The Campaign To Crush 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 TikTok about it. Oh my God, we should cancel her. I hope they tasted 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 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 promise to not make this episode a bland recap of it. We have 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 Kat Tenbarge, journalist, writer of the newsletter Spitfire News. Kat, 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 I'm going to 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, the talent agency she was assigned 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 is the chairman of the organizing committee for the L.A. 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, Orville Peck, Sylvain Esso, Gigi Perez, Laufey, 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. TAG. The Agency Group. 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-centric, 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. 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 apolitical 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 Hin Rajab, the Oscar-nominated film from this year. Also, we're behind the smear campaign of No Other Land. So, 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. That's 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. OK, I didn't even I didn't even plan on invoking her in this episode. I'm sorry, guys. I know I've been I've been good. I've been good. It's like when they release. It's anti-climate change petitions that are signed by like 5,000 scientists, but half of them are chiropractors. 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 Jorginho posted an Instagram story to his four million followers regarding his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whose biological father, Jorginho, was born at the age of 16. His biological father is Jude Law, which is fun. The story has everything. I think this might have been the first time Jude Law found out that he had this daughter. And how many other kids are out there that have yet to have these run ins with Chapel Rhone. And then by consequence, Jude Law discovers that that is his child. It's very Elonian. Does one of you want to read Jorginho's statement that started it all? He posts to Instagram. I went through a very upset. upsetting situation with my family earlier today. My wife is in Sao Paulo for Lollapalooza 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 Rhone. 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 have done it. I've lived with football, public exposure, and well-known people for many years. And I understand very well what respect and boundaries are. 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 children, you can't do anything about it. And to the fans, she does not deserve your affection. Look, it is really hard to not like stop after every sentence and be like, but the best thing is that I'm not going to be a child anymore. I'm going to be a child. 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 guards 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 bye 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 i 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 u.s on twitter it was also one of those things where it's like like wait i'm so sorry so i 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 was like oh my god i'm so sorry i'm so sorry 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 cavaliere cavaliere cavaliere he said that italian i know he's 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 todo mundo no rio i doubt that shakira at shakira at shakira brazil would do that by the way at freio georginio your little one is already the guest of honor from the organization in may and then georginio 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 hour one chapel had not yet responded i thought it was going to be a big deal but i was like oh my god this is going to be it was so bizarre and i actually tweeted at the time uh 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 touche i guess i don't but it's also notable that this todo mundo no rio 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 banned 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 hassan piker's broadcast and they've never been invited on this is like the israeli far-right terrorist military organization betar usa saying that matt bernstein is banned from israel like okay okay it's also really wild to me that he specifically pits chapel road against shakira because i'm like i don't even know maybe shakira has been rude to an 11 year old before like who's to say who's to say 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 uh the mayor of rio de janeiro does follow benjamin netanyahu so anyway i think her fans should uh should stop buying tickets to her shows because um because she's a horrible person and not because i want easier access to those tickets so that night chapel roan posts 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 gonna 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 saying 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 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 slept 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 of all 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 so are we 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 i came across a reel 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 chad cath 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 leaning spaces. Cause as all this was going on, I went to a reading like an 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 chapel 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 chapel 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 of 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 Jorginho. She posted a six minute long video where she more or less ignores chapel's explanation that chapel 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 were sending me messages like, is this true? Is this true? Is this true? And then lots of messages now about obviously chapel's message that she's put out. So I don't know if it 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. Um, 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 with an 11 year old at a fancy hotel, which isn't great course, but I really struggled to put it in. I think it's really important that you know what I'm saying? 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, 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, et cetera, et cetera. So I truly wish this woman no ill will. Please do not, if you're listening to this, go onto any of these people's accounts and leave them in comments. It really is so far from the point, but, 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, but she's the only one. And she's the only one that's ever really been a good example of that. Because Jorginho'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 know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. 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 Rowan 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 Rowan, 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 guard's 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 am going to be the host of the show. I'm going to be the host of the show. 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 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 heat and eat in two minutes. Factor has a 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 factormeals.com slash fruity 50 off with the code fruity 50 off. That is factormeals.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 Heard? 