00:00:00.000Did you guys know that Chapel Rhone at the breakfast, she ordered truffle pancakes, which were it was the most expensive thing on the menu.
00:00:08.500They were fifty four dollars. A server from the hotel restaurant made a tick tock about it.
00:00:21.600I don't I don't care that you made it up because I've already tweeted 10 versions of it.
00:00:26.720I 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.1.00
00:00:34.240I 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.1.00
00:01:41.500I mean, you would think it was true, though.
00:01:43.280No matter what she does, an apology won't bring her back to life.
00:01:46.520Joining us on our episode today to talk about a lot, we have Kat Tenbarge, journalist, writer of the newsletter Spitfire News.
00:01:54.900Kat, welcome back to the show. So excited to be here. A true smear campaign expert. Both of you,
00:02:00.480really. We also have Caroline Kwan, pop culture and political Twitch streamer. So excited to have1.00
00:02:05.900you back. Excited to be here yet again, talking about my favorite thing in the world, which is
00:02:10.740that everyone loves to hate women. Guys, I have 21 pages of notes for this episode. I have never0.99
00:02:16.980had this many pages of notes before. And I think people on this podcast know me for long outlines.
00:02:21.940So I'm very excited to get into it. And we also have a lot to get to. So shall we get started?
00:02:28.820Yeah, I have 33 years of notes in my head. So I'm going to try and not say everything
00:02:38.300all at once. I have organized our episode today into some sweet internet friendly chapters.
00:02:44.860So here we go. Chapter one, a breakfast from hell. On February 13th, 2026, Chapel Roan cut ties with Wasserman, the talent agency she was signed to. Wasserman is a massive agency and Chapel was one of their biggest names.
00:03:01.620Her departure was in response to Wasserman's founder, Casey Wasserman, appearing to have sexted with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 via email.
00:03:12.320I guess it's not sexting if it's emails, but you know.
00:03:15.160Casey Wasserman is an extraordinarily powerful figure, as is made clear by his inclusion in the Epstein class.
00:03:22.580Forbes estimates Wasserman's personal net worth to be at least $750 million as of last month.
00:03:28.560He's the chairman of the organizing committee for the LA 2028 Olympics, a position the Olympic
00:03:34.860committee has not removed him from, despite public protest. After Chappell pulled out of Wasserman,
00:03:41.200so too did a string of other artists, Orville Peck, Sylvain Esso, Gigi Perez, Laufey, Odessa,
00:03:47.880and the local natives, to name a few. This led Casey Wasserman to announce within days that he
00:03:54.120was selling the company. And the following month, it was announced that Wasserman Agency would be
00:03:59.520renamed The Team. Memorable. You know, there was one guy who was like, what if we call it The Team?
00:04:08.280And everyone went, yeah, it's good enough. That's kind of like how Melissa Nathan's PR company is
00:04:12.200called Tag. Tag. The Agency Group. I mean, you're an agency and you're a group, so you're the agency0.92
00:04:19.120group. We're a team of managers, so we're the team. I begin our episode with this story not to imply
00:04:24.020that Casey Wasserman is necessarily behind all or any of what we'll discuss today. You can't sue me
00:04:30.100now, Casey. But because I think it represents well the kind of threat that someone like Chapel
00:04:37.120Rhone poses to hierarchy and order and power. There's a ton of public litigation over just how
00:04:43.960real or manufactured the constant churn of controversy around Chapel Rhone is, and we'll
00:04:49.960get to that. But what we know for certain is that Chappell is a pro-Palestine, pro-trans,
00:04:56.020boundary-setting lesbian, willing to disrupt business as usual, literally, for powerful
00:05:02.460people. And that puts a target on her back and incentivizes people with their hands on the1.00
00:05:07.480levers of power to turn public opinion against her if they wanted to, strategically, in what1.00
00:05:12.860one might call a campaign. Casey Wasserman is also one of the figures associated with0.79
00:05:22.740the Creative Community for Peace. They are a pro-Israel group that call themselves an
00:05:29.380apolitical nonprofit. He has hosted fundraisers for Creative Community for Peace. Yes. And they
00:05:34.620are the ones behind all the open letters, the open letters, the smear campaigns towards
00:05:39.780voice of Henry Job, the Oscar nominated film from this year, also were behind the smear campaign of
00:05:46.040no other land. So yeah, that's the creative community for peace that Casey Wasserman is
00:05:52.080tied to. Yeah. If you've ever seen a bunch of headlines that come out all at once about how
00:05:57.140it's like Deborah Messing and 1200 celebrities who you just also haven't heard of sign an open
00:06:03.380letter condemning literally any other celebrity who's spoken out against Israel. That's those
00:06:08.920are all organized by creative community for peace yeah and it should show you if they're
00:06:12.560leading with deb messing's name that's about the top of the list that they got okay i didn't even
00:06:18.680i 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
00:06:24.100been good it's like when they release anti-climate change petitions that are signed by like 5 000
00:06:29.360scientists but half of them are chiropractors exactly and oil executives chapter one section
00:06:37.500two, breakfast. The most important meal of the day. It's where we have to start.
