Trolling Tragedies (or Asking Questions)

Written June 2026

This week marked the two-year anniversary of the curious case of Jay Slater, the British teenager who allegedly fell to his death while on holiday in Tenerife. To recap, after being reported missing by a friend, Jay’s body was allegedly found in a ravine a month later, the 19-year-old seemingly having suffered a catastrophic head injury from the fall. The case attracted huge press attention, as well as a considerable amount of speculation by “online ghouls”. (Who, incidentally, for the most part, are nothing of the sort. In fact, “ghouls” is the codeword employed by state propagandists for members of the public who present with pattern recognition skills, and who therefore have manifold questions regarding events that receive hugely inflated press attention.)

The Daily Mirror saw fit to mark the momentous occasion of the second anniversary of Slater’s demise by conducting an excruciating video interview with his mother, 57-year-old Debbie Duncan. But, as with all the state-sponsored madnesses that have been presented to us over the years, the resulting interview merely poses more questions than it answers, and certainly does little to quash the distinct whiff of “off-ness” that lingers around the whole affair. Yet again, we are presented with a somewhat bizarre, and distinctly unemotional performance from a woman who, if what we are told is true, is just two years into the horrific, almost unbearable process of grief that comes from losing a loved one – a process surely heightened in the case of a deceased child. One can only imagine the depth of pain and suffering such a loss, in such shocking and unexpected circumstances, would render. And yet, as in all of these high-profile cases, here is Debbie, chatting over a cuppa with a journalist, perfectly at ease with sharing that surely indescribable burden.

Furthermore, Debbie uses this huge platform not to wax lyrical about her precious, beloved, missed son, but instead, to focus on the political change that his disappearance and subsequent death has played a part in bringing forth. The entire interview, bar a sprinkling of “bringing Jay to life” snippets (we learn of his dog, Buster, and his wishes for a redecorated bedroom on his return from Tenerife) is a litany of soundbites. Debbie, you see, is more saddened and hurt, it appears, by the “tragedy trolling” she experienced during the search for her son, than by the actual crushing loss of her youngest child. Around the 3minute 25second mark in the interview, Debbie is grinning as she recalls the “conspiracies that were out there”, prompting a matching jovial response from the interviewer, who laughs as she states that it “captured the public’s imagination like nothing else!”. Well, thank goodness they’re able to find humour amid the tragedy, eh! The revelations keep coming, and around the 4minute 30second mark Debbie recalls that “it felt like you were int’ middle of a movie, when you were out there”, referring, of course, to being in Tenerife during the month-long search for Jay. Like a movie, you say?

What’s more, Debbie has seemingly found an outlet for her grief in a campaign to implement Jay’s Law, which seeks to introduce more robust laws for dealing with “tragedy trolls”. In other words, to stop “ghouls” from being allowed to speculate on news. She has secured – quelle surprise – meetings with Parliament, where several MPs are eager apparently to appease this bereaved mother. (I’m sure it has little to do with the fact that they would like nothing more than to stop those who see through the flimsy stories that are pushed, and who question the gaping holes in them.) The interviewer enthusiastically leads Debbie in the subject, and prompts her with phrases straight out of the modern-day psyop zeitgeist. They’re all in there. “Misinformation” and “disinformation”, “big tech”, “social media”, “conspiracies”, “Online Safety Act”, she even manages to shoehorn in the recent bizarre story of the three drowned sisters in Brighton – a case also attracting attention from “ghouls”. I was left with an image of a post-interview Debbie, ticking off the boxes of points she was contracted to raise, and the journalist praising her A* efforts. The two-year anniversary interview comes some nine months after a Channel 4 documentary about the case, that similarly focused more on the online speculation and trolling of the family, than on the case itself.  