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 Depp v. Heard. In case you need some brushing up. The bones of the case were this. Actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard 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 Depp or anyone in that op ed. But Johnny nevertheless sued for defamation. Amber countersued. And in 2022, they duked it out. And 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 Heard 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 Dior fragrance contract was renewed. Two years later, Alexi Mastris, 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. Kat, you were a part of that podcast. So can you explain some of what those findings were? Yes. So who trolled 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 Heard and Johnny Depp. And more like why were all of these people, people in air quotes, talking about it? Because at the time, it felt really, 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 Depp v. Heard. And all of those posts were very specifically like through this lens of Johnny Depp is a victim and Amber Heard 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 they didn't know about Depp 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 the One of those places that they found was Saudi Arabia, which is really interesting because over the past few years, Johnny Depp 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 Depp party together. They take pictures together at the exact same time that Johnny Depp 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 Depp 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 Alexei 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 interesting. 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 Depp sued Amber for defamation, this was already put into place with a combination of Depp stands, but also these bot farms. This inorganic activity. 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. Duh. It's like an American pastime at this point. Exactly. This is all like at the exact same time that the Mueller 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 across 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, Johnny, 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 Johnny 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 Wolff, Jeffrey Epstein himself, Donald Trump as well, like all of these men were terrified. Stephen 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 Epstein 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. One thousand percent. 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 Lively's, because so much of right wing media. Both giant companies like Fox News, but also individual online commentators such as Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly have a political interest in smearing famous women who make accusations of abuse. In the first half of twenty twenty five, Fox News posted 80 stories alone on their website about Blake Lively, about Blake Lively. Candace 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 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 twenty twenty and twenty twenty four over the January six 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 Angelina Jolie, 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 Too movement from being able to happen again or to like carry any of the consequences it briefly did in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. 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 Heard to successfully set back feminism, Me Too, what could they gain from doing the same thing to Chapel Roan? And another thing that I think is so interesting about who trolled Amber and the findings that there were a lot of bot farms involved in boosting anti Amber Heard content during that trial is how that strategic engineering of publicity. 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 Heard. 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, 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 in 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. 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 roan 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 roan accused of leaving jude law's 11 year old daughter in tears and using security guard to threaten her chapel roan thanks her security during her lollapalooza brazil show hours after her team were accused of threatening jude law's daughter 11 and leaving her quote in tears chapel roan apologizes to jude law's daughter as she insists she did not ask security guard to approach her and say she's not a security guard 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 one who's never said anything about this by the way jude law's ex hits back at chapel roan's denials and hope 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 roan risks being canceled after diva outbursts and celeb spats with star urge to quit fame after aggressive team left jude law's daughter iris law makes a low-key appearance as she steps out after chapel roan was accused of leaving her sister ada 11 in tears with heavy-handed security oh the next one pisses me off i'm sorry i also love their writing about iris law stepping outside because she's like tangentially related to this 11 year old we are all but six degrees separated from having a baby and she's like i'm not going to have a baby Daily Mail article written about us for our relationship to this 11-year-old girl. Matt Bernstein, noted Chapel Roan fan, steps out after Singer Lee's 11-year-old is in tears. Oh no, I'm in tears. Oh God. I have to get my composure. Chapel Roan 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. Yes. The Daily Mail, sure, if I were to look back, participated 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 she would be opposed to the way Chapel Roan handles fame. Taylor Swift has spent the last three albums agonizing over her relationship to fame and public scrutiny, and referred to fans who care too much about her as vipers dressed in empaths' clothing, which the Daily Mail criticized as terrible songwriting. This idea that she needs to be more like Taylor Swift is so divorced from reality, Taylor Swift gets hate 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 used that looks like a mugshot. Yes. Chapel Roan 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 Roan. Music insiders give their verdict, and one source close to the star explodes with worst insult imaginable amid latest scandal. Chapel Roan is outed as hypocrite as her secretly rich family and privileged background is revealed, and backlash over hotel drama that left Jewsies to honor Jude Law's daughter in tears. And the last one here, opinion. It's career crisis time for Chapel Roan. 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 hype 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 churn out as many articles on Chapel Roan as possible. It was the same thing, like, I worked at Business Insider during the Gabby Petito incident. I think we wrote hundreds of articles about Gabby Petito, 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 Petito 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 bass, actually. If you're unfamiliar, pop crave and pop bass 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 bass 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 Roan 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 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 bass generally better. All of these accounts now have a partnership with Polly 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 mails 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 Roan, yada, yada, yada, that becomes content for the daily mail. And we saw this with the Blake Lively story to where it's like at 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 some of the sort of spinoff controversies because now that the Chapel Roan 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 Roan. And so as one daily mail article suggested, there was a resurgence of interest in Chapel Roan'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 kylie chung who's amazing just had had her on the stream with kat 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 rune is actually rich she's a nepo baby she's been lying about it chapel ron queer baits she uh 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 yes exactly eat the rich baby and this is like bar for what they did to amber heard too including the fact that amber heard 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 that 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 who's jude 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 grammys 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 kaylee 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 to see 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 make sacrifices to support their kids' artistic careers with money that they don't necessarily have offhand. It's a privilege, of course, to have access to that money in any form, obviously. But like many successful artists, 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. Well, 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 Roan is secretly a billionaire. His family owns the entire world, which, funny enough, is a parallel between one of the smears against Hassan. Hassan is a billionaire. He owns the entire world. Hassan 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 TikTok that I remember kicking this off was some random user that made this multi-part how Chapel Roan 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 $3,000 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 TikTok, who made a tweet that then went viral as well, responding to this TikTok. 