Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 15, 2025
Last week, while attending the David Di Donatello Awards in Italy, Timothee Chalamet made his red carpet debut with his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner. While the pair have been dating for at least two years and have attended various industry events together, they have never posed for photographers hand-in-hand. Yet they did it in Italy, where Chalamet received an honourary award for his brief but intriguing career. They looked cute together.
The headlines were as calm and normal as you can imagine. The tabloids released the body language ‘experts’ to try and position Jenner as a humiliated embarrassment because she reached in for an extra kiss and didn’t get one. The usual suspects tried to find new ways to be weird about Jenner and express increasingly fake bafflement over the idea that Chalamet would want to date a hot, rich woman in his age range. And, of course, there were the conspiracies. Click on any story or post related to the pair and you’ll see people screaming about how this PR contract is terrible and weak, little Timmy must be freed from the shackles of oppression that is dating a Kardashian.
We know how this crap goes. The narratives are well-worn and seldom refreshed. How often have we seen this happen? Tom Hiddleston and Zawe Ashton, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, all five guys in One Direction, Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter…
I know we’ve talked about this before. Hell, it’s probably one of the topics I’m best known for writing about in my career as a pop culture hot takes merchant. Yet I find myself returning to this issue time and time again because it never goes away, and in an era of conspiracy rule and the increasing normalization of such rhetoric, the endlessly reheated fervour over ‘PR romances’ remains curiously relevant. With Chalamet and Jenner, the issue is exacerbated by the press’s ‘how do you do, fellow kids’ eagerness to reference Club Chalamet, an obsessed fan and 50-something woman who insists that she has first-hand knowledge that the lovers are fake and don’t even have sex. So, let’s delve into this madness once more in the hopes that some sort of common sense prevails.
It’s tough to prove a negative, which is handy for conspiracies of all kinds. No, we don’t have the killer piece of hard evidence that debunks a theory like a PR Romance, but what would such a thing even look like? Would they need to see a signed document that says ‘our relationship is real and not the result of a publicity campaign’? Such things are not only ridiculous and unheard of but would simply become more fuel for an already uncontrollable fire. Marriage and birth certificates have already been hunted down by said tinhatters and dismissed as just another cog in the spin machine. When the goalposts of proof are always moving, trying to offer a reasonable response to the unreasonable is a waste of time and energy.
Such issues are also made trickier to detangle because, like the most effective and long-lasting conspiracies, there is a shred of truth to the claim. We know that PR romances have happened over the decades and that celebrities have engaged in performances of love and drama for attention. Rock Hudson went on dates with Natalie Wood to throw the press off the scent of his real love life as a gay man. Queer celebrities are encouraged to remain in the closet even today. They have mutually beneficial relationships with the media to spread the narratives they want to take root in their fans’ imaginations. So, whenever two celebrities are seen in public via some artfully presented paparazzi photos, it’s easy to put two and two together and get five.
Conspiracies form because we are a stubborn species who cannot handle the idea of life not making narrative sense. We’ll tie ourselves in knots to create a story that is more satisfying than the mundane, often uninspiring nature of truth. Sometimes, it’s too much to confront the actual abuses of power and control that rule the world, so we cling to bastardised cartoons that offer a more satisfying response, akin to a classic Hollywood thriller. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein talks about this, explaining how these dramatic reinterpretations of real problems feel somewhat safer than the seemingly indomitable systems we inhabit. Rather than accept, for instance, that big pharma is a crooked capitalistic concept that made the COVID-19 vaccine a for-profit endeavour, people buy into parodic fairytales of Bill Gates-mandated microchips and brain control via injections and mask mandates. Is it dumber? Yeah, but it’s not as scary.
Yeah, it feels like a big jump from vaccine deniers and Pizzagate to Kylothee’s love life, but it would be foolish of us to pretend that such conspiracies are not all cut from the same cloth. Given how many modern hate campaigns are rooted in the image of the entertainment industry being ruled by child-abusing billionaires who frequent the Oscars, it’s not hard to see the connective tissue between PR romance tinhatting and QAnon. There’s a reason so many of these Trump-adjacent hard-right abuse campaigns latched onto pop culture as their Trojan horse to spread bigotry. It’s mightily effective to spread your message via a medium that is typically dismissed as frivolous. Why else do you think Amber Heard’s life was so easy to destroy despite her doing everything that victims are supposed to?
Conspiracies are about control. They’re about reassuring people that, no, your inner prejudices and suspicions aren’t an issue and, yes, the world is out to get you, but not in ways that tackle the real problems. Celebrity drama seems like a risk-free way to indulge these excesses, although we’ve all seen what happens when that obsession slides into violence. And all that does is further fuel the plotting. Look at the people who think John Lennon’s murder was part of a grander scheme, or those who claim that Kurt Cobain was killed by Courtney Love. It’s no coincidence that women typically end up as the villains in these scenarios, whether they’re ‘forcing’ a man to date them, ‘faking’ abuse, or putting too many non-white dudes in your space movie.
Truth is more boring than a classic red-string-on-the-wall conspiracy. The idea that two hot famous people might like one another and want to use their relationship for a bit of good press seems too calculating for fans who see their idols as reflections of their own moral worth. For some fans, it’s too nefarious to imagine their faves as having a calculating interest in their careers; they must be untainted innocents forced into the grime of Hollywood sleaze by a faceless evil known only as PR. The nuances of fame, love, and image maintenance can be curdled into something sinister even as their intentions seem utterly banal. A couple calling the paparazzi on themselves is not instant proof that their lives and feelings are fake. It’s just another symptom of the transactional nature of fame.
If I were smarter, I would do a PhD-level deep dive into the ‘celebrity conspiracy to QAnon’ pipeline, an area of culture that is sorely under-researched. For now, I just hope that we find ourselves more willing to call out tinhat nonsense when we see it instead of letting it fester as a pseudo-ironic joke until it’s too late to change tack. I’ll take boring over madness every time.