What appears not to dawn on those people still faithful to the “news” is the fact that life, in all its manifestations, is happening all over the world to billions of people on a daily basis – including death, kidnap, rape, child abuse, murder, and accident – and yet, 99.99% of these events go completely unreported. Except, perhaps, as a few lines in a local newspaper, or in a local Facebook group. I can share a personal experience to illustrate. When I was 19, two friends from our group embarked upon a tour backpacking around South America, and, whilst there, managed to find themselves on the wrong side of a gang of dangerous drug dealers. Horrendously, this resulted in their murders, they were, in fact, beheaded. The shock was huge, for us, of course, but we could only imagine the impact it had on their families. This horrific event could have quite reasonably, been regarded as sensational, and yet, it attracted zero news coverage, neither here nor, as far as I am aware, in South America. I can absolutely attest to the realness of this diabolical event. But, since it was not staged or controlled, it was unnecessary for the “news” to report it. It served no agenda. It was simply a case of two unfortunate, naïve young people, out of their depth in a foreign country. Could this tragedy have been exploited as a gift horse for the powers that be to use? Perhaps. But with real, deeply grieving families and friends, unwilling to appear before cameras, they would have little in the way of leverage to court public attention. And in any case, the drive to stop foreign travel had not yet ramped up when this took place, in 1996.  

So how do the national newspapers, news stations and news websites choose which cases to promote to such celebrity status? Answer – the ones that are being controlled, and rolled out by the powers that be, for sundry purposes that always become apparent very soon after the event. The grieving parents in such cases exhibit their strength and courage so easily to the public, as they promote new laws or restrictions via campaigns that, while on the surface appear noble, inevitably involve the stripping away of liberties in one form or another. The Snowdrop Campaign, for example, calling for a ban on private ownership of handguns, was launched mere weeks after the Dunblane tragedy, by parents of murdered children. The father and stepmother of Leah Betts, the teen who allegedly died after taking a single Ecstasy tablet,  appeared at a press conference just hours after the teen’s life support machine was supposedly switched off, and on a BBC programme that very evening, before embarking on the full round of daytime TV interviews in the days that followed. They ostensibly were calling for tighter drug laws, while simultaneously promoting organ donation. And in a prelude to Jay’s Law, there has been a campaign for similar measures against “online ghouls” via Eve’s Law, after the Manchester Arena incident, a campaign that the ever-sharp Miri has exposed as being used to silence dissenters who have questions about the entire Manchester story.  

In real life, the universal experience of grief sets off a multitude of emotions, and intense anger is prominent when we lose a loved one. This primal emotion is conspicuous by its absence in the cases we so often see in the media, however, and is one of the ways, in my opinion, to identify the fraud therein. An explanation that many fall back on when trying to justify these odd responses is that “everyone grieves differently”, and there may well be some elements of grief that vary. Yet we are simultaneously asked to believe that all these victims just happen to behave exactly the same way in other respects – i.e. smiling through their adversity, finding the silver linings, and becoming stronger because of their experience. Truly inspirational.

The childish and story-like way in which parents present as strong, courageous campaigners, who do not wish their loved one’s death to have been in vain, to me is just not believable. I suggest that quite the opposite would be the case. Losing a child to a senseless act of terrorism, for example, would evoke anger beyond measure, and one would surely be left with a despair that your child has indeed died in vain. And, if your child had died in a tragic accident, a retreat into one’s own world, to reflect and process your grief in quiet dignity would seem a more likely response, as opposed to beginning campaigns against those who had the audacity to make nasty online comments about you.

Ultimately, I have come to agree with Leo Biddle, my friend and fellow researcher, who has often asserted a belief that we are living in a story-based simulacrum. Of course, there is truth within our own lives, and amongst those we are directly acquainted with. But the “news” and the wider stories we are fed continually are, for the most part, entirely fictitious, and placed in the fabric of this simulacrum to create a consistent state of fear of, anger at, and mistrust of our fellow humans, and to keep us from banding together against the real enemy. Sadly, in truth, there is enough pain and trauma in real life, so stop taking on the burden of extra state-scripted horror stories.   

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