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 piqued, keep listening. I find it pretty funny. 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 Roan should be more like billionaire Taylor Swift, they say Chapel Roan is a hypocrite for growing up with money. Yeah. So which one is it? It's very funny. And you know, it doesn't matter how much money Chapel Roan'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 Roan'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 Mar-a-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 he owned Mar-a-Lago. But he didn't, he didn't, he didn't. And I will say, what I can further understand about this is that one of the things people really drew anger from was that Chapel Roan 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, 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 inflating 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 Chappell's family wealth, Chappell's conservative family wealth, Chappell's Republican politician uncle, to why she did not endorse Kamala Harris. So this is a part of why Chappell 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 look into a crystal ball and I can just see all these things. The Daily Mail tweeted out, their article, Chaperone is outed as a hypocrite for her secretly rich family. And this librarian named Joe Randazzo 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 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-leaning. There would never be an article calling out a rich, wealthy Republican or like a nepo baby artist for being a hypocrite about their wealth. It is only relevant when someone has left-leaning politics. It's the if leftist, if socialist, then why clothes? Yes. Then why things? And actually, I think it's a mark of somebody like Greta Thunberg, who is constantly being smeared as well for having come from a wealthy family, that actually, I think, is a marker of how clear-eyed she is and of how she is 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 spinoff smear that you mentioned that became very popular briefly in the discourse was that Chapel Roan has a Republican uncle who is a state representative in the United States. And he's a Republican. And he's a state representative in Missouri. One popular tweet said, Oh, bitch, they really got me with Chapel Roan gossip 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 Roan 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 Roan 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? Darren 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 Rowan 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. It's 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. And 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. It is a great tool if you want to keep your money in check. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. The app analyzes your bills, shows you all of your expenses on a really easy to digest dashboard and helps you cancel any subscriptions you no longer need with just a few clicks. Rocket Money is a really easy way to just stay on top of your spending. Stay on top of your spending habits, stay on top of your budgets, and especially cancel subscriptions that can sneakily continue charging in the background, even after you think you might have gotten rid of them or just forgotten about them completely. Rocket Money has saved its 5 million users more than $500 million and saves the average user $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. If you'd like to try Rocket Money, you can head over to rocketmoney.com slash fruity. That is rocketmoney.com slash fruity. To start saving today. Thanks so much to Rocket Money. And now let's get back to 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 threads between the most strident anti-chapel posters, it started to feel like Pancake Gate. The second was how when I started digging for common threads between the most strident anti-chapel posters, it started to feel like Pancake Gate. The third was how when I started digging for common threads between the most strident anti-chapel posters, it started to feel like Pancake Gate. The fourth was how when I started digging for common threads between the most strident anti-chapel posters, it started to feel like Pancake Gate. All right, let's take it again. The bitch beneath the makeup, Chapel Roan's diss of that crying 11-year-old fan actually revealed her dark truth, says Jacqueline 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 Jacqueline 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 IsraelFriends.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. Jacqueline 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 can't find it, which is really interesting because this does not usually happen. But when I was looking at Jacqueline Powers' past work, I also found something that I find really interesting. Remember how the mayor of Rio de Janeiro? Was like, Shakira would never do something like this. So two years ago, Jacqueline Powers, there's an article on her muck rack from page six titled, Secrets of Shakira's Miami Life. Basketball mom parties with Giselle 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? So, 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 Roan. 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, Brittany never was this obnoxious. Oh, do we all have amnesia with the way that we treated Brittany? 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, Jacqueline Powers writes for New York Post, why women are winning the culture right now. And it's just like. No thanks to you, Jacqueline. You just spat out your drink. I just spat out my coffee on the microphone. The Jacqueline 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. Jacqueline 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. Oh, Jacqueline 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 Bryce Gruber talking vaguely about how in interviews no one has published, for some reason, Chapel Roan, quote, belittles certain races and religions. I'm going to keep this one really quick. 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, 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. I'm not sure why. That's craziness. Who is Bryce Gruber? Oh, Bryce Gruber. Bryce 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 Bryce Gruber is a hardcore Zionist who moved her family from New York to Israel. She clearly has a big political difference here with Chapel Roan 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? In 2024, Bryce Gruber 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, I highly doubt was happening. Yeah. Bryce Gruber 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 Amatek 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 TikTok she made about Snapple, who's obviously supposed to be Chappell. I find this really, really interesting for a couple of 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 going to have to take my word for it. Because she's saying there are these recordings that journalists have of Chappell being racist, fatphobic, 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 Chappell Rowe. And 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 insider 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 Chappell 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. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Greg. 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 winning the 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, Chappell Roan is definitely on your hit list because she thinks that she's going to win the election. 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 Roan'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. Right. Sure. 