00:06:45.120On March 21, Brazilian footballer Jorginho posted an Instagram story to his 4 million followers
00:06:51.980regarding his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whose biological father is Jude Law, which is fun.
00:06:58.280This story has everything. I think this might have been the first time Jude Law found out that
00:07:02.800he had this daughter. And how many other kids are out there that have yet to have these run-ins
00:07:10.460with Chapel Roan and then by consequence Jude Law discovers that that is his child. It's very
00:07:16.340Elonian. Does one of you want to read Jorginho's statement that started it all? He posts to
00:07:23.300Instagram, I went through a very upsetting situation with my family earlier today. My wife
00:07:29.400is in Sao Paulo for Lollapalooza Brazil. This morning, my daughter woke up incredibly excited.
00:07:36.060She even made a sign because she was so happy to see an artist she really admires or used to admire
00:07:42.220at Chapel Rhone. By coincidence, they're staying at the same hotel as this artist. During breakfast,
00:07:48.920the artist walked past their table. My daughter, like any child, recognized her, got excited,
00:07:55.140and just wanted to make sure it was really her. And the worst part is she didn't even approach
00:08:00.480her. She simply walked past the singer's table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled, and went
00:08:06.300back to sit with her mom. She didn't say anything, didn't ask for anything. What happened next was
00:08:12.040completely disproportionate. A large security guard came over to their table while they were
00:08:17.100still having breakfast and began speaking in an extremely aggressive manner to both my wife and
00:08:22.320my daughter, saying that she shouldn't allow my daughter to, quote, disrespect or harass other
00:08:27.880people. He even said he would file a complaint against them with the hotel while my 11-year-old
00:08:33.100daughter was sitting there in tears. My daughter was extremely shaken and cried a lot. I've lived
00:08:39.260with football, public exposure, and well-known people for many years, and I understand very well
00:08:44.860what respect and boundaries are. What happened there was not that. It was just a child admiring
00:08:51.140someone. It's sad to see this kind of treatment coming from those who should understand the
00:08:56.120importance of fans. At the end of the day, they are the ones who build all of this. I sincerely
00:09:01.900hope this serves as a moment of reflection. No one should have to go through this, especially
00:09:07.140not a child. At Chapel Roan, without your fans, you would be nothing. And to the fans,
00:09:13.420she does not deserve your affection look it is really hard to not like stop after every sentence
00:09:23.720and be like like to me it's interesting that like this is being written so rigorously by someone who
00:09:32.700as evidenced in his own story wasn't there was not there but i promised that this episode would
00:09:38.320not just be litigating the breakfast itself because i don't actually think that's the
00:09:42.680interesting thing about what happened here but we can talk about it a little bit we could talk
00:09:46.300about it a little bit i will say too though i think the irony in this line what happened next
00:09:52.040was completely disproportionate actually applies to what happened next after he posted this it's
00:10:00.980also interesting to me that like he acknowledges from the very beginning that chapel didn't even
00:10:06.540necessarily have a reason to know this happened because the 11 year old in question didn't even
00:10:12.100approach her she didn't ask chapel for a photo like there was no interaction between the two of
00:10:17.420them yet for a lot of people responding to this it became like chapel furiously said she wouldn't
00:10:23.180take a picture with this child but also it's just like throughout this whole controversy people are
00:10:28.820trying to blame chapel for the security guards actions which is literally holding a woman
00:10:34.480accountable for something every party agrees a man did like you aren't responsible for someone
00:10:41.040else's conduct, especially when you are both adults. Could you guys quickly describe how
00:10:45.680quickly this blew up and took over everyone's feeds? Like, I can't remember seeing any celebrity
00:10:52.900news spread like this in recent history. It was giving bye sister to me, honestly. I had taken
00:10:59.260the night off from streaming. I was out and I started to get texts from friends and I looked
00:11:05.680at the initial post and I went what who cares I went I this is not a situation that I felt in the
00:11:12.520beginning that I needed to jump in and do what I have done in the past which is to defend Chapel
00:11:18.480Rhone and then suddenly like that it was a raging wildfire it was everywhere so much of what was
00:11:28.320online was very deranged it was trending at number two in the U.S. on Twitter it was also one of those
00:11:35.580things where it's like like wait i'm so sorry so i i do not mean to cut a woman off on this episode
00:11:41.840in particular but like we are at war and this was trending at number two in the united states
00:11:49.560yeah yeah it was also one of those things where there was like a whole algorithm constructed
00:11:54.800around this incident because every time i would like refresh my fyp on x it would be more tweets
00:12:02.480about this incident, which means that there is like an algorithm pushing it to the top of your
00:12:07.300feed. And so that happened very, very quickly. And that was locked in for days, days of just
00:12:14.980like the algorithm specifically surfacing content about this incident and putting it at the very
00:12:19.780top of people's for you pages. I even checked my partner's Twitter because all he follows is
00:12:26.620football to see because we have very different feeds. And even on his feed, there was so much
00:12:33.560activity around this. Later that day, Eduardo Cavalieri, Cavalieri, Cavalieri. He said that
00:12:41.300Italian. I know he's he's Brazilian. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro posted the following statement.
