Who Trolled Chappell Roan?

Did you guys know that Chapel Roan at the breakfast, she ordered truffle pancakes, which were, it was the most expensive thing on the menu. They were $54. A server from the hotel restaurant made a tick. Talk about it. Oh my God, we should cancel her. I hope they taste good. I'm just kidding. I made that up. Wait, I believed it. I don't I don't care that you made it up because I've already tweeted 10 versions of it. I just feel like if we're going to talk about this and like we're going to talk about a lot of like things that aren't true, like I want to throw my own fake thing into the mix. I could tweet out something such as Chapel Roan came into one of the clubs that I worked at one time and she was a fucking bitch. 10K likes in an hour. Well, my friends, I said I wasn't going to make an episode about this on the a bit fruity Instagram. I said I wasn't and I want to own up to that. I said I wasn't going to make an episode about this. I said I wasn't going to make an episode about this. And I want to own up to that. I said it was time for us to move on from Chapel Roan's malevolent breakfast in Brazil. And I said that at the exact wrong time because in the days following what I thought was a stupid non-controversy that did not matter. Things spiraled out of control in a way that I thought did matter. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you will soon. And if you are familiar with what I'm talking about, I promised to not make this episode a bland recap of it. We have insights, we have thoughts, and we will get to the bottom of why Chapel Roan broke that child's limbs one by one. Sorry. That's not true. I mean, you would think it was true though. No matter what she does, an apology won't bring her back to life. Joining us on our episode today to talk about a lot, we have Cat Tenbarge, journalist, writer of the newsletter Spitfire News. Cat, welcome back to the show. So excited to be here. A true smear campaign expert, both of you really. We also have Caroline Kwan, pop culture, and political Twitch streamer. So excited to have you back. Excited to be here yet again, talking about my favorite thing in the world, which is that everyone loves to hate women. Guys, I have 21 pages of notes for this episode. I have never had this many pages of notes before, and I think people on this podcast know me for long outlines. So I'm very excited to get into it. And we also have a lot to get to. So shall we get started? Yeah, let's do it. I have 33 years of notes in my head, so. So I'm gonna try and not say everything all at once. I have organized our episode today into some sweet internet-friendly chapters. So here we go. Chapter one, a breakfast from hell. On February 13th, 2026, Chapel Roan cut ties with Wasserman. In the talent agency she was signed to, Wasserman is a massive agency, and Chapel was one of their biggest names. Her departure was in response to Wasserman's founder, Casey Wasserman, appearing to have sexted with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 via email. I guess it's not sexting if it's emails, but you know. Casey Wasserman is an extraordinarily powerful figure, as is made clear by his inclusion in the Epstein class. Forbes estimates Wasserman's personal net worth to be at least $750 million as of last month. He's the chairman of the organizing committee for the LA 2028 Olympics, a position the Olympic committee has not removed him from, despite public protest. After Chapel pulled out of Wasserman, so too did a string of other artists, Werville Peck, Sylvain Esso, Gigi Perez, Laofi, Odessa, and the local natives, to name a few. This led Casey Wasserman to announce within days that he was selling the company, and the following month, it was announced that Wasserman agency would be renamed the team. Memorable. You know, there was one guy who was like, what if we call it the team? And everyone went, yeah, it's good enough. That's kind of like how Melissa Nathan's PR company is called TAG, the agency group. I mean, you're an agency and you're a group, so you're the agency group. We're a team of managers, so we're the team. I begin our episode with this story, not to imply that Casey Wasserman is necessarily behind all, or any of what we'll discuss today. You can't sue me now, Casey. But because I think it represents, well, the kind of threat that someone like Chapel Roan poses to hierarchy and order and power. There's a ton of public litigation over just how real or manufactured the constant churn of controversy around Chapel Roan is. And we'll get to that. But what we know for certain is that Chapel is a pro-Palestine, pro-trans, boundary-setting lesbian, willing to disrupt business as usual, literally for powerful people. And that puts a target on her back and incentivizes people with their hands on the levers of power to turn public opinion against her if they wanted to. Strategically, in what one might call a campaign. Da-da-da. Casey Wasserman is also one of the figures associated with the creative community for peace. They are a pro-Israel group that call themselves an A political nonprofit. He has hosted fundraisers. For creative community for peace? Yes, and they are the ones behind- All the open letters. The open letters, the smear campaigns towards Voice of Henry Job, the Oscar-nominated film from this year. Also, we're behind the smear campaign of no other land. Yeah, that's the creative community for peace that Casey Wasserman is tied to. Yeah, if you've ever seen a bunch of headlines that come out all at once about how it's like, Deborah Messing and 1,200 celebrities who you just also haven't heard of, sign an open letter condemning literally any other celebrity who's spoken out against Israel, those are all organized by creative community for peace. Yeah, and it should show you if they're leading with Deb Messing's name. That's about the top of the list that they got, okay? I didn't even plan on invoking her in this episode. I'm sorry, guys, I know. I've been good, I've been good. It's like when they release anti-climate change petitions that are signed by like 5,000 scientists, but half of them are chiropractors. Exactly, exactly. And oil executives. Chapter one, section two, breakfast. The most important meal of the day. It's where we have to start. On March 21, Brazilian footballer, Georginho posted an Instagram story to his four million followers regarding his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whose biological father is Jude Law, which is fun. This story has everything. I think this might have been the first time Jude Law found out that he had this daughter. Yeah. And how many other kids are out there that have yet to have these run-ins with Chapel Roan? And then by consequence, Jude Law discovers that that is his child. It's very Elonian. Does one of you want to read Georginho's statement that started it all? He posts to Instagram, I went through a very upsetting situation with my family earlier today. My wife is in São Paulo for Lala Palusza, Brazil. This morning, my daughter woke up incredibly excited. She even made a sign because she was so happy to see an artist she really admires or used to admire at Chapel Roan. By coincidence, they're staying at the same hotel as this artist. During breakfast, the artist walked past their table. My daughter, like any child, recognized her, got excited and just wanted to make sure it was really her. And the worst part is she didn't even approach her. She simply walked past the singer's table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled and went back to sit with her mom. She didn't say anything, didn't ask for anything. What happened next was completely disproportionate. A large security guard came over to their table while they were still having breakfast and began speaking in an extremely aggressive manner to both my wife and my daughter, saying that she shouldn't allow my daughter to quote disrespect or harass other people. He even said he would file a complaint against them with the hotel while my 11-year-old daughter was sitting there in tears. My daughter was extremely shaken and cried a lot. I've lived with football, public exposure, and well-known people for many years, and I understand very well what respect and boundaries are. What happened there was not that. It was just a child admiring someone. It's sad to see this kind of treatment coming from those who should understand the importance of fans. At the end of the day, they are the ones who build all of this. I sincerely hope this serves as a moment of reflection. No one should have to go through this, especially not a child. At Chapel Roan, without your fans, you would be nothing. And to the fans, she does not deserve your affection. Look, it is really hard to not stop after every sentence and be like, buh-duh-buh-duh-buh-duh-duh-duh. Like, to me, it's interesting that this is being written so rigorously by someone who, as evidenced in his own story, wasn't there. Was not there. But I promised that this episode would not just be litigating the breakfast itself, because I don't actually think that's the interesting thing about what happened here. But we can talk about it a little bit. We can talk about it a little bit. I will say too, though, I think the irony in this line, what happened next was completely disproportionate, actually applies to what happened next after he posted this. It's also interesting to me that like, he acknowledges from the very beginning that Chapel didn't even necessarily have a reason to know this happened, because the 11-year-old in question didn't even approach her. She didn't ask Chapel for a photo. Like, there was no interaction between the two of them, yet for a lot of people responding to this, it became like, Chapel furiously said she wouldn't take a picture with this child. But also, it's just like, throughout this whole controversy, people are trying to blame Chapel for the security guard's actions, which is literally holding a woman accountable for something every party agrees a man did. Like, you aren't responsible for someone else's conduct, especially when you are both adults. Could you guys quickly describe how quickly this blew up and took over everyone's feeds? Like, I can't remember seeing any celebrity news spread like this in recent history. It was giving by-sister to me, honestly. I had taken the night off from streaming. I was out and I started to get texts from friends. And I looked at the initial post and I went, what? Who cares? I went, this is not a situation that I felt in the beginning that I needed to jump in and do what I have done in the past, which is to defend Chapel Roan. And then suddenly, like that, it was a raging wildfire. It was everywhere. So much of what was online was very deranged. It was trending at number two in the US on Twitter. It was also one of those things where it's like... Like, wait, I'm so sorry. So I do not mean to cut a woman off on this episode in particular. But like, we are at war. And this was trending at number two in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. It was also one of those things where there was like a whole algorithm constructed around this incident because every time I would like refresh my FYP on X, it would be more tweets about this incident, which means that there is like an algorithm pushing it to the top of your feed. And so that happened very, very quickly. And that was locked in for days, days of just like the algorithm specifically surfacing content about this incident and putting it at the very top of people's For You pages. I even checked my partner's Twitter because all he follows is football to see, because we have very different feeds. And even on his feed, there was so much activity around this. Later that day, Eduardo Cavalieri... Cavalieri... Cavalieri? He said that Italian. I know, he's Brazilian. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro posted the following statement. He said, as long as I'm in charge of our city, this young lady, Chapel Roan, will never perform at Toromundo Norio. I doubt that Shakira at Shakira at Shakira, Brazil would do that. By the way, at Freio Giorgioinho, your little one is already the guest of honor from the organization in May. And then Giorgioinho commented heart, heart. So this was actually the first piece of content I saw about any of this. And the fact that I was seeing this from the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, this was on like our one, Chapel had not yet responded. I thought it was so bizarre. And I actually tweeted at the time, I was like, does anyone think that it's weird that a public official is weighing in on such private matters that haven't even been addressed by the singer in question? To which a bunch of Brazilian posters replied, you clearly don't understand Brazilian politics, which to Shay, I guess I don't. But it's also notable that this Toromundo Norio festival that he's saying he's banning Chapel from Chapel was never scheduled to play that festival this year. So this is like me saying that like I ban Chapel from coming to my house and hanging out with me like, yeah, she wasn't coming. This is like Democrats saying that they won't go on Hasan Piker's broadcast and they've never been invited on. This is like the Israeli far right terrorist military organization, Bitar USA, saying that Matt Bernstein is banned from Israel. Like, okay. It's also really wild to me that he specifically pits Chapel Roan against Shakira, because I'm like, I don't even know, maybe Shakira has been rude to an 11 year old before. This clearly shows that political officials and other people in power actually do have the ability to not just hold people accountable that they have perceived to have done wrongdoing, but to do so very quickly. That was my very first thought because it's like, there are so many touring musicians who are men who actually pose real danger to women and children in the places where they go on tour. And I can't think of a single like comparable incident where a mayor or any sort of government official has been like, I'm specifically banning an artist from coming to my city based on like the danger that they pose to children. It just doesn't happen. But clearly it could if that was where the priority truly lies. Yeah. And I don't want to play follow police. I don't love to do that. But I think, you know, when you're talking about public officials, it's sort of interesting to notice that this man, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, does follow Benjamin Netanyahu. So anyway, I think her fans should stop buying tickets to her shows because she's a horrible person and not because I want easier access to those tickets. So that night, Chapel Roan posted a video in which she explains that the security guard in question was not her personal security, but perhaps one working for the hotel during Lollapalooza or for another artist who was staying there. She said she never saw the 11 year old girl in question was unaware anything had ever happened, but nonetheless apologized to the family for their experience. I'm just going to tell my half of the story of what happened today with a mother and child who were involved with a security guard who was not my personal security. I didn't even see. I didn't even see a woman and a child. Like I did not. No one came up to me. No one bothered me. Like I was just sitting at breakfast in my hotel. I think these people were staying at the hotel as well. I did not ask the security guard to go up and talk to this mother and child. I did not. They did not come up to me. They weren't doing anything. It's unfair for security to just assume someone doesn't have good intentions. I do not hate people who are fans of my music. I do not hate children. Like that is crazy. I'm sorry to the mother and child that someone was assuming something that you would do something and that if you felt uncomfortable, that makes me really sad. You did not deserve that. But the dominant narrative that Chapel Roan hates children was already running ahead with too much steam. So this response did little to stop it and everyone who was already angry just agreed that Chapel was clearly a lying psychopath. People were resurfacing one clip in particular where she was talking about how her friends that had children were miserable and talking about like why she doesn't want children at least not right now. All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don't know anyone. I actually don't know anyone who's like happy and has children at this age. I have like one year old, like three year old, four and under, five and under. I don't I literally have not met anyone who's happy. Anyone who has like light in their eyes. Anyone who has he was slut. There was just no point in any of this that didn't have political undertones to me because I had seen that clip previously float around like conservative women like pro-natalist Twitter being like look Chapel Roan is discouraging women from becoming mothers. I'm a mom of two kids under four and yeah my house is chaotic. I haven't had a full night of sleep in years. But you know what? I've never been happier in my life. There is a kind of joy that comes from motherhood that you can't explain to people who only live for the weekend or the next Instagram dopamine hit. So I thought it was interesting that that was resurfacing now in the context of Chapel Roan hates children. So many people participated in the outrage from that particular clip. First off, Chapel's 26 years old. I'm in my 30s and I would say the same thing about my friends who have children in their 30s. I would say yeah they're in hell. They love their kids but man oh man parenting can be real hell. But everybody is so reactionary. This is something that I see all the time is the immediate immediate reactionary sentiment. Oh sorry all what? Trad conservatives over here with the I can't believe Chapel Roan doesn't love children. I don't care if Chapel Roan a 26 year old woman doesn't like children. There are adult men who are abusing children who work in our government, who work in finance and media and the entertainment industry and ain't nothing happening to them. It's also such a common smear against any woman who either doesn't conform to like patriarchal standards and or any woman who advocates for women's equality. A perfect example of this is like I came across a real a couple weeks ago where this woman was who is a mother was talking about like I don't know how stay-at-home moms do it because like my oldest is in daycare every day and we have a new baby and it's so hard. All the comments were from like Chodkath accounts being like you don't actually love your children. You hate your children because you're a woman who works, who has a job. So this is a very very common smear utilized even against women who have kids of their own. It's like if you don't adhere to the strictest most like white supremacist Christian ideals of motherhood, you will be smeared as hating children and it is so insidious how this trickles even into like left leading spaces because as all this was going on, I went to a reading like IRL reading in New York and it was a really good reading. All the readers were amazing and the hosts were amazing too, but somebody made a joke about chaffel hating kids during this reading and I was like it's just so interesting how like these smears work their way into real life offline context and just become widely accepted as narratives against like feminist women and non-conforming women and it's not true. As Chappell said in her video like she doesn't hate children. So it's just like a completely manufactured part of her personality that people now just accept as reality. Yes and there are other videos of her embracing her young children fans like it the whole thing is so nonsensical. Nevertheless, the narrative barreled on. So within the next couple days finally we hear from the girl's mother who was actually there. Catherine Harding had this child while she was dating Jude Law before they separated and she married Georginho. She posted a six minute long video where she more or less ignores Chappell's explanation that Chappell wasn't personally involved with the incident saying this is the last thing I'm going to say about this now because it's getting a bit crazy but lots of people are sending me messages like is this true is this true is this true and then lots of messages now about obviously Chappell's message that she's put out. So I don't know that was her personal security guard but he was with her so that's that is all I know. Do did she send him to do it again? I don't know. Look, I would like to hope not but at the same time I think that you have a responsibility when you are a celebrity to to make sure I guess that the people that work for you in the act on your behalf are acting on your behalf. Okay, this makes me mad. I know the actual events of the breakfast in Brazil debacle which from here on out I will be calling pancake gate matter much less than what comes next like a security guard was overly stern within 11 year old at a fancy hotel which isn't great of course but I really struggled to put it in proportion with people's reaction which was more akin to murder. Catherine Harding's video however I did have an opinion of because to me it becomes clear that this is a wealthy couple staying at a hotel with celebrities. They are celebrities themselves and probably feeling more entitled to a certain level of treatment than most and blasting this on social media through the lens of that entitlement right like Catherine Harding was also liking very disparaging comments about Chapel Roan on her video calling Chapel Roan rude etc etc so I truly wish this woman no ill will please do not if you're listening to this go on to any of these people's accounts and leave them in comments it really is so far from the point but I do think it's important to establish that she's probably not a particularly reliable narrator for this whole thing and she is the only narrator because Georgino's original Instagram post was based on Catherine coming to him and being like this is what happened at breakfast. Do you think that's fair? Yes I do I do think that's fair and also it then turned there was this weird aspect of it where it was pitting Catherine Harding against Chapel and there was a lot of comparing the way that they look therefore kind of the moralizing from that which is why at the end of the day I don't care about any of the actual events I don't care if the most exaggerated version of these events which we know is not true but even if in this hypothetical here we were to say is true it still does not warrant the global hate campaign against Chapel Roan that is rooted in misogyny and homophobia and that is why it took off so fast that is why there were enterprising online people who recognized this was something that they could join in on the side of hitting Chapel Roan the bots that got involved the misinformation and disinformation like that is the thing that I care about. I agree and I also just think that so much of the rationale again comes back to this idea that Chapel is the one who should be like responsible and accountable for the security guards behavior which is all the more ridiculous because as we then learn he wasn't even working for her. So it's just this like reinforcing again of this societal standard that really only affects women which is like you're not only responsible for yourself but for any man in your vicinity if any man around you is like behaving poorly potentially on your behalf then you need to be held more accountable than him for his behavior. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Factor for sponsoring this episode in the year 2026 I have been trying to evolve on a personal level away from work in a few different ways one of them being that I'm trying to put together more outfits I'm trying to dress myself more in the morning and stop relying on the gay guy uniform of a white tank top which if you watch the video version of this podcast you are very well familiar with like I started wearing sleeves that's got to count for something cheer me on please anyway what does this have to do with Factor well one of the things that I am not changing in 2026 is that I don't really love cooking I don't really love setting aside time for cooking I don't really love going grocery shopping maybe you think that's embarrassing fortunately there are some ways around it one of which is factor factor is a meal delivery service with chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy and everything is ready to eat and eat in two minutes factor has a rotating menu of over a hundred different meal options every single week and there are plenty of different menus you can try from I've always said that I like the protein plus and the smoothies you can make eating well a more varied and less laborious experience with factor if you would like to try it you can get 50 off your first box at factor meals dot com slash fruity 50 off with the code fruity 50 off that is factor meals dot com slash fruity 50 off thanks so much to factor for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to it chapter two who trolled amber herd I know you're all so happy that we get to take a break from from pancake gate don't worry we'll be back if you were alive in 2022 you might remember a niche pop culture event that nobody made podcasts about called dep v herd in case you need some brushing up the bones of the case were this actors johnny deaf and amber herd were in a relationship from 2011 when amber was 25 and johnny was 48 they were in a relationship until amber filed for a divorce in 2016 claiming that johnny had physically abused her in 2018 amber wrote an op ed in the washington post about how she quote felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out she did not name johnny deaf or anyone in that op ed but johnny nevertheless sued for defamation amber counter sued and in 2022 they duked it out in court for two months during which amber turd trended daily during those two months one could have plausibly described amber herd as the most hated person on the internet if not the world the case came and went amber fled to spain and johnny's 20 million dollar d or fragrance contract was renewed two years later alexey mosh dress an investigative journalist released who trolled amber a six part podcast series where he explains his findings that the turning of public sentiment against amber was not exactly organic cat you are a part of that podcast so can you explain some of what those findings were yes so who told amber is a really really interesting it was one of the only investigations that focused less on like the facts of the case and what happened between amber herd and johnny deaf and more like why were all of these people people in air quotes talking about it because at the time it felt really unprecedented to have this sort of algorithmic bias where you can't go on any social media platform and not encounter people talking about debt be heard and all of those posts were very specifically like through this lens of johnny deaf is a victim and amber herd is an abuser they collected a bunch of data a bunch of tweets from the time of the trial and they sent them to researchers around the world who study bots and part of what they found is that it's really hard to figure out like who is a bot and who is not on social media but that there are very sophisticated places around the world where you can direct these sorts of bot campaigns and one of those places that they found was saudi arabia which is really interesting because over the past few years johnny deaf has cultivated a friendship within like the saudi arabian regime mbs the main guy who's like in charge of saudi arabia like he and johnny deaf party together they take pictures together at the exact same time that johnny deaf is cultivating this close relationship the country is also trying to build out its own sort of cultural initiatives they have like the red sea film festival that johnny deaf has been a guest of honor at i believe he premiered one of his films after the trial there and also a lot of these tweets that alexi was investigating and sending around to these data scientists could potentially be linked back to these bot farms from that country so there's an interesting like geopolitical aspect to all of this but of course his ultimate takeaway is like yes there was inauthentic activity up to 50 percent based on some estimations but also it is concerning and reflective of the fact that there were enough real authentic people who were also willing to push these narratives that was what ultimately made it as successful as it was and prior to the 2022 trial where johnny deaf sued amber for defamation this was already put into place with a combination of deaf stands but also these bot farms this inorganic activity online that had already pumped out thousands of tweets that were very anti amber heard before the trial started exactly and in addition to that not only is there the saudi arabian connection but there's also a russian connection it's like an american pastime at this point exactly this is all like at the exact same time that the molar report is ongoing and finding all of this evidence that russia had influenced american elections at the exact same time depp's lawyer adam waldman has closely worked with russian oligarchs in his capacity as johnny depp's lawyer he was actually basically kicked off of the 2022 trial because he had leaked materials that were supposed to be like sanctioned not supposed to be released to the public to youtubers and he later testified to this in 2022 there were like three youtubers in particular who he had shared audio recordings with of like fights between johnny depp and amber heard and some of those youtubers had created these videos that had hundreds of millions of views cross platforms before the trial even started and they had mistranslated them like they had put captions on the videos but they just made up the captions so the audio would be like crackling static and like voices and you couldn't really discern what they were saying and then these youtubers had written out like i'm hitting you donnie like crazy stuff like that they just made up this whole fake narrative depp's lawyer was involved with that that was inauthentic and there were already as you said caroline so many tweets the entire justice for donnie depp movement which was astroturfed already existed by the time the trial even began how do you explain why such powerful people across countries and governments were invested in smearing amber as hard as possible even before this started because i feel like this is important as we continue on with this episode and then return back to pancake gate i mean interestingly enough this really aligns with what we've seen in the epstein files which is that a lot of very powerful men celebrities people like woody allen journalists like michael woof jeffrey eppstein himself donald trump as well like all of these men were terrified steve and bannon all of these men were terrified of the me too movement and the implications it had for their power and so all of these men behind the scenes were working together to figure out ways to undermine the credibility of specific women who had come forward and also the movement in general and depp v heard was the perfect playbook for this it worked like a charm and so i don't think you don't need to take it to the conspiracy brain level of like jeffrey eppstein orchestrated like the pushback against amber heard because i don't think it's that but rather i think that it is in all of their best interests to destabilize these movements and amber heard ended up being the perfect target for like a confluence of factors so that's where i think a lot of the geopolitical stuff comes in yes is like this playbook is really perfect for all of these powerful people 1000 and what we saw was the result that it was a significant setback for women's rights yes it did reverse progress that had been made from the me too movement and i think the other case that really shows the right wing conservative investment is blake livelies because so much of right wing media both giant companies like fox news but also individual online commentators such as kandace owens and meghan kelly have a political interest in smearing famous women who make accusations of abuse in the first half of 2025 fox news posted 80 stories alone on their website about blake lively about blake lively kandace owens made dozens of videos every time there was a new update that came out and what she said about blake she said a lot of things but i think this is the thing that really stands out she said she has proven herself to not be a kind person and that is largely due to the fact that she is a modern feminist so that is tying modern feminism feminist movements to these lying scheming manipulative women amber heard her very name has become a weapon because any woman who steps out of line is now referred to as amber 2.0 and you even saw that with is her name cassidy hutchinson is that the woman who who was like part of trump who then testified against him later when she testified against trump in between like 2020 and 2024 over the january 6 hearings trump supporters were calling her amber 2.0 so it's like the idea the rhetorical weapon of amber heard has now been deployed against angeline a joe lee against republican women who go against trump against any woman who is sort of smeared online and the reinforcing of that playbook is a very powerful tool to prevent the me to movement from being able to happen again or to like carry any of the consequences it briefly did in 2017 2018 and i just think like in the context of this larger oh wow no they're they're always coming for me every time i try to make a salient point i don't know it's johnny depp he's coming for me no he he's probably in some drug stupor somewhere so that's what's also so ironic about johnny depp is like he doesn't even pay people i believe he got sued by his lawyers for not paying them and like his insurance company like he's not known for being a good client which to me shows that there is a much deeper ideological purpose behind all of these powerful wealthy people who aligned with him they saw him as like the perfect figure for this type of ultimately ideological crusade and i think just like in the context of this larger conversation if powerful people could get involved in smearing amber herd to successfully set back feminism me too what could they gain from doing the same thing to chapel ron and another thing that i think is so interesting about who trolled amber and the findings that there were a