Why People Were so Quick to Label Rose Hanbury the ‘Other Woman’

• Kate Middleton’s public absence led to rumors resurfacing that Prince William had an affair. 
• Sarah Rose Hanbury was labeled the “other woman” and compared to Queen Camilla on social media. 
• Therapists said insecurity, misogyny, and society’s fixation with the “other woman” play a role. 

What do Queen Camilla and Sarah Rose Hanbury have in common? Besides being wealthy, British, and mothers, not much.

But some have been quick to label Hanbury Camilla 2.0, claiming she had an affair with Prince William — an unsubstantiated rumor the 40-year-old noblewoman denied to Business Insider via her lawyers.

People wondered if a rumored affair was in turn connected to Kate Middleton’s long absence. Such theories were part of “Katespiracy,” a term used to describe speculation on X and TikTok about what was going on with Kate behind the scenes since her last official public appearance in December 2023.

Kensington Palace did not respond to requests for comment on the rumors. On Friday, however, Kate explained in a video message that she has been out of the spotlight because, beyond her planned abdominal surgery, she is undergoing treatment for cancer.

But if people found themselves easily buying into the prospect of another royal cheating scandal, relationship experts said it has nothing to do with Kate, William, or Hanbury.

In all likelihood, they added, it has everything to do with you.

Obsession with a royal cheating scandal exposes our deepest insecurities, therapists said

Speculation about Hanbury’s relationship with William isn’t new, but it reached a fever pitch in the days leading up to Kate’s cancer announcement.

The ease with which a late-night host and social-media users pointed fingers at Hanbury showcases their own deep insecurities about infidelity, said Matt Lundquist, a New York City-based psychotherapist and founder of Tribeca Therapy.

It touches on “our own anxieties about what we fear could or might be going on in our own relationships,” he added.

Lundquist said people in relationships cling to the unsubstantiated rumor of cheating because they are, either consciously or subconsciously, relating it to their own lives: “It evokes this idea of, ‘Gosh, I was going along thinking everything with my partner was fine, but I thought everything with William and Kate was fine.'”

The concept of infidelity remains a “real anxiety” for people because it speaks to a “primitive” fear of not being a “desirable” enough partner, Lundquist added.

Georgina Sturmer, a psychotherapist in the UK who specializes in relationships, also said that people’s reaction to affair rumors and their willingness to believe it was behind Kate’s absence demonstrates a sensitivity to the concept of cheating in society.

She also said people may have felt particularly triggered by the prospect of a royal cheating scandal because they have formed “parasocial relationships” with Kate and William, meaning they feel like they know them even though they don’t.

“We build these parasocial relationships based on a sense of trust that we think we know someone. We think we know they are trustworthy and well-behaved, and they do all the right things,” she said.

When a rumor of infidelity starts going around, Sturmer also said people “instinctively” resent and blame the other woman in the equation rather than the unfaithful partner.

“We can’t cope with the idea that someone we imagine to be perfect or who we imagine to be a certain way could let us down,” she said.

Blaming the ‘other woman’ has always been society’s coping mechanism, experts said

Even though she has denied the rumors, Hanbury is still the latest example of how society has historically reacted to the “other woman,” Sturmer added.

She said it comes from how we’ve been “wired to think” of women as cunning temptresses for millennia, citing Adam and Eve’s story in the Bible as an example.

“This idea of women being vilified for being different or for trying to pull people into their way in a way that we excuse men,” added Sturmer, giving the American witch hunts of the 17th century as another example.

Meanwhile, she said, men have historically been painted as unwitting victims.

Lundquist pointed to the popular Broadway show “Six” — about Henry VIII’s six wives, including Anne Boleyn, one of the most famous “other women” in royal history — as an example of how “other women” tend to be characterized.

While the show retells the wives’ histories through the lens of “empowerment,” Lundquist said, the characters are still “competitive” and sometimes display animosity toward each other.

It highlights how even in “something that is presumptively feminist and redemptive,” society can’t help but slip into a kind of “hatred” for the “other woman.”

The ‘other woman’ label is nearly impossible to shake off, therapists said

Reactions to Hanbury mirror the way people viewed and spoke about Camilla in the 1990s after her affair with King Charles while he was married to Princess Diana came to light.

According to Sturmer, it shows people can “retreat” to basic stereotypes of men and women when the topic of sex arises, even if they “don’t mean to.”

“Even though we’re really enlightened, and we’re really modern, and we’re really feminist, and we know whose marriages have broken down and who have remarried and found love, despite all of that, we are still so conditioned by this,” she said.

Even though Camilla has been married to Charles for nearly two decades, Sturmer also said she will always be associated as the “other woman.”

“Yes, we have normalized her, we have humanized her, but she is still and always will have that label,” she said.

Lundquist also said the ease with which people were quick to associate Hanbury with the “other woman” trope demonstrates how pervasive misogyny is.

“In the case of both Camilla and Rose, the bad object in these instances is a woman,” he said. Once again, he said it’s the “sneaky conniving woman” who can trick a man and render him “not responsible for his decision-making in that process.”

While he said people have a “right to feel bad” when cheating happens in monogamous relationships, it’s the “other woman” who often ends up carrying the greater burden because they are both “other” and “woman.”

“You hear a lot about the mom at the elementary school that gets scorned at drop-off because she had some kind of role in something like this,” Lundquist said. “It can be some real unkindness.”

Sturmer wasn’t surprised that the rumor of infidelity became a leading theory social media users put forward to explain what was going on with Kate, especially given the royal family’s history of cheating.

“They’re kind of the soap opera of our lives,” she said. “The stories that gain momentum are the ones that pull on those base urges that we have. It was almost like people were excited by this story — they wanted to believe something about it.”