00:12:48.440He said, as long as I'm in charge of our city, this young lady, Chapel Rhone, will never perform
00:12:55.100at todo mundo no rio i doubt that shakira at shakira at shakira brazil would do that
00:13:01.560by the way at freio jorginho your little one is already the guest of honor from the organization
00:13:08.800in may and then jorginho commented heart heart so this was actually the first piece of content i saw
00:13:16.160about any of this and the fact that i was seeing this from the mayor of rio de janeiro this was on
00:13:23.100like hour one chapel had not yet responded i thought it was so bizarre and i actually tweeted
00:13:30.680at the time uh i was like does anyone think that it's weird that a public official is weighing in
00:13:36.320on such private matters that haven't even been addressed by the singer in question to which a
00:13:41.520bunch of brazilian posters replied you clearly don't understand brazilian politics which touche
00:24:49.020That is why there were enterprising online people who recognized this was something that they could join in on the side of hitting Chapel Roan.
00:24:58.400The bots that got involved, the misinformation and disinformation.
00:25:03.240Like that is the thing that I care about.
00:28:52.220against Amber was not exactly organic. Kat, you were a part of that podcast. So can you explain
00:28:59.800some of what those findings were? Yes. So who told Amber is a really, really interesting. It
00:29:05.700was one of the only investigations that focused less on like the facts of the case and what
00:29:11.360happened between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp and more like why were all of these people,
00:29:16.340people in air quotes, talking about it. Because at the time, it felt really unprecedented
00:29:22.400to have this sort of algorithmic bias where you can't go on any social media platform and not
00:29:29.300encounter people talking about Depp v. Heard. And all of those posts were very specifically
00:29:34.640through this lens of Johnny Depp is a victim and Amber Heard is an abuser. They collected a bunch
00:29:40.400of data, a bunch of tweets from the time of the trial, and they sent them to researchers around
00:29:45.560the world who study bots. And part of what they found is that it's really hard to figure out who
00:29:50.820is a bot and who is not on social media, but that there are very sophisticated places around the
00:29:56.540world where you can direct these sorts of bot campaigns. And one of those places that they
00:30:01.200found was Saudi Arabia, which is really interesting because over the past few years,
00:30:07.220Johnny Depp has cultivated a friendship within the Saudi Arabian regime. MBS, the main guy who's
00:30:14.280like, in charge of Saudi Arabia. Like, he and Johnny Depp party together. They take pictures
00:30:17.960together. At the exact same time that Johnny Depp is cultivating this close relationship,
00:30:22.320the country is also trying to build out its own sort of cultural initiatives. They have, like,
00:30:27.820the Red Sea Film Festival that Johnny Depp has been a guest of honor at. I believe he premiered
00:30:32.100one of his films after the trial there. And also, a lot of these tweets that Alexei was
00:30:37.740investigating and sending around to these data scientists could potentially be linked back to
00:30:42.120these bot farms from that country. So there's an interesting like geopolitical aspect to all of
00:30:47.760this. But of course, his ultimate takeaway is like, yes, there was inauthentic activity up to 50%
00:30:54.000based on some estimations. But also, it is concerning and reflective of the fact that there
00:31:00.000were enough real authentic people who were also willing to push these narratives. That was what
00:31:05.880ultimately made it as successful as it was. And prior to the 2022 trial where Johnny Depp sued
00:31:14.340Amber for defamation, this was already put into place with a combination of Depp stands, but also
00:31:23.600these bot farms, this inorganic activity online that had already pumped out thousands of tweets
00:31:30.420that were very anti-Amber Heard before the trial started. Exactly. And in addition to that, not
00:31:35.740only is there the saudi arabian connection but there's also a russian connection duh it's like
00:31:42.120an american pastime at this point exactly this is all like at the exact same time that the molar
00:31:47.220report is ongoing and finding all of this evidence that russia had influenced american elections
00:31:52.360at the exact same time depp's lawyer adam waldman has closely worked with russian oligarchs in his
00:32:00.660capacity as Johnny Depp's lawyer, he was actually basically kicked off of the 2022 trial because he
00:32:07.120had leaked materials that were supposed to be like sanctioned, not supposed to be released to the
00:32:12.800public to YouTubers. And he later testified to this in 2022. There were like three YouTubers
00:32:19.180in particular who he had shared audio recordings with of like fights between Johnny Depp and Amber
00:32:24.800heard. And some of those YouTubers had created these videos that had hundreds of millions of
00:32:30.240views across platforms before the trial even started. And they had mistranslated them. Like
00:32:36.860they had put captions on the videos, but they just made up the captions. So the audio would be like
00:32:42.300crackling static and like voices and you couldn't really discern what they were saying. And then
00:32:46.560these YouTubers had written out like, I'm hitting you, Donnie, like crazy stuff like that. They just
00:32:51.820made up this whole fake narrative. Depp's lawyer was involved with that. That was inauthentic.
00:32:56.940And there were already, as you said, Caroline, so many tweets. The entire Justice for Johnny Depp
00:33:02.280movement, which was astroturfed, already existed by the time the trial even began.
