on Madison Avenue. Very chic. And as she's leaving the hotel one night, this white lady with brunette hair and a mask reportedly yells at her, "Charlatan princess," and was then swiftly intercepted by a security guard. I repeat, this masked truther rolled up to yell at a woman who was seven months pregnant.

[00:25:37] ELLIE HALL:
I mean, it's not great. We know that it had an effect on Meghan's mental health when she was pregnant, and it did translate to real-world violence a little bit, but mostly it's online speculation and nastiness.

[00:25:51] CRISTEN CONGER:
And kind of by the same token, there's the conspiracy theory, but also, are these pregnancy truthers themselves dangerous? And how do they respond if confronted? I don't know.

[00:26:04] ELLIE HALL:
I would say they're dangerous in that people looking for information about Meghan Markle's pregnancies online might stumble across some weird rabbit holes in Googling and looking on social media. For the most part, it's just aspersions against Meghan's character and trying to change the public narrative about her. Like I mentioned, YouTube and how YouTube is full of anti-Meghan Markle people. If you're only going to get your information about Meghan Markle's pregnancies from YouTube, you're going to be presented with a lot of evidence that she faked her pregnancies, if that makes sense.

So it's something that affects her reputation, I would say, or her name online. It's pretty much an online-only thing, but that doesn't make it less nasty. You can't erase the fact that Meghan is a biracial woman from the discussion about pregnancy truthers. You can't ignore issues of misogynoir with any of these pregnancy rumors. So anybody who says it's not race-based is lying. That's always been my stance, you know, or people willfully shutting their eyes.

[00:27:11] MOYA BAILEY:
Misogynoir is a way to describe that unique intersection of the way that racism comes together with sexism to create an experience that's uniquely problematic for Black women and people read as Black women. I think the way that Meghan Markle is treated is, unfortunately, a great example of misogynoir because, for a lot of people, Meghan's Blackness is contested.

[00:27:47] CRISTEN CONGER:
Moya Bailey is an associate professor at Northwestern University.

[00:27:52] MOYA BAILEY:
I mean, even the concern about the color of her children's skin when they were born, before they were born, in utero—you know, what is this going to mean if her children are dark-skinned? And when I say dark-skinned, I probably should say darker-skinned because Meghan herself is very light-skinned. So the fact that somebody like Meghan, who, again, is Black by virtue of her mother and her upbringing but does not phenotypically give people the same sort of reaction that somebody like Serena Williams, per se, has.

The fact that they can be in the same boat around issues of pregnancy and misogynoir, to me, says something about the world that we live in and how much anti-Blackness, anti-Black racist misogyny come together to really harm Black women and shape their experiences. So, you know, I'm thinking about Serena's experience in the hospital after giving birth to Olympia and how she had to really advocate and fight for herself that she was experiencing a blood clot. And Serena Williams, an athlete—nobody knows her body better than her. Nobody's thinking about their body probably as much as her, as an athlete, as somebody who has had to deal with blood clots. But even then, not being understood or listened to by the medical staff. To me, that's just another example of how misogynoir works. And it's unfortunate that that's how it's working in a place where you're supposed to be getting help in a medical situation.

[00:29:50] CRISTEN CONGER:
Let's take a quick break. When we come back, Ellie Hall is gonna bring us full circle with hashtag Where is Kate?

AD BREAK 2

[00:30:23] CRISTEN CONGER:
We're back with Ellie Hall. Can you just share kind of just a timestamp for us? What is the status right now of this Kate Middleton—would you call it a conspiracy theory?

[00:30:23] ELLIE HALL:
Oh, 100%. I would say conspiracy theories, you know, plural. Yeah. I mean, it's all the internet is talking about right now. It's dominating pop culture discourse. And for me, as someone who follows the royals, it's been really interesting to watch it sort of bubble up from the toxic hellhole that is royal internet into, like, mainstream internet.

[00:30:42] CRISTEN CONGER:
I'm assuming that no matter what happens, for the pregnancy truthers, it will be Meghan's fault.