lot of farms involved in boosting anti amber herd content during that trial is how that strategic engineering of public sentiment mixed with people's existing prejudices i think a lot of people might say well i'm a human being and i i don't like amber herd i'm not a bot i tweeted you know we're not all bots i think it's important to address how the organic mixes with the inorganic like it's easier to wield a campaign like this against some people more than others existing feelings that people have of misogyny of anti blackness of homophobia transphobia anti fat bias those can easily be exploited by bad actors this is the problem here it's the way that our cultural biases are so deeply ingrained that people will say uh no i reached this opinion on my own and so therefore they don't believe that they have fallen for a smear campaign they don't believe that they are contributing here to a hate train that is greased by these biases that exist in our culture and so it is this mixture of astroturfed inorganic manufactured discourse online but it is anchored by real misogyny homophobia racism etc and that's what's hard to kind of root out from people because most people don't want to do that internal self-reflection but that's the job here that i think people like us have is getting people to interrogate those biases and make these connections and it's an uphill battle for the left compared to a very easy thing for the right to do which is why melissa nathan and her famous text message was like wow it just really goes to show you how much people hate women because there were elements of the Blake Lively smear campaign that just were like a runaway train on their own the publicists lit the match but the crowd of people and their misogyny is what like carried the flames as far as they eventually spread chapter three chapel gets trolled back to chapel back to pancake gate as the days and weeks unfolded following hashtag pancake gate that's not a real hashtag i made that one up online anger towards chapel ron didn't die down it grew for example the daily mail has written upwards of 30 articles about this incident a sample platter of which we will read to you now do you guys want to popcorn it i put them in the outline i'll start chapel ron accused of leaving jude law's 11 year old daughter in tears and using security guard to threaten her chapel ron thanks for security during her lala palooza brazil show hours after her team were accused of threatening jude law's daughter 11 and leaving her quote in tears chapel ron apologizes to jude law's daughter as she insists she did not ask security guard to approach her and says i do not hate fans of my music or children jude law i love how they keep invoking jude law for seo purposes they're like how many celebrities can we include in what who's never said anything about this by no jude law's x hits back at chapel ron's denials and hopes singer learns a lesson as she shares further details about star's aggressive security leaving her 11 year old daughter say it with me folks in tears the super woke pop star who doesn't like people looking at her why chapel ron risk being canceled after diva outburst and celebs bats with star urge to quit fame after aggressive team left jude law's daughter in tears iris law makes a low key appearance as she steps out after chapel ron was accused of leaving her sister aida 11 in tears with heavy-handed security oh the next one pisses me off i'm sorry i also love they're writing about iris law stepping outside she's like tangentially related we are all but six degrees separated from having a daily article written about us for our relationship to this 11 year old matt bernstein noted chapel ron fan steps out of singer lees 11 year old girl in tears oh no i'm in tears oh god chapel ron is urged to be more like taylor swift after her many outbursts as fans note how kind the billionaire still is to her loyal supporters after two decades in the industry billionaire good can we make it any clearer yeah also taylor swift has previously been a victim of a smear campaign yeah yes the daily mail sure if i were to look back and participate it in yes this comparison to taylor swift makes me particularly irate especially because it's like you don't know anything about taylor swift if you think that like she would be opposed to the way chapel ron handles fame taylor swift has spent the last like three albums agonizing over her relationship to fame and public scrutiny and referred to like fans who care too much about her as like vipers dressed in empaths clothing which the daily mail criticized as like terrible songwriting so this idea that like she needs to be more like taylor swift is so divorced from reality taylor swift gets tape for all the opposite reasons it's just like a ridiculous like impossible standard we ready for this next one with the photo that they use that looks like a mug shot yes chapel ron calls fans weird and crazy and says i don't give a fuck if you think it's selfish of me to say no to a photo as outspoken 2024 video trends after hotel drama rehashing a 2024 video that's normal cat next one hollywood turns on biggest bitch chapel ron music insiders give their verdict and one source close to the star explodes with worst insult imaginable amid latest scandal chapel ron is outed as hypocrite as her secretly rich family and privileged background is revealed and backlash over hotel drama that left chewed law's daughter in cheers and the last one here opinion it's career crisis time for chapel ron i appreciate them clarifying that this one is opinion in contrast to all the other ones that were fact i used to work at business insider which is not daily mail level and like there's a lot of good work that gets done there but i am so familiar with this specific digital media type cycle and what it is is like they wrote one article about this incident and it shot to the top of their internal charts and was getting like more views than the average article and so digital media outlets like this will oftentimes feed into these smear campaigns so perfectly because like any viral news aggregator they are incentivized to get as many clicks as possible that's how they make money they get money from ads that run on these articles and daily mail performs very well on facebook a lot of older women actually read daily mail and older women of that demographic love these types of misogynistic smear campaigns so basically internally they were like let's turn out as many articles on chapel ron as possible it was the same thing like i worked at business insider during the gabby pitido incident i think we wrote hundreds of articles about gabby pitido and a lot of those articles at the time when we just had that police footage of her in tears there were a lot of articles that suggested gabby pitido was like either abusive or like the problem in her relationship obviously we all know how that story turned out but like a lot of these digital media outlets that make their money this way the standards become very close to like a pop crave because they are hinging on this misogynistic attitude that their readers already have i have some smoke for pop crave much more so than pop base actually if you're unfamiliar pop crave and pop base are the two biggest news sources for pop culture and oftentimes political related news on twitter slash x i will say i do think pop base wields their power with much more responsibility they also talk a lot about hard lefty politics they talk about palestine pop crave in particular though if they see for example a chapel ron leaves jude law's daughter in tears post is doing well they will make 20 of those and it's interesting how this exact same type of slop quote unquote news content that uh greases the wheels of misogyny is replicated in these new formats absolutely there's definitely a lot of comparison now between pop crave and the tabloids and the tabloids have been doing this for decades at this point but i've noticed with pop crave and these other pop culture big news twitter accounts and then also the ones that have popped up that call themselves parody accounts there's so many more of those but they are really fashioning themselves after a daily mail and it's because of the financial incentives and the other thing i want to add is yes i agree pop base generally better all of these accounts now have a partnership with holly market which is a whole other element here and they all put out the exact same post in the timothy shallow may bet on timothy shallow may's odds of winning the oscar yeah yeah wow it's also like these types of like pop craves and daily males feed into each other because when daily mail runs headlines like this pop crave can aggregate those and if pop crave or anyone makes a tick tock or a viral post being like chapel ron yada yada yada that becomes content for the daily mail and we saw this with the Blake lively story too where it's like add a lot of these digital media outlets and again i've worked for them i know they do this i've had to do this a story can just be here are 10 viral tweets about something the onus to actually be like fact-checked real information then falls onto the social media posters and the news outlet can just say it's aggregated from these tweets so they feed into each other they don't even necessarily have to be viral a lot of times it's just like it's a daily mail article predicated on one person on twitter saying something mean about like what was this one about she needs to be more like taylor swift i can confidently say that that is just referencing what one person on twitter said yes and now it's an article but now it's getting hundreds of comments from daily mail readers i want to get into uh some of the sort of spin-off controversies because now that the chapel ron is a child hating demon news cycle is in full speed well what do we do with this forward motion we have to talk more about chapel ron and so as one daily mail article suggested there was a resurgence of interest in chapel ron's family wealth or lack thereof the dominant narrative then became she killed a child and she lied about growing up in a trailer and she's really rich she's a rich spoiled brat and no one should trust anything she has to say and she's lying about being a lesbian okay so kyle chung who's amazing just had had her on the stream with cat as well wrote a piece and she uses the term weaponized irrelevancy which i really like because that describes this grasping at straws this inventing any reason to justify the smears and hate train against someone like chapel when the original thing starts to lose steam when there's too many holes that are poked in it when too many people go honestly i don't care about this that's when these other irrelevant points come into play that are weaponized and that's how we end up now on these new paths of chapel ron is actually rich she's a nepo baby she's been lying about it chapel ron queer baits she takes advantage of drag queens it's language that's also wrapped up in the language of feminism and progress to give it that extra justification so it's like oh no no we're not being misogynistic or homophobic here because we're actually being woke we're actually being progressive we're critiquing the ron family's generation exactly yeah it's the rich baby and this is like bar for bar what they did to amber her too including the fact that amber herd is bisexual and they dug up stuff about her previous relationships with women and tried to like make it out to be very very malicious as well yeah the narrative the chapel isn't actually poor a lot of