00:33:06.520How do you explain why such powerful people across countries and governments were invested
00:33:14.320in smearing amber as hard as possible even before this started? Because I feel like this is important
00:33:20.180as we continue on with this episode and then return back to Pancake Gate.
00:33:24.080I mean, interestingly enough, this really aligns with what we've seen in the Epstein files,
00:33:28.820which is that a lot of very powerful men, celebrities, people like Woody Allen,
00:33:33.520journalists like Michael Wolff, Jeffrey Epstein himself, Donald Trump as well,
00:33:37.220like all of these men were terrified. Stephen Bannon.
00:33:40.260All of these men were terrified of the Me Too movement and the implications it had for their power.
00:33:46.200And 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.
00:34:02.380And 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.
00:34:23.740So that's where I think a lot of the geopolitical stuff comes in.
00:34:53.740Because 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.
00:35:14.120In the first half of 2025, Fox News posted 80 stories alone on their website about Blake Lively, about Blake Lively.
00:35:23.740Candace Owens made dozens of videos every time there was a new update that came out.
00:35:29.060And what she said about Blake, she said a lot of things, but I think this is the thing that
00:35:32.560really stands out. She said she has proven herself to not be a kind person. And that is
00:35:38.320largely due to the fact that she is a modern feminist. So that is tying modern feminism,1.00
00:35:45.620feminist movements to these lying, scheming, manipulative women.1.00
00:35:51.820Amber Heard, her very name has become a weapon because any woman who steps out of line is now referred to as Amber 2.0.1.00
00:36:00.980And you even saw that with, is her name Cassidy Hutchinson?0.91
00:36:05.080Is that the woman who was like part of Trump who then testified against him later?
00:36:09.540When she testified against Trump in between like 2020 and 2024 over the January 6th hearings, Trump supporters were calling her Amber 2.0.
00:36:18.120So 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.
00:36:31.520And 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 2017, 2018.
00:36:43.140And I just think like in the context of this larger.
00:36:46.080oh wow no they're they're always coming for me every time i try to make a salient point
00:36:52.460i don't know it's johnny depp he's coming for me no he he's probably in some drug stupor somewhere
00:36:58.300so that's what's also so ironic about johnny depp is like he doesn't even pay people i believe he
00:37:04.600got sued by his lawyers for not paying them and like his insurance company like he's not known
00:37:10.740for being a good client, which to me shows that there is a much deeper ideological purpose behind
00:37:17.000all of these powerful wealthy people who aligned with him. They saw him as like the perfect figure
00:37:22.820for this type of ultimately ideological crusade. And I think just like in the context of this
00:37:28.940larger conversation, if powerful people could get involved in smearing Amber Heard to successfully
00:37:35.860set back feminism, Me Too, what could they gain from doing the same thing to Chapel Roan?
00:37:43.260And another thing that I think is so interesting about who trolled Amber and the findings that
00:37:48.000there were a lot of bot farms involved in boosting anti-Amber herd content during that trial is how
00:37:54.940that strategic engineering of public sentiment mixed with people's existing prejudices.
00:38:00.460I think a lot of people might say, well, I'm a human being and 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.
00:38:21.360existing feelings that people have of misogyny, of anti-blackness, of homophobia,
00:38:26.480transphobia, anti-fat bias, those can easily be exploited by bad actors.
00:38:31.460This is the problem here. It's the way that our cultural biases are so deeply ingrained
00:38:38.040that people will say, no, I reached this opinion on my own. And so therefore, they don't believe
00:38:45.720that they have fallen for a smear campaign. They don't believe that they are contributing here to
00:38:54.100a hate train that is greased by these biases that exist in our culture. And so it is this
00:39:02.900mixture of astroturfed, inorganic, manufactured discourse online, but it is anchored by real
00:39:13.520misogyny, homophobia, racism, et cetera. And that's what's hard to kind of root out from
00:39:19.840people because most people don't want to do that internal self-reflection. But that's the job here
00:39:26.040that I think people like us have is getting people to interrogate those biases and make these
00:39:32.300connections. And it's an uphill battle for the left compared to a very easy thing for the right
00:39:37.340to do, which is why Melissa Nathan in her famous text message was like, wow, it just really goes1.00
00:39:42.540to show you how much people hate women because there were elements of the blake lively smear0.94
00:39:47.040campaign that just were like a runaway train on their own the publicists lit the match but the
00:39:53.140crowd of people and their misogyny is what like carried the flames as far as they eventually
00:39:57.680spread chapter three chapel gets trolled back to chapel back to pancake gate as the days and
00:40:05.400weeks unfolded following hashtag pancake gate that's not a real hashtag i made that one up
00:40:10.360online anger towards chapel roan didn't die down it grew for example the daily mail has written
00:40:18.180upwards of 30 articles about this incident a sample platter of which we will read to you now
00:40:24.260do you guys want to popcorn it i put them in the outline i'll start chapel roan accused of leaving
00:40:30.300jude law's 11 year old daughter in tears and using security guard to threaten her chapel roan thanks
00:40:37.440her security during her Lollapalooza Brazil show hours after her team were accused of threatening
00:40:42.840Jude Law's daughter, Eleven, and leaving her, quote, in tears.
