Kate Middleton Shopping Video Raises More Questions on Well-Being, Royals’ Secrecy: ‘I’m Losing My Mind’

Prince William and Kate Middleton took a trip to the Windsor Farm Shop on Saturday, a move that wouldn’t typically raise eyebrows — but instead shocked social media, as the Princess of Wales hasn’t been spotted in public in nearly three months due to what Kensington Palace said was a “planned abdominal surgery” announced in January. TMZ released a video Monday that purportedly shows the pair speedily walking through the market… but social media users aren’t quite convinced.

As Stephanie Soteriou put it on X (formerly Twitter), comparing images from the video and another recent blurry image with an earlier photo of Middleton, “I might have to tap out of this whole Kate Middleton thing because I genuinely, hand on heart, do not think these pics look like the same woman & it’s making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Like, I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but that is not her??”

X user @MediumSizeMeech pointed out that Middleton appears to be recovering quite well. He tweeted, “My thing is — if this is indeed ‘Kate Middleton’ why would a woman who JUST GOT abdominal surgery that needed such a long recovery be carrying a large bag like this???”

Quite a few people used popular memes to express their disbelief. X user @toops99 wrote, “The whole world right now analysing the video of Kate and William” alongside memes including the famous “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” red string board.

@IBZDRAGON invoked Andrew Garfield’s emotional graveyard scene from “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” and captioned it, “The entire internet after seeing Kate Middleton without makeup for the first time.”

Some also pointed out that practically speaking, it doesn’t make sense that a high-quality photo or video of Middleton out and about isn’t available. After all, as @yolanda_parody put it, “you‘re telling me somebody was able to zoom in and get this footage of rihanna yet we can’t get a single high quality image of kate Middleton.”

Andy Cohen isn’t buying it either:

For others, the publication of the video and the immediate skepticism that followed online is an indication of just how steep of a climb Kensington Palace has to convince the public to trust them again, following their lack of communication about Middleton’s status and the release of a photo that had been digitally altered.

@SmoothDunk wrote, “‘these Kate Middleton pics will silence internet critics’ I don’t think u understand how badly you’ve f–ked this. there are now people on the internet who could SHAKE HER HAND and still claim she’s four cats in a wig.”

This was more seriously echoed by Ellie Hall, a correspondent who covers the royal family and previously worked for BuzzFeed. She tweeted, pointing to an earlier interview she’d done, “This @EliotHiggins quote proved prescient: ‘At this point, I think if there was a video of Kate holding a paper with today’s date on it published, we’d still have an online army explaining how you can tell it’s an AI-generated fake from the pixels.'”

Despite the potentially serious nature of the situation Middleton and Kensington Palace are engulfed in, plenty of people are still having fun. As Teen Vogue columnist Rainesford Stauffer tweeted, “One thing I do appreciate about the Kate Middleton conspiracy is that everything they do to try to make it better and less weird actually makes it worse, which is something I absolutely relate to.”

Hear, hear.

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