this rhetoric is undermining the credibility of the person being smeared so it's not just that she grew up with a rich family because if that were what people were upset about then they wouldn't care about the plight of the 11 year old whose jew law's daughter because she's a nepo baby it's not just that it has to be dishonesty it has to be like oh chapel lied she is performative and so that is where they have the drive to like say that her family was rich and that story in particular is so incorrect because there were literally news clippings well should we get into the grammy thing yeah it became a big deal to people that chapel ron attended grammy camp a week long summer program that only admits a very small number of kids across the country each year to hone their artistic skills this is affiliated with the grammy's with the academy the camp is seven days long and costs three thousand dollars but the narrative became chapel ron went to a summer camp that cost three thousand dollars per week which is technically true but it was one week and three thousand dollars is certainly a lot of money but i think there's a few points worth mentioning here one there's a local news article like you mentioned cat from the time about how quote willard high school student kaley rose aka chapel ron is one of 30 students admitted to new york grammy camp and that she was going to be performing at a local coffee rock house cafe to raise money for the trip charging five dollars per person take me back i would do anything to pay five dollars this you chapel ron live in a very small room right point two let's say realistically she didn't raise three thousand dollars from performing at a cafe very supportive families do sometimes make sacrifices to support their kids artistic careers with money that they don't necessarily have off hand it's a privilege of course to have access to that money in any form obviously but like many successful artist parents make sacrifices for them and it's not necessarily because they're filthy rich and can just throw that kind of money around and then point number three is what does this have to do with anything exactly who cares then what is the point here that you're trying to make we're only talking about this because of the momentum that pancake gate gave to a hungry public and we were only talking about that big well we don't we don't even remember why we're talking about that anymore the other part here is that this aspect of pancake gate that then turned into chapel ron is secretly a billionaire his family owns the entire world which funny enough is a parallel between one of the smears against hasan hasan grew up well to do his parents are not billionaires his father's not a billionaire but that is something that his detractors bring up all the time as a way to delegitimize his socialist ideology anyway so the tick tock that i remember kicking this off was some random user that made this multi part how chapel ron has actually lied about everything in her life brought up the grammy camp all that did you guys know that little miss i don't want to be famous went to grammy's camp in 2014 it's three thousand dollars a week that went viral and then it was quote tweeted by a twitter account that we now know to be a man masquerading as a woman whose photo he had stolen from tick tock who made a tweet that then went viral as well responding to this tick tock like it's all fake this is a whole other part of my outline so i will leave that in but listener if your interest was just peaked keep listening i find a particularly interesting that people love to use this line of attack against like women from more like working class backgrounds or like women who are not nepo babies people who did not come from like immense wealth and fame again it's so ironic that the daily mail is pushing this at the exact same time that they're comparing her to taylor swift who famously like got her start because her parents were so filthy rich that they could pay for her to have opportunities that no child would ever have access to the daily mail is also openly laudatory of the fact that taylor swift is a billionaire and within days that they say chapel ron should be more like billionaire taylor swift they say chapel ron is a hypocrite for growing up with money yes so which one is it it's very funny and you know it doesn't matter how much money chapel ron's family has i mean if they were billionaires i would have something to say about that but alas my dear listener they are not what i have gathered about the generational wealth of chapel ron's family is that her grandfather was a part owner he was i believe one of three owners in a private insurance company that was local to springfield missouri and it seems that he made enough money from that to buy a local golf course in missouri which is open to the public and which you can pay i think it's like between 40 and 60 to do 18 holes look i won't tell you this man was like lower class you have to have a certain amount of money to own a golf course but he didn't own maro lago you guys and well i was gonna say and even if he did i mean it could it would kind of be an issue if you had maro but he did it he didn't he did it and i will say what i can further understand about this is that one of the things people really drew uh anger from was that chapel ron once mentioned in an interview that she had lived in a trailer at one point which is true i don't think it was a permanent thing for her i think that it seems like her parents now own some local veterinary practice but at one point they were in school so she briefly lived in a trailer she said she she's known what it's like to be poor and that's also true before she got famous she just worked a bunch of odd jobs she famously worked at a donut shop during covid because she got famous not that long ago none of this really matters because ultimately these people are just saying oh she secretly comes from some mega wealthy family just to undermine her credibility over anything and when you consider what she stands for fundamentally it then makes sense that huge media institutions are pumping out and fleeting content about this because they have something to gain from undermining her credibility yes and what happens is that we get dragged down into the muck and we we are attempting to point out the absurdity of all these various smears and lies and disingenuous framing of parts of her life and it's all again weaponized irrelevancy but the one thing to always consider here are what are the motivations and i saw so many viral tweets that linked chapel's family wealth chapel's conservative family wealth chapel's republican politician uncle to why she did not endorse kamala harris so this is a part of why chapel has been subjected to smears over the short amount of time she has been famous because she refused even though she publicly said she voted refused to endorse and campaign for kamala harris which we will also get to you have such great foresight i still look into a crystal ball and i can just see all these things the daily mail tweeted out their article chapel ron is outed as a hypocrite for her secretly rich family and this librarian named joe randazo replied i just read this and still don't know what she did wrong it wasn't even her security guard thank you joe shout out shout out to joe at yankee librarian but of course in the replies to him he was completely dogpiled by people being like well she's clearly a lying sociopath and you are too joe the librarian these types of criticisms and this whole idea of hypocrisy only applies to people who are politically left leading there would never be an article calling out a rich wealthy republican or like a neppo baby artist for being a hypocrite about their wealth it is only relevant when someone has left leading politics it's the if leftist if socialist then why close yes then why things and actually i think it's a mark of somebody like gretta tunberg who is constantly being smeared as well for having come from a wealthy family that actually i think is a marker of how clear i she is and of how she's a person who easily could have just enjoyed her family's privileged position and not put herself front and center of the anti imperialist front and has consequently been subjected to heinous heinous smears it's because they're viewed as a class traitor ultimately and that's where the anger comes from at least from the people who own the daily mail and to that end chapter four section two verse b i don't know i set up the chapter thing to make this easier and i'm already confusing myself because there's just too much but one other spin-off smear that you mentioned that became very popular briefly in the discourse was that chapel ron has a republican uncle who is a state representative in missouri one popular tweet said oh bitch they really got me with chapel ron gossip for this time what do you mean her uncle is an anti trans conservative state rep who sponsored bills to roll back and defund abortion plus aims to remove critical race theory from schools and she just never talks about that lmfao well i would posit that chapel ron does talk about these things exactly like she does specifically in the context of her uncle whose instagram i found that has 29 followers but chapel ron has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for causes related to trans people left-wing causes in general has you know raised hell about palestine it's just you know having an insane family member like a politically insane right-wing family member is kind of part of the american experience for like most people yes especially if you're like a white person from the south is there more chapel could be doing to directly combat the work of what's his name darin chapel maybe but like do you want her to kill him it's it's ridiculous because you're right so many of us have right-wing family members matt you're jewish and an anti zionist i'm sure there are people in your family who are still zionists because that's the reality for a lot of young jewish anti zionists is this massive split in their family usually between the generations yeah i'm chipping away at them don't worry at the end of the day like i find this line of argumentation so frustrating because it's like we don't even know she has a relationship with her uncle we like we just like we don't know and we don't need to know and it's a ridiculous standard and ironically i feel like this level of like impeding on her privacy digging into her background digging into her family this is what she initially was talking about with setting boundaries with the public so a lot of this just feels like punishment for her attempt to like assert those boundaries in the first place i also find it interesting because like lady gaga's dad is a trump supporter who went on fox news to campaign for donald trump in 2024 and was introduced obviously as lady gaga's dad i've never seen anyone be like lady gaga go kill your shitty father right i think all of this is happening to chapel roan for very specific reasons i think one difference between chapel and other progressive pop stars like lady gaga is that chapel specifically has advocated for palestine and that is a big part of the story here palestine as well as her refusing to endorse kamala Harris i would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to rocket money for sponsoring today's episode budgeting has long been a habit of mine ever since my dad nailed it into my head as a child that budgeting is something that you have to do constantly always it annoyed the hell out of me