00:40:47.340Chapel Roan apologizes to Jude Law's daughter as she insists she did not ask security guard
00:40:53.120to approach her and says, I do not hate fans of my music or children.
00:46:09.560Like I worked at Business Insider during the Gabby Petito incident.
00:46:13.800I think we wrote hundreds of articles about Gabby Petito.
00:46:16.260And 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.
00:46:29.180Obviously, we all know how that story turned out.
00:46:32.080But 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.
00:46:44.060I have some smoke for Pop Crave, much more so than Pop Base, actually. If you're unfamiliar, Pop Crave and Pop Base are the two biggest news sources for pop culture and oftentimes political related news on Twitter slash X.
00:47:01.120I will say I do think pop base wields their power with much more responsibility. They also talk a lot about hard lefty politics. They talk about Palestine. Pop Crave in particular, though, if they see, for example, a chapel room leaves Jude Law's daughter in tears post is doing well, they will make 20 of those.
00:47:20.960And 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.
00:47:34.420There's definitely a lot of comparison now between Pop Crave and the tabloids.
00:47:41.060And the tabloids have been doing this for decades at this point.
00:47:44.480But I've noticed with Pop Crave and these other pop culture, big news, Twitter accounts,
00:47:50.460and then also the ones that have popped up that call themselves parody accounts. There's so many
00:47:55.900more of those, but they are really fashioning themselves after a Daily Mail. And it's because
00:48:01.460of the financial incentives. And the other thing I want to add is, yes, I agree. PopBase generally
00:48:08.020better. All of these accounts now have a partnership with Olly Market, which is a whole
00:48:14.780other element here. And they all put out the exact same post in the Timothee Chalamet.
00:48:21.660Bet on Timothee Chalamet's odds of winning the Oscar. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's also like these
00:48:26.360types of like pop craves and Daily Mail's feed into each other because when Daily Mail runs
00:48:31.920headlines like this, pop crave can aggregate those. And if pop crave or anyone makes a TikTok
00:48:37.600or a viral post being like Chapel Roan, yada, yada, yada, that becomes content for the Daily
00:48:42.640Mail. And we saw this with the Blake Lively story too, where it's like, add a lot of these digital
00:48:47.340media outlets. And again, I've worked for them. I know they do this. I've had to do this. A story
00:48:52.380can just be, here are 10 viral tweets about something. The onus to actually be like fact
00:48:57.400checked, real information then falls onto the social media posters and the news outlet can
00:49:02.180just say it's aggregated from these tweets. So they feed into each other.
00:49:06.140They 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 Trump. 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.
00:49:24.900Yes. 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 Rhone 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 Rhone.
00:49:49.740And so as one Daily Mail article suggested, there was a resurgence of interest in Chapel Roan's family wealth or lack thereof.
00:49:57.960The dominant narrative then became she killed a child and she lied about growing up in a trailer and she's really rich.1.00
00:50:08.800She's a rich, spoiled brat and no one should trust anything she has to say.1.00
00:50:13.760And she's lying about being a lesbian.0.98
00:50:15.220OK, 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.
00:50:37.020When the original thing starts to lose steam,
00:50:40.780when there's too many holes that are poked in it,
00:55:00.600That 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.
00:55:19.540This is a whole other part of my outline. So I will leave that in. But listener, if your interest was just piqued, keep listening.
00:55:25.740I find it particularly interesting that people love to use this line of attack against like women from more like working class backgrounds or like women who are not nepo babies, people who did not come from like immense wealth and fame.
00:55:40.040Again, 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.
00:55:56.680The Daily Mail is also openly laudatory of the fact that Taylor Swift is a billionaire.0.94
00:56:00.940And 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.0.97
01:11:59.660So Bryce Gruber is a hardcore Zionist who moved her family from New York to Israel.
01:12:05.140She clearly has a big political difference here with Chapel Roan on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
01:12:13.320So 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.
01:12:27.240In 2024, Bryce Gruber was interviewed by the New York Post before she moved to Israel when she still lived in New York.
01:12:34.960From 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.
01:12:50.560We have some more shouting at children, which, by the way, I highly doubt was happening.
01:12:54.700Bryce 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.
01:13:14.460So without getting into every little thing, the New York Post is writing this as if these like
01:13:19.360rabid pro-Palestine protesters went and yelled at children at their elementary school. No,
01:13:25.480they were blocking the entrance to a defense contractor that is headquartered down the street
01:13:31.860from this elementary school. And then she was so upset about it that she moved to Israel.
01:13:36.900Also, like the TikTok she made about Snapple, who's obviously supposed to be Chapel. I find
01:13:42.160this really, really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, this is like a common rhetorical
01:13:46.960strategy that's a part of celebrity smear campaigns, which is basically being like,
01:13:51.420I have evidence of you doing horrible, horrible things, but you're just going to have to take my
01:13:55.340word for it. Because she's basically saying there are these recordings that journalists have
01:13:59.980of Chappell being racist, fat phobic, potentially anti-Semitic, I think she's implying,0.86
01:14:06.200and all of this other stuff. But we don't have the recordings and they're not going to reach us.
