Andy Cohen apologizes for fuelling Kate Middleton conspiracy theories
'I am heartbroken by the news about Princess Kate,'
Andy Cohen has finally addressed jokes he made about Kate Middleton’s whereabouts prior to her announcing her cancer diagnosis last month.
“I just want to say, I am heartbroken by the news about Princess Kate,” he said this week on his Radio Andy show after returning to the air. “I wish had kept my mouth shut.”
The comments were the first Cohen has made since Kate, 42, revealed she had been diagnosed with a form of cancer in an emotional social media video on March 22.
“I think someone on Sky News called me a ‘numpty’ during that whole conversation, and they were right,” Cohen conceded.
The Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen host said he is “praying for Princess Kate and King Charles.”
After TMZ released a video of the Princess of Wales during a recent outing with Prince William that they claimed was “100% her,” Cohen took to X to tell his followers, “That ain’t Kate….”
Cohen, 55, also invited followers to weigh in, sharing a survey on his Instagram Stories. Posting a screenshot from TMZ’s video he asked: “Is this Princess Kate?” Shortly after posting his poll, 72% of respondents had voted no.
“They should’ve just paid Steven Spielberg to fake a video of Kate because that TMZ video just made everything worse,” one conspiracy theorist mused, posting an image of Middleton taken last year and a screengrab from the shopping video from the weekend.
Cohen also endorsed speculation that Kate’s husband Prince William and Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, were in the midst of an affair, which Hanbury had already flatly denied.
“It all seems to come back to this lady Rose who he’s had an affair — who he allegedly had an affair with,” Cohen said on an episode of his Daddy Diaries Podcast, dredging up old rumours surrounding William and the Marchioness of Cholmondeley.
Rumours of the affair even became late-night fodder, with Stephen Colbert joking about it in a recent monologue.
“There have been rumours of an affair between William and the Marching Band of Chicanery since 2019,” Colbert said. “According to tabloids back then, when Kate supposedly confronted him about it, he laughed it off, saying there was nothing to it. Always a good response when your wife accuses you of cheating.”
Colbert addressed backlash he received last week.
“We do a lot of shows. I tell a lot of jokes. I tell jokes about a lot of different things, mostly about what everybody is talking about,” Colbert said. “For the last six weeks to two months, everybody has been talking about the mystery of Kate Middleton’s disappearance from public life. Two weeks ago, we did some jokes about that mystery. When I made those jokes, that upset some people…even before her diagnosis was revealed. I can understand that a lot of my jokes have upset people in the past and some of my jokes will upset people in the future, but there’s a standard that I try to hold myself to, and that is I do not make light of somebody else’s tragedy.”
Meanwhile, Real Housewives of New York City alum Leah McSweeney, who is currently suing Cohen, slammed the Bravo star for making jokes about Kate’s health before the Princess of Wales’ cancer revelation.
“Andy Cohen gets a kick out of being cruel to women and Kate Middleton is no exception,” McSweeney, 41, seethed on her Instagram Story (per Us Weekly). “I hope that after she was forced to publicly talk about her cancer diagnosis, he will muster up the decency to apologize to her.”