then sometimes still annoys the hell out of me now i have a text waiting for me in my inbox from him right now telling me to get him my latest budgets i am 27 years old some things don't change but i love him and rocket money is a great tool if you want to keep your money in check rocket money is a 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the show you've segued me perfectly into chapter four who trolled chapel as i tracked these many unfolding non controversies some strange things stood out to me the first was how when i started digging for common threats between the most strident anti chapel posters it started to feel like pancake gate and its many spin-offs were actually proxy wars for something else israel one of the daily mail articles one of the most vicious should i add that was published amidst all of this was titled nasty thongs puffy lips and trans oh no not that one the one that's another one okay wait the also insane now we're gonna get to that one we're gonna all right let's take it again the bitch beneath the makeup chapel roane's diss of that crying 11 year old fan actually revealed her dark truth says jacklyn powers daily mail published this article they tweeted the article out they then deleted the tweet and as far as i can tell deleted the whole article from their website wow which is a rare w for those of us in the war against the daily mail this was written by a woman named jacklyn powers whose personal instagram reveals her to be a staunch Zionist following accounts including but not limited to the state of israel the israel defense forces israel tourism follow team israel israel war room and israel friends dot us her recent work at the daily mail also includes take it away caroline nasty thongs puffy lips and trans stunts how fashion week became a traveling circus where good taste goes to die jacklyn powers it gives you a pretty good sense of this woman's worldview and it's to me pretty fascinating that this even got deleted because the daily mail doesn't have a whole lot of shame i was looking to see if the article got deleted from the daily mail which i i can't find it which is really interesting because this does not usually happen but when i was looking at jacklyn powers's past work i also found something that i find really interesting remember how the mayor of rio dijeniro was like Shakira would never do something like this so two years ago jacklyn powers there's an article on her muckrak from page six titled secrets of Shakira's miami life basketball mom parties with jazelle and drives a neon lamborghini and it says welcome to Shakira's new life in florida where she has put disastrous years of infidelity tax evasion and a musical drought behind her to launch a stunning comeback as the queen of latin music so isn't it funny too how like all of these women are up for being hated yes it just depends on like your positionality in the current moment exactly yes we can like Shakira if it's in the context of chapel ron but if it's in the context of Shakira and Shakira's private life we hate Shakira all of these women are interchangeable i mean i have seen so many tweets saying britney never was this obnoxious oh do we all have amnesia with the way that we treated britney yes we do but you're right matt it's about the positionality it's about when people can weaponize certain women against others even when in the past those women themselves have been victim to vicious misogynistic smears also the same year she publishes this jacklyn powers writes for new york post why women are winning the culture right now and it's just like no thanks to you jacklyn you just spat out your drink i just spat out my coffee on the microphone the jacklyn powers spit take that thing people are always talking about and the header for the why women are winning the culture right now is of course a picture of taylor swift jacklyn powers wrote as a feminist i'm loving this moment but as a boy but as a boy mom i want my son to achieve greatness too no oh jacklyn calls herself a boy mom say less i know who this woman is her calling herself a feminist is what really gets me her entire career is bashing women yep one viral tweet posted during the anti chapel cycle said she was right about her which included a video of tiktok influencer brice groober talking vaguely about how in interviews no one has published for some reason chapel ron quote belittles certain races and religions i'm going to keep this one really quick uh but basically if your name rhymes with snapple i want to remind you that media record all of our interviews we have little recorders they're on our phones we keep the interviews so when i tell you that a lot of my colleagues pass around their interviews with you snapple that should come as a little bit of a warning because you fat shame you are unkind you belittle certain races uh certain religions and on top of that basically anyone who has kids instantly becomes your enemy i'm not sure why that's craziness but what i will tell you is that i don't want to be in a room with any snapples at all ever caroline who is brice groober oh brice groober brice is a tiktok influencer girl boss business owner zionist who moved her family from new york to israel in 2024 wow in 2024 in 2024 and this woman has said that israel is the most important decolonization project okay yeah so brice groober is a hardcore zionist who moved her family from new york to israel she clearly has a big political difference here with chapel ron on the issue of israel and palestine so i think it's really important to examine someone's motivations like this tiktok influencer as to why they would put out something like this and why now people are spreading it around in 2024 brice groober was interviewed by the new york post before she moved to israel when she still lived in new york from that article a jewish mother was left stunned after anti-israel protesters shut down the road near her children's upstate new york elementary school and shouted at the kids that their parents were complicit in genocide and baby killers we have some more shouting at children which by the way a highly doubt was happening yeah brice groober of woodstock said she had trouble coming up with answers for her kids about the things they heard when dozens of protesters descended on their small town on tuesday to target the amatech rotron defense manufacturing company which is based down the road from the woodstock elementary school so without getting into every little thing the new york post is writing this as if these like rabid pro palestine protesters went and yelled at children at their elementary school no they were blocking the entrance to a defense contractor that is headquartered down the street from this elementary school and then she was so upset about it that she moved to israel also like the tick tock she made about snaple who's obviously supposed to be chapel i find this really really interesting for a couple reasons one this is like a common rhetorical strategy that's a part of celebrity smear campaigns which is basically being like i have evidence of you doing horrible horrible things but you're just gonna have to take my word for it because she's basically saying there are these recordings that journalists have of chapel being racist that phobic potentially anti-semitic i think she's implying and all of this other stuff but we don't have the recordings and they're not going to reach us so it's like this is a very common technique is like i have this like really like good evidence but i'm not going to let you see it the other thing that just strikes me as weird about this is like i'm a journalist i know a lot of journalists i find it hard to believe that journalists are sending recordings of their interviews with chapel roan first of all she doesn't even do that many interviews second of all like journalists don't usually like send their recordings to other people to gossip people definitely journalists definitely talk about their interviews with other journalists but like this whole story feels so fishy to me but because a lot of people in the public don't really have that level of media literacy or like inside or know how about how these things work it's also really really convincing as we can see with like the traction that this tiktok got and we don't even she could be making it all up we have no clue and to make it a little personal when i attempted to defend chapel on twitter from what i thought was getting blown way out of proportion people of course piled on me and one such person is named greg who wrote that he struggles to find me attractive which got 1600 likes noted thank you but when i went to greg's profile it became clear to me that he is someone who in the year 2026 is still very angry with pro-palestine people for what he views as getting in the way of kamala harris election that is a whole other episode but if you are a liberal capital l liberal who's still angry at the left for not enthusiastically getting behind kamala harris's pro-genocide campaign two years ago chapel ron is definitely on your hit list because she famously voted for but did not endorse kamala harris because of this issue some of greg's tweets include it is safe to say that the free palestine movement was an op it is funny how the free palestine movement simply faded after trump was elected that's news to me right and earlier this month fuck palestine so now i'm just stuck wondering are any of us really arguing about chapel ron's culpability in leaving jude law's daughter in brazil in tears or are we arguing about something else and before anyone goes oh come on matt it's just one guy named greg well sure that's just one guy named greg it is one guy yeah it right like sure literally that is a guy named greg he was a twitter influencer you know he has like 50 000 twitter followers this is one part of the much bigger picture here this aspect of smearing public figures smearing celebrity women like chapel ron because of her anti-genocide stance is something that we've seen paralleled in the smears against people who are not necessarily global pop stars like chapel but are public figures because they are activists organizers involved in the pro-palestine movement and urdine kaswani is one of those who just had an assassination plot stopped before it could end in her in her home getting blown up yeah yeah in her home being blown up she is a palestinian woman who has been subjected to years of these smears when i started combing through some of the tweets about me that were being made in the wake of my defending chapel ron in a tweet this was a theme throughout all of them lots of them were very pro-israel some of them weren't even liberal they were just fully right-wing republicans they were anti-woke pages there was an absolute political current throughout all of it in hammers home that a lot of what is happening with chapel ron over and over again is you now have this coalition of people who do not like her for reasons that are totally separate from any of these controversies that they are engineering and so this is like a pattern of behavior where you now have these ideologically motivated people who want to find reasons to go after chapel ron and they are manufacturing controversy after controversy after controversy and one of the consequences of that is that now people who are not familiar with this background or this nuance instead are like well chapel ron has created this reputation for herself where she is repeatedly problematic but she didn't she did not do those things what actually happened is people who hate her for