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 Roan 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, people who have been involved in the pro-Palestine movement. Nardine 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 Roan 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. It hammers home that a lot of what is happening with Chapel Roan 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 Roan 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 Roan has created this reputation that is 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 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. Mm hmm. 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 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 and decades and decades and decades and decades and decades and decades in 1950. I always think about this story. The actress Ingrid Bergman, had had an affair with the director, Roberto Rossellini. 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 Rossellini. It was all for Ingrid Bergman. And Senator Edwin Johnson denounced Ingrid 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 Rossellini'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 Grammys revoked, that it's. It killed her very platinum career. But not only did nothing to Justin's, he basically entered the heights of his solo career post NSYNC. 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 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 Casey Wasserman 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 Roan go on and on and on and on and on right after she had a great. 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 Roan cares about. And is actually doing something about. Chapter 4, Section 8, Part 2, 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. LMAO. 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 hella racist shit to the teams competing against him. Chapel used to call Mrs. Shepard, a black female security guard, Rasputia and others stuff in our school GC. Oof, I just logged back on. But yeah, constant bullying and harassment from them. Kaylee 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. 4,300 likes. Boyfriend? Question mark, question mark. Oh, I knew she was a fake lesbian. 1,300 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. With the handle at Laced Bras, which is part of a title of a Tate McRae 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 them. And their profile picture was of a woman from TikTok named Dani 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 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, particularly for queer women, this is a very harmful sort of stigma because it really. It really enforces the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, which is basically, like, oh, 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 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 Chappell's first name, Kaylee, a picture of her and her boyfriend, mentioning the school, 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 who he is. But 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. She dated boys and then realized that she loves girls. So, anyway, what I mean by that is, like, somebody sees that and goes, ooh, 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. 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 platform. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really cool about this. It 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 dangerous. It's more 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 Tate McRae fan makes it even more like compelling. Because 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 the problem is, They'll be like, look at mother. Like she is the best dancer there. is, cue like 7,000 angry quote tweets. But the person who tweeted it isn't actually a Swifty at all. They're a fan of like Tate McRae 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 antisocial 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-MeToo. He has allegations against him. And so he benefits from this like anti-MeToo reactionary culture, but he also directly profits from all of this. Every single anti-Chapel Roan tweet 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. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And finally, after all of this starts to die down at last, we get a post on Instagram from Pascal Duvier. You know, Pascal Duvier, we've been talking about him the whole time. What do you mean you don't know Pascal Duvier? Well, there's a reason you don't know his name because he hasn't been centered in any of this. Pascal Duvier is the security guard. And he's coming to arrest me right now. And he's coming to put you in tears. He's coming to put you, yes. You're going to 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 used the D 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 Roan. The actions I took were not on behalf of Chapel Roan, 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 sole interaction with the mother was calm and with good intentions, and the outcome of the encounter is regretful. So. You know, you'd 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 they were the ones who were the most invested in this. And they 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 Roan, obviously, and Chapel Roan 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 it. 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 won in the UK, when Johnny Depp 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 a connection to the judge to imply that the judge was uniquely biased toward her. And they're doing that again with the judge in the Blake Lively case, saying Lehman's 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 Chappell 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% of users contributing to the Chappell 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% of users who were likely to be bots were non typical. And so they found that 4.2% of users who were likely to be bots accounted for more than 23% of all of the posts who trolled Chappell 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 chapter. So as stupid and annoying as this whole thing was, I really wanted to make this episode today because I think that PancakeGate 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 and shitified, 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 Heard and Megan Thee Stallion for standing up to rich and famous men, what happened to Meghan Markle in the UK for challenging the monarchy. And also, for example, what's happening to Hassan Piker right now for specifically threatening the order of a liberal Zionist. Democratic Party in the US. I think PancakeGate 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 bleak. 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 sure. 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 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 than just a byline. And that's why I think it's so important that people be more authentic than what you see in the traditional mainstream media. And 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 insofar. 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 inshittification of social media with people being incentivized to make shitty slop content that just outrages people because they've signed up for their blue check and hopefully they can make that $8 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, as a danger to the Democratic Party. A lot of people see through that because 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 use. 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 also in figuring out who you can trust and who can I trust as a creator, as a journalist, it's like you can build that trust with someone over time. Versus. Because 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 100,000 views or like a TikTok 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. Kat and Caroline. What is that? It's literally Jorginho's biker gang outside of my apartment. Oh my god, run! Kat 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 Roan, 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 Lieb about Israel's Queen of Propaganda, Noah 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. Yay. I cannot talk about Chapel Roan. Like, I can't. They're going to 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?