Mar 18, 2024 - 00:23
By huffpost.com

Tucker Carlson Pranked By YouTubers Claiming They Edited Kate Middleton Photo

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson seems to have been hoodwinked by a prank involving the controversial edited Mother’s Day photo of Kate Middleton and her children that went viral earlier this month.

In a videoposted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday, YouTube pranksters Josh Pieters and Archie Manners revealed that Manners posed as a former Kensington Palace employee who had been fired for unsuccessfully editing the family’s photo.

The pair, whose YouTube channel, Josh & Archie, features an array of celebrity hoaxes, fooled Carlson with an extensive, fabricated story, which was erroneously supported with falsified documents, including a fake contract of employment, that Pieters made for Manners.

Manners said he wanted to see if Carlson’s team would actually fact-check his claims, so Pieters hilariously included a clause in the contract that said the royals reserved the right to “amputate one limb of their choosing” should Manners fail his probationary period.

The ludicrous stunt worked so well that the Tucker Carlson Network invited Manners, who was posing as a former producer of digital content for the Prince and Princess of Wales, to a London studio to film the bombshell interview.

Before Carlson and the network had a chance to air the interview, however, Manners came clean about falsifying everything, telling Deadline that he and Pieters didn’t want to spread disinformation on social media.

“We didn’t want to cause any more rumors, that are not true, to go out to lots and lots of people,” Manners said. “We just didn’t want to be too worthy about that in our video.”