Photoshop is often good for a lot of things. But, it can also be used to create scandal…
We have a love-hate relationship with Photoshop. The reason for it is quite simple. We’re just not that good at using it. In Hollywood and beyond, the software is used to alter photos, especially in the modelling industry to give an unrealistic look to how people actually look. There are a lot of celebrities who rely on the heavily editing of pictures to make them appear better than what they are.
But, what happens when someone uses photoshop to make up something that is not is true or might not be. We’re going to be examining three cases of photoshopping and how they created a scandal.
The Markle Surrogacy Scandal – Part 1
The first one we want to examine is the ‘Tweet’ about Meghan Markle using a surrogate. Now, there have been stories that she faked her pregnancy with both her children. We covered this in our post about Meghan’s miscarriage not being an ulterior motive.
However, this story was spun when her sister-in-law, Catherine was pregnant with Prince George. The same happened with Beyoncé. The Duchess of Cambridge didn’t have to prove that she was pregnant. Queen Bee did and she did it in a smart way. She went down to the beach in a bikini.
Going back to Meghan, there were inconsistencies with her baby bump whilst pregnant with Archie. But, that’s not the reason we’re here. This Tweet is:
Now, the story goes that this tweet was put up by Kensington Palace about two hours before Archie even been born. But it was taken down quickly and few people saw it.
Further Tweets from @CelebLipstick show the time on the tweet was 3:02 am from Frogmore Cottage. Any birth announcements would’ve been made at a rational hour. Also, the Cambridges don’t have access to the account. Meghan and Harry had split from Kensington Palace and had their own Instagram account by the time of the ‘tweet’.
These screenshots show what the Kensington Palace Twitter account looked like before, during, and after Meghan. Look at the description of the last screenshot. We used the Web Archive.
As you can see, Harry and Meghan had been removed the Twitter description when they joined Instagram. Just a look at Tweets from the time and there is no room on the tweets for a location:
Please excuse the different language in the screenshot.
The Markle Surrogacy Scandal – Part 2
As you can see in the last screenshot we post in the above section, there is no room for a location. This screenshot was from the post celebrating Prince Louis’ first birthday. We could be wrong but there might’ve been a feature where you could include it. Also, look at the sides of the ‘tweet’. You can see that it’s on some kind of screen. We took a look at tweets from this time and they did not fill the screen the way this one appears to. With that being said, we believe this tweet to have been created in photoshop. Whoever created it did a really good job.
The Justin Bieber Sexual Assault Scandal
In 2020, there was a story released about Justin Bieber. This was around the time the #MeToo movement hashtag started to trend on Twitter again. Two Twitter users accused the pop star of sexual assault in March 2014 and May 2015. As documented by Deadline, Bieber was not where his alleged victims said he was during the assaults. There were witnesses to confirm this. Not to mention, despite the victims putting pen to paper about the crime, it was revealed that texts were faked and the statements contradicted each other.
Since this story came out, the tweets have since been deleted.
All it takes is photoshop and some dodgy hatchet job to make tweets or texts and people will believe it. Yes, sexual assault is a very serious accusation and should be looked into, but to falsely accuse someone famous of assault is not on.
The Chrissy Teigen Bullying Scandal
This final story is the whole reason this post was written. We’ve known for a while that Chrissy Teigen is a professional troll. We wrote a while ago that Courtney Stodden had accused the model of bullying them when they were a teenage bride. Teigen admitted she had done this. Just last week there was another development, according to E! Online. Teigen’s lawyers have accused another alleged victim of her’s, fashion designer Michael Costello of faking Instagram screenshots. Pedestrian.TV reported on the story a week ago.
Here are the Screenshots that have been made public. It does not look good for him or Chrissy.
At first, we believed this but now we cannot say for sure that we do. For one, look at Chrissy’s name. There should be a verified badge and there’s not. Also, the profile picture is different. When someone changes their profile photo, it changes on DMs as well. There’s another noticeable difference. See the ‘Chrissy’ interactions in purple? One is a different shade. We just did a check of Chrissy’s Instagram account via the Web Archive and the profile picture is the same as in Michael’s alleged screenshots and there is no verified badge. After a little bit of a Google search, we discovered that verification was introduced to Instagram in 2014 as per Business Insider Australia.
Michael claims Chrissy’s DMs happened in 2014.
So, we’ve come down to a couple of answers on this:
- The screenshots were taken in 2014.
- The screenshots were fabricated due to the different colour on one of Chrissy’s alleged messages.
- Chrissy deleted her messages from that period which is why she’s saying that they’re fake.