01:14:11.520So this is a very common technique. I have this really good evidence, but I'm not going to let
01:14:17.200you see it. The other thing that just strikes me as weird about this is I'm a journalist. I know a
01:14:22.740lot of journalists. I find it hard to believe that journalists are sending recordings of their
01:14:27.340interviews with Chapel Row. First of all, she doesn't even do that many interviews. Second of
01:14:31.440all, journalists don't usually send their recordings to other people to gossip. Journalists
01:14:37.860certainly talk about their interviews with other journalists. But like this whole story feels so
01:14:42.880fishy to me. But because a lot of people in the public don't really have that level of media
01:14:47.680literacy or like insider know how about how these things work. It's also really, really convincing,
01:14:53.040as we can see with like the traction that this TikTok got. And we don't even she could be making
01:14:58.480it all up. We have no clue. And to make it a little personal, when I attempted to defend
01:15:04.200chapel on Twitter from what I thought was getting blown way out of proportion, people of course
01:15:09.260piled on me. And one such person is named Greg, who wrote that he struggles to find me attractive,
01:15:17.780which got 1600 likes. Noted. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Greg. But when I went to Greg's
01:15:26.520profile, it became clear to me that he is someone who in the year 2026 is still very angry with
01:15:33.880pro-Palestine people for what he views as getting in the way of Kamala Harris winning the election.
01:15:39.900That is a whole other episode. But if you are a liberal, capital L liberal, who's still angry at
01:15:46.780the left for not enthusiastically getting behind Kamala Harris's pro-genocide campaign two years
01:15:52.140ago, Chapel Roan is definitely on your hit list because she famously voted for, but did not endorse,
01:16:51.480You know, he has like 50,000 Twitter followers.
01:16:54.260This 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,
01:17:19.300but are public figures because they are activists, organizers involved in the pro-Palestine
01:17:28.760movement. Nardine Kaswani is one of those who just had an assassination plot stopped before
01:17:36.100it could end in her, in her home getting blown up. Yeah. Yeah. In her home being blown up. She
01:17:42.900is a Palestinian woman who has been subjected to years of these smears.
01:17:47.860When I started combing through some of the tweets about me that were being made in the
01:17:53.840wake of my defending Chapel Roan in a tweet, this was a theme throughout all of them.
01:18:09.620There was an absolute political current throughout all of it.
01:18:12.660It hammers home that a lot of what is happening with Chapel Roan over and over again is
01:18:17.760you now have this coalition of people who do not like her for reasons that are totally separate
01:18:23.520from any of these controversies that they are engineering. And so this is like a pattern of
01:18:28.760behavior where you now have these ideologically motivated people who want to find reasons to go
01:18:34.520after Chapel Rhone, and they are manufacturing controversy after controversy after controversy.
01:18:39.620And one of the consequences of that is that now people who are not familiar with this background
01:18:44.680or this nuance, instead are like, well, Chapel Roan has created this reputation for herself
01:18:50.540where she is repeatedly problematic, but she didn't. She did not do those things.1.00
01:18:55.980What actually happened is people who hate her for reasons they're not even necessarily sharing
01:19:00.820are making up things to get mad about over her over and over and over again until random members
01:19:07.480of the public associate Chapel with this smear campaign instead of who she actually is.
01:19:12.700This 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.1.00
01:19:31.480And this is something that is not new.
01:19:35.800Chapel is neither the first nor the last.1.00
01:19:38.740And I think this element here of power being at play in these smear campaigns of women,
01:19:48.000of celebrity women, is one that goes back decades and decades and decades and decades.
01:19:54.760In 1950, I always think about this story.
01:19:57.600The 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.
01:20:20.580it was all for Ingrid Bergman and Senator Edwin Johnson denounced Ingrid Bergman on the Senate
01:20:28.780floor and said that she was a powerful influence for evil that she was an apostle of degradation
01:20:35.420and she ended up having to flee to Europe and hide out for a couple years and Rossellini's career
01:20:41.860did not suffer at all and then you fast forward to Janet Jackson and Nipplegate this thing that
01:20:48.560a man, Justin Timberlake, did to her that resulted in her being industry blacklisted,
01:20:54.240that she had her invitation to the Grammys revoked, that it killed her very platinum
01:21:00.240career. But not only did nothing to Justin's, he basically entered the heights of his solo
01:21:07.360career post NSYNC. And so there's all these examples. And I think it comes down to this
01:21:14.360control and policing of women's behavior, of women's bodies, ensuring that there is this0.63
01:21:23.100adherence still to traditionalist conservative values and cultural standards. And now we have0.52
01:21:32.040the the Palestine and the trans rights advocacy that is at play with current smear campaigns that
01:21:40.240we're seeing. I'm once again not asserting that Casey Wasserman was behind any of this,
01:21:45.900but you don't think he wasn't so thrilled to see this news cycle and this bashing of Chapel Rhone
01:21:53.140go on and on and on and on and on right after she had a great hand in toppling his empire?
