I’m bored, and I’m sure a few of you are, too.
What’s The Play, Kim?
(Blingee was down so I had to make my necessary MySpace-style graphics elsewhere)
Usually I have a tacit moratorium on this blog for talk of all things Kardashian, aside from the rare throwback snap here and there, but with the recent news of Kim and co. singing their swan song on reality TV after more than a decade, I felt like I ought to tie up a loose end or two.
If you remember, a couple of years back I made a post prophesying that the Kardashians were bound to enter politics. At the time quite a few people told me it was an interesting conspiracy, but they doubted it was true. Why would they, after all? Aren’t they, like, super famous already? Why the need to hightail it to D.C.?
Then, only a week after I’d made my post, a report surfacedKim had been in talks with Ivanka Trump and Trump’s equally-awful half Jared Kushner to secure the release of a woman named Alice Marie Johnson, a black 62-year-old great grandmother who’d been serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. Kardashian learned of Johnson’s plight through a video made about her case the previous fall. At the time, Kim made a single tweet about it, quickly drowned among plugs for her various beauty products.
This is so unfair… https://t.co/W3lPINbQuy
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian)October 26, 2017
Now, roughly a half-year since her initial tweet, it seemed her interest in the case was a lot more vested than initially thought.
First thing’s first: Kardashian and Trump, as I noted then, go back. Way back down the Hollywood rabbit hole to heady nights at Hyde and the Chateau. Lest we forget Ivanka, like Kim, was one of Paris Hilton’s underlings at a feral time before settling down with fellow rich kid Kushner. When Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal’s stories of shared extramarital flings with Donald emerged a while back, a fun detail that slipped into the abyss was the night in 2007 they’d both cozied up to Trump at a party he’d hosted at Les Deux nightclub - of The Hills fame. (I always knew Les Deux would go down in American history!)
from les deux to the oval office, a lot changes in a decade! pic.twitter.com/E4oGwByvwM
— popculturediedin2009 (@pcd2009)May 30, 2018
With them, in Trump’s carefully-selected VIP section, was Kim. Kim had grown up in the same tight-knit circle as Paris and Ivanka, among others; their parents, Kris and Robert, Donald and Ivana, and Rick and Kathy Hilton, were all good pals. Like Kim, Ivanka had been groomed by her parents into something of a Paris clone - racy spreads in men’s magazine, father-daughter trips to the Playboy Mansion, and the occasional gossip column embarrassment - but to little success. While Kim would eventually prove to be America’s next top socialite after Paris, Ivanka retreated into the typical afterlife of many a party girl, children and branded clothing. Though bonds formed in club bathrooms are forever.
So how Kim first made contact with Ivanka to discuss Johnson’s struggle was simple: she scrolled through her phone contacts and called her.
Seriously. That’s it.
Come May 2018, a meeting was arranged. Kim jetted cross-country to D.C. for an Oval Office tête-à-tête with Trump. She was accompanied by the attorney Shawn Holley, with whom she’d been working on Johnson’s release, and who’d been a close friend of the Kardashian clan for quite some time. Holley worked in Johnnie Cochran’s office during the O.J. Simpson trial. Behind the scenes, it was said Kim’s father, Robert, had been carrying on an affair with Holley. (At the time, Kardashian Sr. was engaged to another woman.)
Simpson ties aside, Holley’s most visible role in tabloidal history, one with which I’m sure most of you gossips are familiar, was her legal wizardry for Lindsay Lohan, whose numerous cases Holley acquiesced after Lilo’s previous counsel and Holley’s pal, Blair Berk, passed the baton. When Kim and Shawn attended the White House Correspondents Dinner together in 2012, naturally La Lohan was in tow.
So now we’re in the Oval Office, and a tabloid staple short.
As Kim saunters in, she cracks a joke about The Celebrity Apprentice. (In addition to Khloe appearing as a contestant in 2009, Kim herself appeared for a small role in 2010.) Trump proceeds to thank his pal for her and her husband Kanye West’s help in ‘raising his approval rating with the black community,’ so reports Bloomberg. Then follows a brief chat: Donald asks Kim how she became acquainted with Shawn, they say O.J., and Trump adds that he and The Juice go back, too.