reasons they're not even necessarily sharing are making up things to get mad at about over her over and over and over again until random members of the public associate chapel with this smear campaign instead of who she actually is this is about control this is about controlling women this is about maintaining rigid cultural gender standards this is about controlling the public's opinion on issues like trans rights and Palestine and this is something that is not new chapel is neither the first nor the last and i think this element here of power being at play in these smear campaigns of women of celebrity women is one that goes back decades and decades and decades and decades in 1950 i always think about this story the actress engred bergman had had an affair with the director reberto rosalini he was an italian director and from that affair she became pregnant and gave birth to their child and then they both divorced their spouses and it was such a scandal but of course nobody had any smoke for rosalini it was all for engred bergman and senator edwin johnson denounced engred bergman on the senate floor and said that she was a powerful influence for evil that she was an apostle of degradation and she ended up having to flee to europe and hide out for a couple years and rosalini's career did not suffer at all and then you fast forward to janet jackson and nipplegate this thing that a man justin timberlake did to her that resulted in her being industry blacklisted that she had her invitation to the grammy's revoked that it killed her very platinum career but not only did nothing to justin's he basically entered the heights of his solo career post ensync and so there's all these examples and i think it comes down to this control and policing of women's behavior of women's bodies ensuring that there is this adherence still to traditionalist conservative values and cultural standards and now we have the the palestine and the trans rights advocacy that is at play with current smear campaigns that we're seeing i'm once again not asserting that kasey waserman was behind any of this but you don't think he wasn't so thrilled to see this news cycle and this bashing of chapel ron go on and on and on and on and on right after she had a great hand in toppling his empire you don't think he's happy about that right at the very least it benefits these powerful people and these powerful men who have actually committed wrongdoing with impunity the fact that we as a culture are so obsessed with these like takedown campaigns against women and we devote so much time and energy and then we have to devote time and energy to debunking it and challenging it and it's all such an obvious distraction from many of the very same issues that chapel ron cares about and is actually doing something about chapter four section eight part two verse 16 letter b and finally it became clear to me throughout all of this that a significant portion of the content being pumped into everyone's feeds about this whole thing just wasn't real a popular post that came onto my timeline which currently has 83 000 likes reads lmao i went to high school with her anyone who went to willard from 2012 to 2015 can tell you how insufferable homophobic and racist she and her boyfriend were the thread continues oh the stories i have i wish i could access my old phone right now but yeah bf was on the baseball team and said hello racist shit to the teams competing against him chapel used to call mrs shepard a black female security guard rasputia and other stuff in our school gc oof i just logged back on but yeah constant bullying and harassment from them kailey was in the theater club and got kicked out for spreading memes and images of a disabled student through snapchat during our sophomore year she left willard in 11th grade i believe those three tweets got 83 000 14 000 and 12 000 likes respectively the top replies to that thread were i knew her lesbian gimmick was fake as fuck 4300 likes boyfriend question mark question mark oh i knew she was a fake lesbian 1300 likes this thread was also reposted to r slash la influencer snark a popular gossip forum on reddit with 1.3 million members so who posted it well it came from a twitter user with almost zero followers they now have about 100 but i think most of those are because of this tweet with the handle at laced bras which is part of a title of a tape mcray song the user had changed their username 13 times according to publicly available information and they've posted a total of four tweets and we just read three of and their profile picture was of a woman from tiktok named danie zaza who when notified of the tweets by her followers on tiktok made it clear that she doesn't have a twitter account it's it's so easy like look how easy it is to get people to believe completely made up allegations with no evidence coming from like very obviously made up sources it's so easy for people to run with those types of false allegations against a woman when at the exact same time people refuse to believe credible allegations with evidence against men like the fact that anyone would take this seriously and run with it is just such an indictment of our culture and like this double standard and also like with the fake lesbian thing it is so offensive to me as a lesbian who dated boys in high school this idea that your past relationship history indicates like what your sexuality actually is any queer person knows that's not true yeah yeah yeah shout out to my eighth grade girlfriend emily i am forever straight because of you i guess and it's like it particularly for queer women this is a very harmful sort of stigma because it reinforces the idea of compulsory heterosexuality which is basically like you know you think you're straight because that's like the default especially for like young women that means you can never be like queer and and women like young queer women are going to read this stuff and they're going to internalize it and it will have harmful consequences on them so like there is a very real social cost even to other people of these smear campaigns i think too when you examine these tweets you can see upon just a quick read why someone would blindly believe it there's enough personal details the utilizing of chapel's first name kailey a picture of her and her boyfriend mentioning the well mentioning names sorry i just want to say it's a picture of her and some guy whose face is blocked out we don't know what their relationship is we don't know exactly but she we know that she had a boyfriend because she's talked about it she has put into the lyrics of her songs talking about how she dated boys and then realized that she loves girls so anyway but i mean by that is like somebody sees that and goes oh this is clearly someone who's telling the truth just by virtue of having these specific details yes now it doesn't matter if they're true or not and when you really look at this with common sense you go okay hold on a second when you examine the page that it's coming from there's just too many things that seem fishy that seem like red flags but because this fulfills people's preconceived notions their biases and also it helps them to moralize their justification for hating chapel they fucking run with it and they run with it to the tune of 83 000 likes which by the way it's not even clear that all of those likes are real people right it's not clear that this thread just popped up on thousands of people's timelines organically like we've established throughout this episode there is a real motivation for powerful people to pump content like this into lots of people's feeds regardless of whether or not it's true and there's now a monetary incentive for people to do stuff like this because of how twitter works now explain that because that is huge i mean elon musk has just turned twitter into something that is so different in the form of x that incentivizes this type of behavior because as most people are probably familiar with blue check accounts used to symbolize that somebody conveyed authority but basically you can now pay to make money on twitter from getting engagement people who opt into the like subscriber version of x can also join like the ad sharing program the revenue sharing program that x now has and you specifically derive value from getting engagement on your posts which directly incentivizes rage bait it directly incentivizes misinformation that fits these preconceived notions that gets people angry and it even incentivizes like bots and spam accounts this is the reason why so many of the top replies on x now are these blue check ai accounts that are posting things clearly generated by chat gpt it's because there's a monetary incentive behind it and over the past couple of years we've seen this make stan culture even more toxic and deranged and reactionary than it used to be which is saying a lot but when you see stuff like this i think the fact that this is seemingly a tape macray fan makes it even more like compelling because you you see this all the time and a lot of normies who are on x don't even pick up on this because i see this all the time for example you'll have an account pretending to be like a taylor swift stan and they'll tweet that famous video of taylor swift dancing where she looks kind of childlike and bad and they'll be like look at mother like she is the best dancer there is q like seven thousand angry quote tweets but the person who tweeted it isn't actually a swiftie at all they're a fan of like tate mcray or sabrina carpenter or somebody else and they're doing it as a form of like stan warfare against someone who they view as a competitor this is like a very like twisted anti-social byproduct of like stan culture and pop idols where now people pit these women against each other and they try to tear the other one down through smear campaigns so there's also an element of that happening here and it's just like i just feel like this is so much of what x culture has unfortunately become when you put someone in charge like elon musk he represents all of the bad things i feel like we talked about he's the world's richest man he's very anti-me too he has allegations against him and so he benefits from this like anti-me too reactionary culture but he also directly profits from all of this every single anti-chapel ron twi is like putting more money in his pocket through like inflating the value of x.com x has become this like echo chamber that is so good at streamlining and amplifying these smear campaigns and finally after all of this starts to die down at last we get a post on instagram from pascal du vie you know pascal du vie we've been talking about him the whole time what do you mean you don't know pascal du vie well there's a reason you don't know his name because he hasn't been centered in any of this pascal du vie is the security guard and he's coming to arrest me right now and he's coming to put you in here yes you're gonna be left in tears he posts the following i do not normally address online rumors but the accusations currently circulating are false and constitute defamation oh he's the day word i take full responsibility for the interaction on march 21st i was at the hotel on behalf of another individual and i was not part of the personal security team of chapel ron the actions i took were not on behalf of chapel ron her personal security team her management or any other individuals i made a judgment call based on information we obtained from the hotel events i had witnessed in the days prior and the heightened overall security risk of our location my soul