[00:30:50] ELLIE HALL:
A hundred percent. It's always Meghan's fault. Right now, if you look online, you will see people blaming Meghan, and you will see people blaming the Sussex Squad, which is what fans of Meghan call themselves online. And you asked me about, you know, how much power do people ascribe to Meghan? These pregnancy truthers and people who hate Meghan believe that she is actively commanding this online army of fans, the Sussex Squad, to go and do her bidding and to spread her narratives on social media—that she's actively paying them. That people, you know, I would say, like, royal influencers who support Meghan are being paid by her. And the leaders of this fan group are being paid to troll royal family accounts in favor of Meghan. Like, that is something that is going around hugely right now. Like, Meghan started these conspiracy theories. She's doing this to ruin Catherine because if you're—if you're like a crazy royal fan, you don't say "Kate Middleton." And what's more, if another person says "Kate Middleton" online, they come into your mentions and are like, "Who's Kate Middleton? We're talking about Catherine, the Princess of Wales."

[00:31:55] CRISTEN CONGER:
Ellie also told me that as the Kate Middleton conspiracy theories were spiraling out of control, she'd been seeing hashtag "Sussex Baby Scam" popping up on Twitter trending topics. Meghan truthers were at it yet again and also kind of telling on themselves. Because remember their make-believe about Meghan Markle running a bunch of burner accounts to wreak who knows what kind of havoc? In 2021, reports from the cyber security firm Bot Sentinel found that 70% of hate tweets directed at Harry and Meghan came from less than 100 what they called single-purpose users—hate accounts. It also showed how the same hardcore Meghan truthers relied on YouTube to peddle and monetize their conspiracies.

[00:33:04] ELLIE HALL:
They are saying, "Why is everyone asking where Kate Middleton is? Why are you asking where Kate Middleton is? We know where she is. Do you know what you should be asking? Where are Archie and Lilibet, Harry and Meghan's kids? Where are they? Can you show us proof that they exist?" Hand to God. So, yeah, the pregnancy truthers are alive and kicking, and they are trying to get that narrative into the public discourse about Kate Middleton being missing. And it is funny. It's quite funny. And right now, because of the Photoshop scandal, they're, like, pulling up all of these photos of Meghan and Harry and their children and being like, when are the newswires gonna look at these photos and see that this is fake and Meghan's holding a doll instead of holding her son? Or, you know, when are people going to look at this and see that this is the son of two of Meghan's friends and not Harry? Like, when are they going to investigate this? And it's just like, alright, you know, y'all do you. Stay in your weird little corner of the internet, but don't think that you're going to spread your crazy to other people.

[00:34:06] CRISTEN CONGER:
A few days after Kate Middleton shared her cancer diagnosis, Meghan Truther Twitter was red hot with righteous indignation and the same old conspiracies. For example, a user who goes by Lady Catherine tweeted, "Your path of destruction is unforgivable. Thomas Markle. Heart attack. Stroke. Prince Philip. Dead. Queen Elizabeth II. Dead. King Charles III. Cancer. Catherine. Cancer. Take your fake kids and disappear forever."

To which I say, you won't let her!

. . .

[00:35:11] CRISTEN CONGER:
Thank you so much to Ellie Hall. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @EllieVHall.

[00:35:18] ELLIE HALL:
It is likely that when this comes out, because you are talking about Meghan and you're talking about pregnancies, that you will get some hate mail. If you have anything online that's like, "Contact us here," you will probably get some emails. Any social media accounts that you have, you will probably be accused of working for Meghan or you'll be accused of working for WME, which is the agency that represents her. Just—that is how it operates. People believe that Meghan has this level of control and Meghan is this concerned about her press and how she's perceived online that she takes an active hand in all of this, which again, is nonsense.

[00:35:52] CRISTEN CONGER:
For the record, to any pregnancy truthers listening, I'm repped by CAA, not WME—don't come for me.

And a very special thank you to Moya Bailey, who has been helping spotlight the misogynoir just embedded in this kind of conspiracy culture. So if you have not listened to the Megan Thee Stallion episode and the Beyoncé episode, I don't know what you're waiting for, but there's a lot more to come to misogynoir that Moya goes into in both of those episodes.

Conspiracy She Wrote is an Unladylike Media production. It's created and hosted by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer. Amita Ganatra is our engineer. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions. And next time on Conspiracy She Wrote: All this body watching—it takes a satirical turn into a dead end of doppelgangers and a paparazzi lookalike named Melissa.

[00:37:07] RADIO SHOW CLIP:
Did you laugh at the rumors that went around where you no longer exist, and there's a clone of you? So you died years ago, and there's a clone pretending to be you? That's mental.
Yeah, some people think that I'm not the real me, which is so weird. Like, why would they even think that? I don't know.
I look the same!