When Marianna Met the Shemiranis: How Reporting Becomes Propaganda

This is an investigation into an investigation.

Or, at least, my end of it amounts to an investigation, as I have done my very best to meet the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition: “the act or process of examining a crime, problem, statement, etc. carefully, especially to discover the truth”.

My best for sure, but nowhere near enough to claim I know what actually led to the death of Kate Shemirani’s 23-year-old daughter Paloma after a series of disputed events. And I definitely don’t know enough to fill a five-part BBC Radio 4 series plus an episode of a flagship TV news programme.

But then I am not the BBC’s Social Media Investigations Correspondent with a public service broadcaster’s resources at my disposal. I’m just a former national newspaper journalist who remembers how print and broadcast news stories used to be put to the test before being unleashed on the world.

And, no, the process was far from perfect, and, yes, there was frequent spinning and bending of facts to support political and proprietor imperatives, and, yes, egregious mistakes were from time to time made throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. 

But the foundations nonetheless generally had some substance and—crucially—you were expected to at least attempt to ‘get the other side’ and ‘stand the story up’. Plus, there was a system of editorial QC, sense-checking, and real, old-fashioned fact-checking to catch most of the shortfalls and mistakes.

Fast forward via what’s now increasingly being labelled ‘the Covid years’ and ‘getting the other side’ appears to have been quietly abandoned across swathes of legacy media. No need for any of that old-fashioned bid for balance: let’s just roll with something that ducks awkward questions completely and instead flawlessly showcases our angle of choice.

Let’s, in other words, give up entirely on being reporters and at best just churn out another round of mostly lazy journalism.

With the inquest into Paloma Shemirani’s death now underway, this is a good moment to analyse Marianna Spring’s Cancer Conspiracy Theories: Why Did Our Sister Die? (a June 2025 episode of Panorama), and Marianna in Conspiracyland 2, a contemporaneous Radio 4 five-parter which essentially elaborates on the TV theme and chucks in an unexpected twist in episode 5. We’ll come back to that. 

To be clear, I am not here to take on Ms Spring personally. I don’t know her, ad hominem is unprofessional, and I’m only interested in the material she’s assembled. Similarly, I’m not here to argue a case on behalf of Kate Shemirani. I don’t know her, either, and I’m only interested in exploring the evidence she’s made public.

The BBC’s version of events is very heavily premised on what Ms Spring has been told by Paloma’s twin, Gabriel, and older brother Sebastian, who—she says—came to her. There is additional input from friends of Paloma and Ander Harris, the boyfriend with whom she split in March 2024, and this has now been revisited and reworked multiple times by legacy media. 

They all say Paloma was diagnosed at Maidstone Hospital, Kent, with a form of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and her mother coerced her into refusing conventional chemo-based cancer treatment which has an 80% survival rate. 

From this emerges the embellished overarching theme underpinning all the rest of the TV, radio, and wider media content: Paloma was fatally manipulated by a mother presented throughout as a dangerous struck-off nurse and irresponsible high-profile anti-vax conspiracy theorist. 

Helping reinforce this is the picture Paloma’s brothers paint of growing up in a dysfunctional home with both parents—Kate and their father Faramarz—becoming more and more absorbed in what Gabriel labels “sprawling anti-government conspiracy theories”. Both parents are also accused of being abusive to their children. 

Of course, we only have two of the four Shemirani siblings’ word for this (there is also a fourth, younger, daughter who is not involved in the BBC coverage). Their parents, who separated in 2014, were invited to comment, but it should be fairly obvious why they declined to respond. 

What we know for sure is that Paloma, a multilingual recent Cambridge graduate and Roedean Scholar, was admitted to hospital in December 2023 after receiving the results of tests for earlier symptoms, including chest pain. After two days, she was discharged, on Christmas Eve, to her mother’s home in Sussex and remained there until shortly before her death on 24 July 2024 following a blue-light ambulance transfer to hospital. 

However, what happened between those dates is far from clear, whether you attempt to stand up the BBC version of events — mostly derived from hearsay—or Kate Shemirani’s. Ms Spring argues that Paloma was coerced into foregoing chemotherapy; Kate Shemirani says her daughter willingly made all her treatment choices, including Gerson Therapy, except for drugs administered in hospital.

