Remember Tatler’s infamous “Catherine the Great” cover story? That happened in May 2020, as the world was mostly locked down during the pandemic. Tatler hired “royal writer” Anna Pasternak to write a gossipy piece which worked as a straight-forward “embiggening Kate” article and also worked as a hilarious parody of those kinds of “Kate walks on water” stories. There were so many amazing quotes and insights, like “friends of Kate” wailing: “She feels exhausted and trapped. She’s working as hard as a top CEO, who has to be wheeled out all the time, without the benefits of boundaries and plenty of holidays.” Pasternak also got quotes from people who said outright that Carole Middleton ran William and Kate’s household and bossed around staffers. What else? It was a portrait of William and Kate as completely furious that the Sussexes walked away and there was even a cryptic mention of Rose Hanbury.
When the Tatler cover story came out, it landed like a bomb in royalist media. Kensington Palace threatened Tatler and there was some talk about whether they would sue. Over the course of four months, Tatler began removing sections from the online story, eventually culling the whole thing down to bare bones. Pasternak has never really addressed what happened in 2020… until now. She recently chatted with the Infamous podcast, and you can hear the whole episode here. Here’s one section making the rounds:
Worthless backstabbers William and Kate are. pic.twitter.com/I1eKXYG7CW
— Coyote Fan (@Coyoteband2) April 9, 2024
Throughout the whole episode, the hosts are being rather snotty about the Duchess of Sussex, but Pasternak spends most of the interview saying no, I completely understand why the Sussexes walked away and the British media and the royal institution would have destroyed them. Pasternak calls out the “invisible contract” between the monarchy and the print media, saying that there is an explicit and implicit editorial stance that William and Kate must be lavished with praise at all times while nothing positive can ever be written or published about the Sussexes.
Pasternak also dishes about what happened behind the scenes during the Tatler fiasco. Basically, Tatler’s lawyers told her not to say anything and not to do interviews until they worked something out. By September 2020, they worked out a deal to avoid being sued by William and Kate… and Kensington Palace (William) leaked the deal to the Mail on Sunday. What’s interesting about that is that all Tatler really did to avoid being sued was… remove the bulk of the article from its online archives months after the fact. Thousands of outlets had already repeated and archived those now-deleted sections. Tatler got the last laugh – it was a rare moment where a British outlet made Kate sound like a lazy, self-absorbed dumbass and it took Kensington Palace four months to figure out how to handle it.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Tatler.