Mum’s brainwashing killed my sister, and still people fall for her lies
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Sebastian Shemirani thinks back often to the warning he gave five years ago. Speaking on a BBC podcast he called his mother, the British former nurse and conspiracy theorist Kate Shemirani, a danger to society. “I said someone is going to get hurt,” recalls Sebastian, 26, speaking to me on a video call from his home in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Then, in December 2023, his sister, Paloma, was diagnosed with cancer. A 23-year-old Cambridge graduate, Paloma died on July 24 last year after refusing cancer treatment on the NHS for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. When diagnosed, she was told that after the recommended course of chemotherapy she had a 80 per cent chance of recovery. She died seven months later.
“I have really struggled to come to terms with the fact that if me or my brother had got cancer, we would’ve survived,” Sebastian says. “Part of me hates the world for having decided that the one sister I have who was vulnerable to my mother’s beliefs happens to be the one of us who gets cancer and dies. And I was powerless to stop it.”
Along with his brother, Gabriel — Paloma’s twin — Sebastian believes that their sister was coerced into refusing treatment by their mother.
Kate (real name Kay) Shemirani is one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in Britain. She gained traction during the pandemic; online, where she has more than 80,000 followers on X, she styles herself “the natural nurse’ — despite being struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council in 2021 after a speech in Trafalgar Square where she likened nurses and doctors to Nazis. She espouses “Gerson therapy” which includes a course of natural juices, coffee enemas and a vegan diet and supplements that conspiracy theorists believe can cure cancer.
This was the treatment plan Paloma was following when she suffered a cardiac arrest at her mother’s house and died a few days later at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, when her life support was turned off. An inquest into her death begins this week.
Although Paloma was an adult, her brother believes that she was not in a position to make the decision to refuse treatment, due to coercion from their parents, both of whom believed in conspiracy theories. “If someone is rejecting cancer treatment for non-terminal cancer, that is evidence that they are not making the right decisions,” he says.
Sebastian works in finance and splits his time between Hong Kong and Georgia. He is articulate and direct, only faltering when speaking about his sister’s final months.
Before the inquest, he and Gabriel are calling for a change in the law, which recognises coercive control but does not have a specific category for conspiracy theory as a means of control. They are also calling for it to be made illegal for unqualified or unregistered individuals to call themselves “nurse” or “doctor”.
He is also calling for social media companies to use algorithms that “prioritise facts” over those that spread misinformation.
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/sebastian-shemirani-interview-sister-paloma-8wtqz29vc.