01:22:00.320You don't think he's happy about that? Right. At the very least, it benefits these powerful people
01:22:05.100and these powerful men who have actually committed wrongdoing with impunity. The fact that we as a
01:22:10.880culture are so obsessed with these like takedown campaigns against women and we devote so much time
01:22:16.220and energy and then we have to devote time and energy to debunking it and challenging it. And
01:22:21.600it's all such an obvious distraction from many of the very same issues that Chapel Rhone cares about
01:22:27.940and is actually doing something about.
01:22:30.680Chapter four, section eight, part two,
01:24:18.540Well, it came from a Twitter user with almost zero followers.
01:24:22.640They now have about 100, but I think most of those are because of this tweet.
01:24:26.760With the handle at Laced Bras, which is part of a title of a Tate McRae song.
01:24:32.920The user had changed their username 13 times, according to publicly available information,
01:24:38.460and they've posted a total of four tweets, and we just read three of them.
01:24:42.500And their profile picture was of a woman from TikTok named Dani Zaza, who, when notified
01:24:48.960of the tweets by her followers on TikTok made it clear that she doesn't have a Twitter account.
01:24:56.280It's it's so easy. Like, look how easy it is to get people to believe completely made up
01:25:03.080allegations with no evidence coming from like very obviously made up sources. It's so easy
01:25:10.000for people to run with those types of false allegations against a woman when at the exact
01:25:14.320same time, people refuse to believe credible allegations with evidence against men. Like the
01:25:21.600fact that anyone would take this seriously and run with it is just such an indictment of our
01:25:25.500culture and like this double standard. And also like with the fake lesbian thing, it is so
01:25:31.480offensive to me as a lesbian who dated boys in high school. This idea that your past relationship
01:25:38.580history indicates like what your sexuality actually is any queer person knows that's not true
01:25:45.180yeah yeah yeah shout out to my eighth grade girlfriend emily i am forever straight because
01:25:50.180of you i guess and it's like it particularly for queer women this is a very harmful sort of stigma
01:25:55.920because it reinforces the idea of compulsory heterosexuality which is basically like oh you
01:26:02.260think you're straight because that's like the default especially for like young women that
01:26:07.420means you can never be like queer and women like young queer women are going to read this stuff
01:26:12.820and they're going to internalize it and it will have harmful consequences on them. So like there0.51
01:26:17.200is a very real social cost even to other people of these smear campaigns. I think, too, when you
01:26:23.820examine these tweets, you can see upon just a quick read why someone would blindly believe it.
01:26:30.000There's enough personal details, the utilizing of Chappell's first name, Kaylee, a picture of her and her boyfriend mentioning the school, mentioning names.
01:26:40.820Sorry, I just want to say it's a picture of her and some guy whose face is blocked out.
01:26:46.260We don't know what their relationship is.
01:27:53.500It's not clear that this thread just popped up on thousands of people's timelines organically.
01:27:59.460Like 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.
01:28:11.880And there's now a monetary incentive for people to do stuff like this because of how Twitter works now.
01:28:20.440I mean, Elon Musk has just turned Twitter into something that is so different in the form of X that incentivizes this type of behavior.
01:28:29.840Because as most people are probably familiar with, blue check accounts used to symbolize that somebody conveyed authority.
01:28:37.340but basically you can now pay to make money on Twitter from getting engagement. People who opt
01:28:44.340into the like subscriber version of X can also join like the ad sharing program, the revenue
01:28:51.120sharing program that X now has. And you specifically derive value from getting engagement on your posts,
01:28:57.940which directly incentivizes rage bait. It directly incentivizes mis and disinformation
01:29:03.360that fits these preconceived notions that gets people angry. And it even incentivizes like bots
01:29:09.860and spam accounts. This is the reason why so many of the top replies on XNOW are these blue check
01:29:15.360AI accounts that are posting things clearly generated by ChatGPT. It's because there's
01:29:20.440a monetary incentive behind it. And over the past couple of years, we've seen this make Stan
01:29:25.220culture even more toxic and deranged and reactionary than it used to be, which is saying
01:29:31.200a lot. But when you see stuff like this, I think the fact that this is seemingly a Tate McRae fan
01:29:36.100makes it even more compelling. Because you see this all the time. And a lot of normies who are
01:29:43.280on X don't even pick up on this because I see this all the time. For example, you'll have an
01:29:48.860account pretending to be like a Taylor Swift stan. And they'll tweet that famous video of
01:29:53.740Taylor Swift dancing where she looks kind of childlike and bad. And they'll be like,
01:29:57.660look at mother like she is the best dancer there is cue like 7 000 angry quote tweets but the person
01:30:03.940who tweeted it isn't actually a swifty at all they're a fan of like tate mcray or sabrina
01:30:08.720carpenter or somebody else and they're doing it as a form of like stan warfare against someone
01:30:14.960who they view as a competitor this is like a very like twisted anti-social byproduct of like stan0.99
01:30:21.020culture and pop idols where now people pit these women against each other and they try to tear the
01:30:26.440other one down through smear campaigns so there's also an element of that happening here and it's
01:30:32.100just like i i just feel like this is so much of what x culture has unfortunately become when you
01:30:37.780put someone in charge like elon musk he represents all of the bad things i feel like we talked about
01:30:42.980he's the world's richest man he's very anti-me too he has allegations against him and so he benefits
01:30:49.560from this like anti-me too reactionary culture but he also directly profits from all of this
01:30:55.740Every 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.
