Just days before she lost her young life to cancer, 23-year-old Paloma Shemirani turned to social media to showcase the healthy foods and sweat therapies she believed were curing her.
Having turned down the chemotherapy which offered a high chance of surviving her non-Hodgkin lymphoma, this beautiful, brilliant Cambridge graduate had embraced a ‘natural’ regime of juices, coffee enemas and saunas – all carefully administered at home by her mother, Britain’s most notorious conspiracy theorist Kate Shemirani.
Shemirani’s outlandish views had previously caused a rift between mother and daughter. But when, just before Christmas 2023, doctors found a massive tumour in Paloma’s chest and urged her to start chemotherapy, she, understandably, reached out to her mum.
Within days, and against the advice of doctors, she had discharged herself from Maidstone Hospital and placed herself in Shemirani’s hands.
In an Instagram post in May last year, former Roedean schoolgirl Paloma wrote confidently about her ongoing ‘recovery’ at home with her mother in the small East Sussex town of Uckfield.
‘Contrary to the many “you are going to dies” I’ve received – have made it to May feeling better than ever,’ she wrote. ‘I have none of the original symptoms I presented with and my bloods, virtually back to normal, are stable.’
On July 18, 2024, she wrote that having been unable to exercise for seven months, she was starting ‘extremely gentle yoga’. Six days later, Paloma was dead.
In the wake of her daughter’s death Shemirani might have been expected to feel searing guilt about the advice she gave her.
Within days, and against the advice of doctors, Paloma had discharged herself from Maidstone Hospital and placed herself in the hands of her mother
Instead, she has since doubled down on her controversial theories, claiming that Paloma died because of ‘a chain of gross medical failings’ by doctors at the hospital where she died. She had been rushed to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton after suffering a heart attack caused by the massive tumour pressing on her heart and major arteries.
By contrast, Paloma’s two devastated brothers, her 24-year-old twin Gabriel and 26-year-old Sebastian, accused their estranged mother of killing their sister with ‘conspiracy theory pseudo-science’.
‘I pray there is a hell for her to burn in,’ Sebastian wrote, referring to his 60-year-old mother on X this week, adding: ‘This woman abused and isolated me, my siblings and other vulnerable people for decades. She is a monster.’
Disturbingly, he added that his mother – whom he refers to as ‘Kay’, her real name – was ‘physically beating’ his sister ‘until the week she died’, although he provided no evidence to confirm this.
The brothers’ decision to speak out comes just a month before a five-day inquest into Paloma’s death is due to be held in Kent.
The hearing is set to be an emotionally charged affair, not least because of Shemirani’s own vile claim that the NHS ‘murdered’ her daughter. There are fears that the disgraced former nurse and her crazed supporters will try to hijack the inquest to suit their own warped agenda.
Shemirani has thousands of online acolytes, many of whom pay an annual £69.99 fee for the misinformation she dishes out on a daily basis. She charges £195 for personal consultations and also offers intravenous nutrient therapy.
This week, after speaking to those close to this heart-rending case, the Mail can reveal for the first time the fateful events leading up to Paloma’s death on July 24 last year. And the agony of the friends who begged her to listen to NHS doctors but found themselves shut out by an increasingly isolated Paloma as she succumbed to her mother’s influence.
Kate Shemirani at an anti-vaccine protest in 2020. Only those who supported her twisted views were allowed to attend her daughter’s funeral last year
Only those who supported Shemirani’s twisted views were allowed to attend her daughter’s funeral last year. Paloma’s brothers, who say they found out about their sister’s death via a lawyer, were cruelly excluded from saying their last goodbyes. So, too, was Paloma’s devastated university boyfriend, from whom she’d split a couple of months before her death.
‘Paloma’s friends all faced a terrible choice,’ says a source who has asked not to be named. ‘If they wanted to stay in touch with her after she went back home to live with her mum, they had to show their support for what she was doing and face the agony of watching her slowly dying. If they disagreed, then they found themselves shut out.
‘It caused a hugely painful rift among her friendship group which went on even after her death.’
Aside from the grief inflicted on those who loved Paloma, this terrible story lifts the lid on the dark underbelly of Britain’s conspiracy theorists amid concerns that the insidious influence of those like Shemirani – who has called the NHS the ‘new Auschwitz’ and preaches that vaccines are an attempt to control our DNA – is spreading far and wide online.
Shemirani, who markets herself as a ‘natural nurse in a toxic world’, is an advocate of Gerson Therapy for cancer sufferers. This was the treatment which Paloma followed. According to Cancer Research UK: ‘There is no scientific evidence to use it as a treatment for cancer.’
Gerson Therapy involves following an organic fruit and vegetable diet, including up to 13 glasses of juice a day, taking nutritional supplements and undergoing daily coffee enemas in a bid to cleanse the body of toxins.
On her anti-vaxxer mother’s advice, Paloma – who weighed just 42 kg when she died, just over six and a half stone – also underwent sweat therapy in an infrared sauna blanket.
During a video call with a close school friend she said she’d found a new lump in her armpit, but that her mother had told her it meant the cancer was leaving her body.
Shemirani’s son Sebastian, who along with brother Gabriel accused their estranged mother of killing their sister with ‘conspiracy theory pseudo-science’
If her estranged sons accuse her of killing their sister, then Shemirani herself accuses the NHS – the ‘National Homicide Service’ as she viciously calls it – of the same crime, claiming Paloma was ‘terminated in the name of healthcare’ and wailing about cover-ups, ‘medical battery’ and ‘conspiratorial connivance’.
She claims that ‘Paloma died as a result of medical interventions given without confirmed diagnosis or lawful consent’ and that she has ‘forensic’ proof that doctors killed her daughter.
