Annie Tsai

On Friday, March 22, 2024, Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales and wife to William, Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the British throne, went to social media to announce in a two minute video that she had cancer and as eloquently as someone from the British royal family might – asked the media and the rest of the world to back off. 

It’s been a brutal several months for Middleton. Since her surgery announcement back in January, speculation over her condition reached an apex in the days leading up to Friday’s announcement where the hashtags #whereiskate, #katemiddleton, #kategate, #katespirocy, and #katebodydouble had a total reach of well over 400 million across social channels. And the rumors were rampant and wild, ranging from infidelity to death to a brazilian butt lift to a bad haircut. There was even an attempt to access her medical records… by hospital staff. 

Our family recently went through many months of a loved one going through surgery followed by chemotherapy, and I simply cannot imagine the added toll of having your character and personal life ripped apart for sport in the tabloids every day on top of that. There is no other way to describe what happens on a daily basis online and in the rumor mill – it is simply cruel. 

I grew up alongside what felt like the world’s curiosity (and to many, obsession) with the late Princess Diana’s marriage to the now King Charles III and watched as a much lesser equipped paparazzi and media machine somehow simultaneously adored her and tore her to shreds. We had a book about her life in our house that was for some reason always around. Even though Disney had started their transformation from Sleeping Beauty to modern day princesses like Ariel and Belle during my own princess-obsessing years, Princess Diana was the real one doing real work in driving awareness for HIV/AIDS and so many other causes. 

As The Crown and other British royalty “autofiction” released on various networks well into the 21st century, it sort of felt inevitable that Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle would get pulled down similar paths of media torment. It’s been long documented that Middleton receives a significantly gentler version of media torment than Markle ever has, and because of this it was rather surprising that an uprising of the classic “mass” media reared its ugly head at a photoshopped family picture and demanded that Middleton explain herself. 

This I was pretty surprised about. If I know one thing, it’s that almost every celebrity photo ever put online has some editing done to it. Filters, lighting, cropping out an unsightly photobomb, the slightest of slenderings. Aren’t we meant to accept this in the era of social media induced body dysmorphia? Come on, people. 

So why should we  Americans in San Mateo County care about this, you ask? 

Of course in the US things are a bit different given the British Monarchy construct, but if I am to be honest – Americans very much expect their elected officials to be open books as well. We dissect President Biden’s well-being with a scalpel because he’s representing our nation. We question the motives behind why long-tenured elected officials choose to run for local office again after they’ve retired from the national stage. And for most of our local elected officials, public service is a labor of love. A 99% volunteer role that often takes up nearly as much time as their day jobs and where most of those hours are spent on nights and weekends away from their own loved ones. That’s an awful lot to ask of anyone. 

Lingering in my mind through this past weekend has been this – will they learn? Will we learn? Assuming Kate recovers and gets back to her duties, does that rumor mill just go back to throwing infidelity in her face at the slightest suggestion that something is imperfect in her very human life? I want to say no, but one might argue that both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of humanity is how short its memory is. Great because we are so willing to try and try again, bad because we are so quick to forget our own lessons. So I guess time will tell, but I hope in that time the Princess of Wales and her family can live in peace.