A celebrity news website has been widely criticised after breaking the news that the Queen had died following a misunderstanding at a wedding party.
Hollywood Unlocked published the story on Wednesday, confident that their sources were correct ahead of any official announcement from Buckingham Palace.
The website wrongly reported that Her Majesty had passed away at the age of 95 after testing positive for COVID last week.
Hollywood Unlocked editor, Jason Lee, said the news was collected from a well-trusted source in attendance at Vogue editor Edward Enniful's wedding on Tuesday.
The report said that a guest close to the Queen received a phone call, “reacted emotionally to a few people, and those few people were informed that that's what happened.”
The story was run as an “exclusive,” stating, “Socialites, it is with our deepest regret to inform you that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has died. Sources close to the Royal Kingdom notified us exclusively that Queen Elizabeth has passed away.”
It was shared on social media and quickly went viral before Instagram marked the post as fake news.
The news was quickly falsified and BuzzFeed News later confirmed that the Queen spoke to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson by phone Wednesday.
It was also reported that the Queen was expected to attend the wedding ceremony which seems unlikely as she has no prior connection to the fashion editor and was never included in any published guest lists.
The monarch has also been signed off all public duties until she makes a full recovery from COVID and was last pictured on February 16th.
It's now believed there may have been a misunderstanding related to the death of Queens of the Stone Age singer Mark Lanegan, who actually died unexpectedly Tuesday at the age of 57.
However, Hollywood Unlocked founder Jason is yet to agree the story is untrue.
“I would never post something like this if the person that told me, I did not trust,” Lee said. “People are asking why we posted without allowing the royal family or the Palace to release a statement. Why? Because we break stories. And I've broken many stories that have been factual. We have never been wrong.”
“I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and everything aligns with me feeling very confident, which is why I doubled down on it,” he went on. “Now if I'm wrong, I'll be the first one to go out there and say, hey, it's the first time I got it wrong and this is a big wrong, on to the next story.”
When asked why he thinks that no one else at the wedding leaked the news of the Queen’s death, he suggested that it’s because “they probably don’t want to go through what I am going through.”
When the Queens of the Stoneage theory was put to him, the editor again doubled down on his story.
He said: “What I said earlier still stands: Until there is a retraction, that’s the story.”
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