Shemirani, as I discovered when I interviewed her in September 2020, tries to back up her nonsensical claims by bamboozling you with pseudo-science. The deeply religious mother was given an 18-month interim suspension by the Nursing and Midwifery Council in July 2020 (and was struck off its register permanently in June 2021) after spreading misinformation about the pandemic.
She claimed that symptoms of Covid-19 were no more than a side-effect of 5G technology and that the vaccine was ‘Satan’s biggest triumph’, containing particles powered by military technology.
These views also saw her Twitter account suspended for violating its rules on coronavirus misinformation. But when Elon Musk bought the platform in 2023, Shemirani was allowed to return.
Speaking to Panorama this week, Paloma’s brothers Gabriel and Sebastian said that growing up, they and their siblings were constantly exposed to their mother’s far-out views – and for a time believed some of them, including that the Royal Family were shape-shifting lizards.
The ‘soundtrack’ to their school runs, Gabriel told the BBC’s disinformation specialist Marianna Spring, was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones talking about how the Sandy Hook school shooting in the US was staged and that 9/11 ‘was an inside job’.
As Gabriel put it this week: ‘As a child, you trust your parents. So you see that as a truth.’ Sebastian said he believed his mother used her ideas as a way to control them.
One time, he says, she decided Wi-Fi was dangerous and switched it off at home, refusing to listen to his pleas that he had to submit GCSE coursework.
‘That only fed the joy she had for using her irrational system of beliefs to control me,’ he said.
The daughter of a Nottingham postman, Shemirani qualified as a nurse in 1994 and supplemented her salary with modelling assignments. She married Faramarz Shemirani in 1996 and, after the birth of their children, set up her own business administering Botox and fillers.
Paloma’s brothers say it was their Iraqi-born father, a wealthy quantitative analyst, who first got into conspiracy theories. When their mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, she refused chemotherapy on his advice but did undergo a double mastectomy and reconstruction. Ever since, she has credited her fat-free, sugar-free, salt-free vegan regime with keeping her ‘cancer-free’.
After their parents separated, Shemirani’s two sons cut off contact with their mother. Paloma, however, was conflicted. ‘Paloma’s strategy was to appease, to be sweet, to try and win the love that she hadn’t been granted earlier,’ Sebastian said this week.
At her private, all-girls’ school, Roedean in Sussex, other pupils were well aware of the tensions Paloma faced at home.
‘It was open knowledge among her classmates that Paloma was mortified by her mother,’ a former pupil told the Mail this week.
‘Friends were concerned it might have a detrimental effect on her A-level results and she got a lot of support from them. However, your mum is still your mum, so Paloma had a lot of love for her.’
Another of her school friends said this week that Paloma talked about her mum ‘curing herself’ from cancer, and also believed Shemirani’s view that sunscreen caused cancer and so would get badly burnt in summer.
Paloma achieved two A-stars in Spanish and English and an A in History. The same month she also qualified for the finals of the Miss Brighton beauty pageant.
In September 2019, she started a degree in Spanish and Portuguese at Newnham College, Cambridge. She became close to the family of her university friends and spent large amounts of time at their home in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
‘Once Paloma was at university, she was away from her mum’s influence,’ says the source who spoke to the Mail this week. ‘She was able to be herself more than when she was at home.’
She began eating meat and using fluoride toothpaste, which her mother had previously banned.
After graduating she started working as an editorial assistant, but on December 22, 2023, she got the cancer diagnosis after suffering chest pains and breathing difficulties. Doctors at Maidstone Hospital diagnosed non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Untreated it can be fatal, but Paloma was told she had an 80 per cent chance of recovery if she had chemotherapy (something Shemirani refers to online as ‘mustard gas’ for ‘ill-informed people’).
Shocked by the news, Paloma wanted to tell her mother. According to her boyfriend, Shemirani texted him to say: TELL PALOMA NOT TO SIGN [OR] VERBALLY CONSENT TO CHEMO OR ANY TREATMENT.’
Medical staff, according to Panorama, wrote in Paloma’s notes that they had ‘a concern regarding parental influence’. But they also believed that she had capacity to make her own decisions.
Having decided to try the controversial Gerson Therapy her mother espouses, Paloma discharged herself from hospital on Christmas Eve and returned home.
‘It was the most normal thing in the world to want her mum again,’ says the source who spoke to the Mail, ‘but it was also a disaster. She was back under Kate’s influence.’
Gabriel was so concerned about his twin being indoctrinated that he began legal action in a bid to get an independent assessment of her medical care. That case ended without any conclusion after Paloma died in July last year.
But this week, as her brothers’ row with their mother gathered apace, Shemirani posted on X what she claims is a witness statement, signed by Paloma, which she says ‘forms a clear, legal rebuttal to the forced medical treatment being pursued against her’.
Gabriel and Sebastian believe that their mother forged the statement in which Paloma purportedly states that she never had cancer, that any suggestion she was ever diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma was ‘absurd fantasy’ and that the legal action by her twin was an ‘outrageous invasion of my privacy’.
Shemirani hit back at her sons this week, bizarrely claiming via a podcast that Gabriel was in the pay of MI6. A joint statement from her and her ex-husband said: ‘Our daughter died following a chain of gross medical failings, breaches of consent law, falsified records and reckless emergency drug use that violated every protocol for her age, weight and clinical presentation.’
Responding on X, Sebastian wrote: ‘How can you blame medical malpractice for Paloma’s death when YOU WOULDN’T LET HER SEE A DOCTOR after her diagnosis until her heart attack when it was already too late?’
All of these matters will be addressed at Paloma’s inquest next month. But behind the ongoing legal battle lies the raw grief of those who loved her and believe she needn’t have died – and the urgent issue of how conspiracy theorists are pushing anti-medicine views to millions and leaving the vulnerable at risk of serious harm.
