A mother’s worst day should not come with a second disaster on top of it—yet that’s what Debbie Duncan says happened after her son Jay Slater went missing in Tenerife. She’s now speaking out about what she calls “tragedy trolling,” and pushing for stricter action against misinformation aimed at grieving families.
Jay Slater, 19, disappeared on 17 June, 2024, during a trip to Tenerife with friends to attend the NRG music festival—his first holiday without his parents. After an extensive 29-day search, his body was discovered on 15 July, 2024, following a catastrophic fall on the way back to his accommodation after a night out. During all that time, Debbie says her family became the target of a relentless online campaign.
According to Debbie, more than 300 million videos were made relating to her son, and the abuse didn’t just stay online—it got personal in ways that, frankly, shouldn’t be possible. She describes being pushed into something like constant public judgment: prank calls, social media posts claiming “we know where Jay is,” and accusations that dragged Jay’s friends and even his brother, Zak, into the spotlight. “I’m surprised I’m not in a padded cell,” she said, adding that it felt like living in a movie—except there was no pause button.
When tragedy trolls latched onto a detail about one of Jay’s friends having a conviction for drug dealing, Debbie says the whole narrative went off the rails. “People began to make videos with voiceovers about Jay being in a drug-fuelled underworld,” she said. She claims the misinformation escalated into staged-looking content—photoshopped images and even claims that Jay had been tortured. And when his body was later discovered, the tone apparently shifted rather than stopped: Debbie says trolls claimed it “wasn’t him in the coffin” and that the only way to be sure was to dig him up.
Eventually, even community attempts to raise money became fuel. After a friend set up a GoFundMe to cover search costs, accommodation for the family in Tenerife and repatriation costs, Debbie says people told her she was using it to pay drug debts—claiming the whole family were drug dealers. She says it was soul destroying because, as she puts it, nobody knows them but everyone assumes the worst anyway. She also says she visited the police station “so many times,” and reported videos, but that they weren’t taken down.
Debbie’s mental health, she says, couldn’t take it. She describes a “full on mental breakdown,” and says she wasn’t allowed to properly grieve because the attention was still aimed at her. A finance officer at a high school, she lost her job after poor mental health, and says “whatever I did or said was ripped to pieces.” One small real-world detail she shared, in the middle of all this, was how the everyday grinding nature of it felt—trolling that didn’t stop, even after the facts were known.
Now she is backing campaigns that aim to end tragedy trolling, including Missing People’s call to stamp out cyberbullying and a petition for “Jay’s Law” that demands social media platforms be legally required to immediately remove organised misinformation and speculative malicious content aimed at grieving families. Missing People CEO Ross Miller said “Some of the content we’re seeing is truly vile,” and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said families facing missing loved ones are living through “unimaginable pain,” and the abuse is “completely unacceptable.” Debbie needs 100,000 signatures by May 4 for the petition to be debated in Parliament, and she says she received an official response after visiting the House of Commons and speaking to Kanishka Narayan, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for AI and Online Safety).
She continues to be trolled daily. Debbie says there’s still a YouTube creator making a video about Jay for clicks every single day—and that it’s monetised. “It just appalls me,” she said, adding that she’s “thick skinned now,” while also sounding exhausted. “But I don’t want this to happen again… We’re real people and we’ve lost our children,” she said, trailing off into a vow to keep fighting—at least until the harm stops.
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