To support her narrative, Ms Spring says: “I have seen messages and emails that show Kate Shemirani was trying to influence her daughter during her two-day stay in Maidstone Hospital for diagnosis”. It’s not entirely clear who was messaging or emailing whom. Inter alia, she adds that Paloma’s twin Gabriel “believed [emphasis added] she was considering the chemo recommended by doctors”. 

Kate Shemirani meanwhile claims that, during the December 2023 hospital stay, Paloma was given an intravenous cocktail of drugs including rasburicase, which is generally only prescribed for use alongside chemotherapy. Paloma was not issued with a hospital ID wristband and never gave her written—or even oral—consent to receive either rasburicase, the steroid prednisolone, or any other drug. 

These details are, says Kate Shemirani, confirmed in Paloma’s medical notes, which also lack evidence of a differential lymphoma diagnosis confirmed by histopathology. Further, she says, a subject access request (SAR) was needed to obtain Paloma’s notes and blood test results. 

If accurate, all this points in a rather different direction of travel to the BBC’s, but Ms Spring firmly asserts: “Kate Shemirani has shared a range of unproven theories on social media and podcasts about how she believes Paloma was murdered by medical staff”. It is, however, unclear from what Kate Shemirani has said on social media, in independent media interviews, and in her Substack posts what exactly did happen just before Paloma died.

According to Kate Shemirani, Paloma was at home, began struggling to breathe, then stopped breathing altogether. Her mother called an ambulance, started first aid, and by the time paramedics arrived Paloma had a pulse, was not in cardiac arrest, and was beginning to slowly recover. A paramedic nonetheless administered adrenaline via intraosseous access—that is, direct into the bone marrow at the femur or hip—and Paloma quickly went downhill. 

Although an air ambulance was on site, Paloma was instead taken by road to hospital. In an interview with GB Resistance’s Will Coleshill, Kate Shemirani contends that an excessive dose of adrenaline pushed the blood from her daughter’s brain into her heart. Once at the hospital, she was declared brain-stem dead, and life support was withdrawn some days later.

In her GB Resistance interview, Kate Shemirani discusses her theories around this final sequence of events, and their possible wider significance, but these fall outwith this article.

The BBC meanwhile skates over Paloma’s last days, focusing instead on the siblings’ claims that their mother failed to inform them properly of their sister’s death, and they were not invited to her funeral. Once again, we’re just given one perspective. 

There are several other odd twists and turns, but the most significant came in early May 2024 when one or both Shemirani brothers attempted to use the law to challenge Paloma’s decision-making competence after first raising safeguarding concerns with East Sussex social services.

Kate Shemirani has published her daughter’s response, but while I have been able to confirm that the brothers’ paperwork was lodged, no other documents are publicly accessible. This is not unusual with the High Court Family Division.

What gives this witness statement particular significance is that it is the only unmediated testimony we have from Paloma herself, and it is confirmed with a wet signature. The BBC would no doubt argue that it is just the product of more control and coercion but absent any proof of that, let’s take it at face value. Key points include:

1. Capacity: “The opinion and political views of my mother have nothing to do with this Claim; I have full confirmed capacity”.
2. Coercion: “There is no evidence whatsoever of coercion … In fact, it is the opposite … Intensive coercive pressure has been brought to bear on me, not only by the Trust [presumably a reference to Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust], but also by Gabriel [Shemirani] and by several others, none of whom have any medical knowledge”.
3. Counselling: “My counsellor Dr Ali Ajaz, with whom I have been in consultation since February 2024, reports a low chance of coercion”.

Kate Shemirani has also made public the court report prepared by consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Ali Ajaz, in which he says: “In my clinical opinion, I have no concerns that Ms Shemirani has been coerced or unduly influenced by any individual when making a decision about her own medical treatment”.

