Katie Roche's Blog

Jack Monroe Investigation: Part Three

This post will be much shorter than its predecessors. For those who haven’t seen them, here’s part 1 and part 2. Right now, I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said.

An X (formerly Twitter) user named @LegalGengar has released Monroe’s Patreon earnings from 2017 onwards. He then released some of the donations made to Monroe via PayPal. The data can be viewed at mega.nz. LegalGengar is the same person who took Monroe to court over unfulfilled Patreon rewards and won. Monroe has also doxxed LegalGengar, which confirms that she has met him and that the case is real. I have seen the post where she doxxed him, but I will not include the link to protect LegalGengar’s confidentiality.

Good afternoon. I can now reveal the exact breakdown of Jack Monroe's Patreon across membership tiers.

As of December 2023, she earns £1,200/month. Her highest point was January 2022 when she earned over £10,000/month.

£3.50/month tier - 223 subscribers

£7/month tier - 32…

— Legal Gengar (@LegalGengar) December 13, 2023

With reveals like this, caution must be exercised. Who leaked the data? Why? According to LegalGengar, the person who released the data knows Monroe personally. The most likely explanation is that it’s someone who is (unsurprisingly) fed up with Monroe and her stories. But I still worry that this is a set-up. That the data is fake, and Monroe will release the correct, much-lower, figures to make her dissenters look bad. Indeed, this possibility can’t be discounted.

Nevertheless, the figures for the Patreon subscribers don’t seem outlandish, based on the number of subscribers, which were displayed publicly on the website. At the peak in January 2022, Monroe made £10,000 a month. Assuming the figures are genuine, this vindicates those of us who were suspicious of Monroe’s claim to be back in poverty in 2022. Remember, she was saying she had to use solar lamps indoors and boil bars of soap to make shower gel (I still don’t see how this would save money).

The PayPal donations are trickier to verify. Unlike with Patreon, the number of donations made is not publicly available. However, the amount donated after Monroe asked for help with the case against MP Lee Anderson is consistent with the amounts donated on other platforms for similar legal cases, such as those on CrowdJustice.

I have already said this, but to reiterate: the problem isn’t that Monroe earns a lot of money. The problem is that she was claiming to be in desperate financial hardship and accepting donations from the public that were given to help cover her living costs. How could anybody condone this?

Thankfully, Monroe’s support has dwindled significantly since the AwfullyMolly exposé back in August 2022. Many of her former fans have accepted the truth. But to those stalwarts who continue to defend her: if you want to think the best of people, why does “thinking the best of people” only go one way? Why not think the best of those who are speaking out and assume we are telling the truth?

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