01:31:11.940Mm 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.
01:32:04.880I take full responsibility for the interaction on March 21st.0.86
01:32:08.620I was at the hotel on behalf of another individual and I was not part of the personal security team of Chapel Roan.
01:32:14.740The actions I took were not on behalf of Chapel Roan, her personal security team, her management or any other individuals.
01:32:21.700I 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.
01:32:30.600My sole interaction with the mother was calm and with good intentions,
01:32:33.720and the outcome of the encounter is regretful.
01:32:38.400So, you know, you'd think, okay, well, we have all the information.
01:38:41.640is that you can convince people on the internet
01:38:43.940to not just believe whatever you want,
01:38:46.260but also to run with it and do your bidding for you for free.
01:38:50.800Because that is the lesson that we know for a fact
01:38:53.560that PR operations that cost you six figures a month, those people have certainly figured this
01:38:59.960out. And they are certainly doing the bidding of these very, very powerful individuals.
01:39:04.980And really, people should be treating things that they come across with on the internet
01:39:09.100with utmost skepticism. You should be treating things that you come across online with as
01:39:15.200less reliable and less trustworthy than what a lot of times I would say would be referred to as
01:39:20.180like mainstream media. Because even though mainstream media is inherently problematic for
01:39:24.980a lot of reasons, there are also like standards and elements of transparency that posts online
01:39:30.820do not have. When you read somebody's byline on the Daily Mail, as much as I don't like the Daily
01:39:36.260Mail, you can be certain that that is really that person. They are not making up fake people and
01:39:41.120having their bylines on the Daily Mail. On Twitter or X or whatever, it's not the same.
01:39:46.940But the unfortunate reality is that most people view what happens on social media as more authentic than what you see in like the traditional mainstream media. And like there's a reason for that anti-establishment bias. But as a result of that, I think it's easier to propagandize people through things like these anonymous social media posts because people are like, oh, I trust that. I trust that Twitter thread more than I trust like this report about bot activity from BuzzFeed.
01:40:15.220And that is really, really problematic because bad actors at all levels can easily weaponize that to their advantage.
01:40:22.660Yeah. And look, I am an independent culture and political commentator.
01:40:27.560Like 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.
01:40:36.920And I will continue to do that, but do so with skepticism.
01:40:41.380My 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.
01:41:00.980And also to stop the inshittification of social media with people being incentivized to make
01:41:06.600shitty slop content that just outrages people because they've signed up for their blue check
01:41:11.500and hopefully they can make that $8 a month back or whatever. There's very little we can do to
01:41:15.980stop that. Like we can't really stop how Elon Musk structures his business at x.com. But what we can
01:41:22.420do, and this is the real uncomfortable uphill battle, is just be more thoughtful consumers of
01:41:28.360what we see online it's the same thing i've been saying on this podcast since day one but it is
01:41:33.200really i feel like all we can do one example that i want to use too as to how i've seen that in play
01:41:39.860is the current coordinated effort by democratic party officials and liberal institutions to smear
01:41:47.540hassan piker as an anti-semite as a danger to democracy is a danger to the democratic party0.93
01:41:52.580A lot of people see through that because a lot more people now understand the bullshit false conflation between Zionism and Judaism. When 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.0.89
01:42:14.220And so in seeing so many people push back against this, I go, wait, so this is possible. We can
01:42:21.860utilize critical thinking. We can go hold on pause before I blindly believe this and either pass it
01:42:30.060on or participate in whatever way. Why don't we do that when it comes to these misogynistic
01:42:37.560like slop campaigns. Yeah. And I think like also in figuring out like who you can trust0.94
01:42:44.220and like who can I trust as like a creator, as a journalist, it's like you can build that trust
01:42:50.240with someone over time versus a lot of what people are taking in on social media are these
01:42:55.320very ephemeral viral posts. And you will remember the sentiment in like a tweet that had like 100,000
01:43:01.940views or like a TikTok that comes across your feed. You may remember that sentiment and not
01:43:06.720even remember who said it. So it's like in figuring out like trusted sources of news and
01:43:11.220information and analysis, it's like you should be watching people over time so that you can figure
01:43:16.300out how to assess them. That's a big part of media literacy is like taking in information
01:43:21.860repeatedly from a source before you make your decision. One of the biggest problems with social
01:43:26.220media and how it feeds information to people is that it takes away the opportunity to build those
01:43:30.560trusted relationships and ultimately like the platforms have the power i feel like one massive
01:43:36.540thing people need to do and i think all of us can do a better job at this is just applying that
01:43:42.160scrutiny more than we are just like taking things in and letting it influence us without even knowing
01:43:48.180what it is cat and caroline what is it it's literally jorginho's biker gang outside oh my