Regarding that medical treatment, Paloma refers in her court statement to her GP carrying out periodic blood tests between December 2023 and May 2024. These “show that most, if not all, of my levels have returned to normal range since leaving hospital on Christmas Eve”. There’s no way of knowing whether Ms Spring explored this with the GP, and if so, what the outcome was. It’s certainly not referred to in the BBC content.

Siblings, schoolfriends, and an ex-boyfriend apart, who else does Ms Spring principally rely on to support her story? Not anyone who knew Paloma professionally, but two high-profile medics: Tom Roques, Vice-President of Clinical Oncology at the Royal College of Radiologists, and former consultant breast surgeon Liz O’Riordan.

Now an author and inspirational speaker, Ms O’Riordan is best known for being diagnosed with breast cancer three times. This slight irony was clearly lost all round when she told Ms Spring: “If someone is offered an alternative, I can see why people might be swayed. But they’re not seeing the reality of what happens when it doesn’t work.”

Both Dr Roques and Ms O’Riordan say what you would expect them to say—that is their prerogative—and they’re neither challenged nor asked to expand. Anything other than a 100% allopathic perspective is, we are invited to confirm, disinformation, misinformation, or a conspiracy theory. 

But they really come into their own in Episode 5 of Marianna in Conspiracyland 2 when Ms Spring switches her attention right away from a young woman’s illness and untimely death to one of her favourite topics.

Pivoting around the Texas measles outbreak earlier this year and speaking over footage of US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Ms Spring manages to make a connection between Paloma’s story, her mother, and vaccines by wrapping them up in one big conspiracy parcel.

To this end—and not, as far as I’m aware, as an expert in either vaccines or childhood disease—Ms O’Riordan asserts: “It terrifies me that this is becoming normal. Suddenly people are not having their vaccinations and kids are dying of measles. And it’s happening on a global stage. People are dying because of what politicians and people in government and people in power are saying”.  

Not billed as a vaccine expert either, as far as I know, Dr Roques agrees it’s all a bit of a challenge: 

When you’ve got a Secretary of State for Health in the States like Kennedy who actively promotes the link between vaccines and autism that has been debunked years ago, then that makes it much easier for other people to peddle false views and therefore to influence more vulnerable people.

We’ve got to call out the conspiracy theorists, find ways to sensibly and logically rebut that information without getting embroiled in social media disputes as that’s not the best way of doing it.

To be clear, these two medical professionals are perfectly entitled to their personal views on vaccines and social media, and we’re equally entitled to listen to or disregard what they say. But they are being presented to us as experts in a context where they are actually both well outside their respective lanes and that is disingenuous at best. 

The BBC has a 22-page policy document on impartiality, and this makes it clear there is always a duty to uphold balance. Point 4.3.6 says: “When dealing with ‘controversial subjects’, we must ensure a wide range of significant views and perspectives are given due weight and prominence, particularly when the controversy is active. Opinion should be clearly distinguished from fact”.

I found none of that in any of Ms Spring’s telling of Paloma’s tragic story across BBC TV and radio. There is no ‘wide range’ of views; in fact, there’s not even a narrow range of views, and you have to ask why as a public service broadcaster you would entirely exclude input from anyone outside mainstream medicine, given the core subject.  

There is also little discernible distinguishing of opinion from fact, from either Ms Spring or her expert witnesses. I would not expect it from Paloma’s siblings, but I would have hoped to see some attempt at balancing, perhaps just from other family, friends, or colleagues with an even slightly different perspective.

And it gets very ad hominem personal: not enough for Ms Spring to make full use of a tragic story that appears to have fallen into her lap. No, she appears to feel the need to take down an individual in a way that by the end feels uncomfortably close to a full-on witch hunt. An individual, let us not forget, who lost her child in traumatic circumstances only a year ago.

This is of course not the first time Ms Spring has sailed close to the professional wind. With this, though, I get an even stronger sense that she is driven solely by her self-appointed positioning as a crusader against dis-, mis-, mal- and any other type of information with which she doesn’t agree. 

Nothing, especially conflicting evidence, can get in the way of making the narrative stick, and the result isn’t anything properly resembling investigative journalism. What we get from the BBC’s Social Media Investigations Correspondent is instead unapologetic propaganda.