interaction with the mother was calm and with good intentions and the outcome of the encounter is regretful so you know you think okay well we have all the information we need to put this to bed but not really though because the people who were the most invested in this from the beginning many of those people i would imagine felt like well if i'm proven wrong now then i kind of have a lot of sunk costs to account for and so what did they say the security guard was paid off by chapel ron obviously and chapel ron is even more of a psychopath than we even previously realized when i saw that response i tweeted out just off the top of my head what i assumed people would say in response to i said oh quote i'm sure she paid him off well she needs to answer for lying about being gay and poor i still believe she abused a child and nothing will change my mind yeah well she's still annoying as fuck and every single one of those hypothetical responses is exactly what i saw in response to the security guard coming forward this is like kind of also the danger of conspiratorial thinking that is specifically geared toward these misogynistic smear campaigns because there is nothing that any woman being targeted in a campaign like this can do there is no amount of evidence you can provide there is no threshold you can meet to stop them they will always move the goalposts i think about how when amber heard actually like one in the uk when johnny dep sued the son for defamation for calling him a wife beater and he lost people made flow charts trying to show that amber heard had like a connection to the judge to imply that the judge was like uniquely biased toward her and they're doing that again with the judge in the Blake lively case saying that judge lemons brother was on a commercial that ryan reynolds for like it was like they'll draw these massive flow charts creating conspiracies that these women are always paying someone off no one could ever defend them authentically and like it's just it becomes an impossible thing where it's like once you've gone down a conspiracy rabbit hole you will never be able to be swayed from your preconceived hatred of this specific woman and in fact i think it only further incentivizes people to keep going i think the more pushback the more they're like aha see ironically we'll say you're being paid off yes yeah because anything chapel does that people can identify as like mean or aggressive or any of the other things that they've accused her of they'll be like oh look this is evidence for my case and anything she does that goes in the face of that whether it's her being nice her being nice to a child on video is evidence that she's clearly a master manipulator and she's so good at performing for the cameras and you know she's even crazier than we thought and finally finally finally the bot campaign reveal buzzfeed publishes a report just a few days ago where they found that quote 4.2 percent of users contributing to the chapel-roan conversation were non-typical i.e. they were very likely to be bots as well as that being a high percentage of bots in and of itself the 4.2 percent of users who were likely bots accounted for more than 23 percent of all of the posts who trolled chapel-roan wow i'm so shocked you're telling me that once again bots are a part of a smear campaign against a famous woman chapter five the last the last chapter so as stupid and annoying as this whole thing was i really wanted to make this episode today because i think that pancake gate is emblematic of just how the internet works now there are financial incentives to make bad content there are bot farms weaponized by real people with power to shape online public opinion with fake interest until the real interest kicks in as social media has become more insidified that is to say worse for the point of tech companies making more money social media has gone from something that felt democratic and equal at one point into just another tool for the powerful to create narratives that protect themselves just like in traditional media and it's hard not to see the structural similarities between what happened here what happened to amber her the megastallion for standing up to rich and famous men what happened to meg and markel in the uk for challenging the monarchy and also for example what's happening to hasan piker right now for specifically threatening the order of a liberal zionist democratic party in the u.s i think pancake gate might seem silly in its origin and it is certainly absurd and ridiculous but i think at the root here is something that is not silly and ridiculous because of how much of an influence it has on our culture on our political system and people are conditioned to view to to treat celebrity women in this really horrific way and that also then trickles down into how we are conditioned to treat all women and i think it is this encouraging to view celebrity women and view cases that involve abuse as pure entertainment slop spectacle and so it's not just the not viewing these things as serious it's the motivation to treat it as blood sport and bad actors and people with power who constantly need to reinforce that systemic power they have been paying attention to the celebrity discourse over the past few years and the lessons that they have learned that they are now applying i would say faster bigger with more regularity is that you can convince people on the internet to not just believe whatever you want but also to run with it and do your bidding for you for free because that is the lesson that we know for a fact that pr operations that cost you six figures a month those people have certainly figured this out and they are certainly doing the bidding of these very very powerful individuals and really people should be treating things that they come across with on the internet with utmost skepticism you should be treating things that you come across online with as less reliable and less trustworthy than what a lot of times i would say would be referred to as like mainstream media because even though mainstream media is inherently problematic for a lot of reasons there are also like standards and elements of transparency that posts online do not have when you read somebody's byline on the daily mail as much as i don't like the daily mail you can be certain that that is really that person they are not making up fake people and having their bylines on the daily mail on twitter or x or whatever it's not the same but the unfortunate reality is that most people view what happens on social media as more authentic than what you see in like the traditional mainstream media and like there's a reason for that anti-establishment bias but as a result of that i think it's easier to propagandize people through things like these anonymous social media posts because people are like oh i trust that i trust that twitter thread more than i trust like this report about bot activity from buzzfeed and that is really really problematic because bad actors at all levels can easily weaponize that to their advantage yeah and look i am an independent culture and political commentator like i am of course motivated to tell you to invest in new independent media invest in creators that you see online whose work you like and i will continue to do that but do so with skepticism my takeaway from all of this is that unfortunately there's very little that we can do to stop the train on its tracks in so far as powerful people weaponizing new media for control of the narrative the same way that they've always used media to control the narrative and also to stop the unshitification of social media with people being incentivized to make shitty slop content that just outrageous people because they signed up for their blue check and hopefully they can make that eight dollars a month back or whatever there's very little we can do to stop that like we can't really stop how elon musk structures his business at x.com but what we can do and this is the real uncomfortable uphill battle is just be more thoughtful consumers of what we see online it's the same thing i've been saying on this podcast since day one but it is really i feel like all we can do one example that i want to use too as to how i've seen that in play is the current coordinated effort by democratic party officials and liberal institutions to smear hassan piker as an anti-semite as a danger to democracy is a danger to the democratic party a lot of people see through that because a lot of a lot more people now understand the bullshit false conflation between zionism and judaism when people public figures like hassan are smeared as anti-semites they see those smears they understand that it is because he is deeply deeply publicly critical of israel and so in seeing so many people push back against this i go wait so this is possible we can utilize critical thinking we can go hold on pause before i blindly believe this and either pass it on or participate in whatever way why don't we do that when it comes to these misogynistic slop campaigns yeah and i think like also in figuring out like who you can trust and like who can i trust as like a creator as a journalist it's like you can build that trust with someone over time versus a lot of what people are taking in on social media are these very ephemeral viral posts and you will remember the sentiment in like a tweet that had like a hundred thousand views or like a tick tock that comes across your feed you may remember that sentiment and not even remember who said it so it's like in figuring out like trusted sources of news and information and analysis it's like you should be watching people over time so that you can figure out how to assess them that's a big part of media literacy is like taking in information repeatedly from a source before you make your decision one of the biggest problems with social media and how it feeds information to people is that it takes away the opportunity to build those trusted relationships and ultimately like the platforms have the power i feel like one massive thing people need to do and i think all of us can do a better job at this is just applying that scrutiny more than we are just like taking things in and letting it influence us without even knowing what it is cat and caroline what is it it's literally georgino's biker gang outside my god run cat and caroline where can people find and support more of both of your incredible insights because if they don't they will leave me in tears i am mostly on twitch i stream just about every night i do pop culture analysis from an obvious leftist perspective and instagram and tiktok and all the places i'm at spitfirenews.com that is my newsletter where i talk about all of this stuff and you can also find me on blue sky where no one talks about chapel ron which is both a blessing and a curse if you would like to get more of this show i always forget to promote it nowadays you can support the show over on patreon i am about to or have just released a new patreon episode with matt bleib about israel's queen of propaganda noa tishby we do a deep dive into her it is as fascinating as it is miserable god i'm not good at advertising my own content i love you so much thank you for tuning into this episode if you've made it this far it means a whole lot to me and until next time stay fruity i cannot talk about chapel ron it like i can't they're gonna come after me i do feel like there's so many more things too that i'm like did we get just the examples of how many celebrity men throughout the years have beaten the shit out of paparazzi and nobody cares