Heartwarming stuff, right?
The conversation, sprinkled with some uber-serious talk - prison and stuff - wraps in under an hour. The President is left with things to ponder while Kim prances from the White House to Javanka’s pad in Kalorama. The former Paris Hilton playthings smile and share drinks. They take selfies. Like the good ol’ days, sans a Barton or Brandon Davis.
It’s not long a decision’s reached, with Donald commuting Johnson’s sentence. In a modern Monroe 'Nothing on but the radio!’ moment, Kim would later claim she’d been shooting a photo spread in the buff when Donald called to tell her the good news, and social media rejoiced. Trump-loving Twitter cited Donald’s good deed as definitive proof he can’t be racist, and that miracles can happen when you just sit down and work with the President, like Kim had done so gallantly. Trump-hating Twitter rightly insisted that Donald is still awful - a lone act ridden with intentions of positive PR aside - but then bizarrely lauded Kim for her efforts as if she were forced into the Oval Office at gunpoint, terrorized into having a conversation with a guy that’d been a family friend since she was in diapers, or as if her intentions, like Donald’s, went anywhere beyond PR.
Pretty much everybody seemed to miss the point.
Since then, Kim’s political footprint has continued to grow. When Ivanka toured Los Angeles that summer for Republican fundraisers, Kim hosted Trump at the Hidden Hills manse she shares with Kanye for a private dinner, one-on-one, per Vanity Fair. In September 2018, Kim returned to the White House for a prison reform roundtable with Jared and Ivanka, all three donning their most serious-looking suits: Kushner’s barely fitting, Trump’s straight from mama Ivana’s old wardrobe, and Kardashian’s accessorized with sunglasses - straight out of an episode of The Simple Life: Interns.
It started with Ms. Alice, but looking at her and seeing the faces and learning the stories of the men and women I’ve met inside prisons I knew I couldn’t stop at just one. It’s time for REAL systemic change pic.twitter.com/kdKr8s6lJW
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian)September 5, 2018
In December of that year, a prison reform bill passed with Donald’s backing, and CNN’s coverage singled out Kim for her role driving the prison overhaul. There was talk of her working on releasing a second prisoner, and at one of his rallies, Donald paused his self-indulgent spiel to heap praise on his fellow reality star: Kim “did a great thing!”
Then the following spring, the rebrand continued. In May 2019, Anna Wintour - who boldly refuses to give Melania another spot in the magazine yet sees the Kardashians as somehow being different? More worthy? Less racist? Not sure! - threw moldy crap to the fan and let Kim have another cover of Vogue, in which Kim’s inexplicably soaked, like always.
.@KimKardashian is our May issue cover star! See the full spread: https://t.co/WclMBN40Qbpic.twitter.com/ahPvfXL1A6
— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine)April 10, 2019
Why is she always wet? No clue, but the inside story was less opaque. It was as transparent a PR ploy as any. It was a political primer to put it mildly, with Kim prattling about her powwow in the Oval Office the previous spring. There were loads of Kennedy references, including Kim’s admission that she purchased Jackie O’s watch at an auction and wore it during her meeting with the Prez to give her “power.” (Remember when Kim cosplayed as Jackie for the cover of Interview in the summer of 2017?) A Kennedy grandson also has a crush on Kendall, apparently. It’s a blatant, in-your-face attempt to tangle two dynasties together: one of politics and another of gossip.
But then Kim dropped a bomb: She was studying law!
Immediately the Twitter world seemed to delight in the information, praising her surprising career move as if not only had she made the decision, but she’d already spent years in law school, passed the bar, and had somehow helped bust out a dozen inmates in the process. Her public image had begun to shift to something of a latter-day Elle Woods, a bimbo reformed. The months that followed were marked by staged paparazzi photos with legal books conspicuously in view, stuffed into multi-thousand dollar Birkins, and the odd headline that Kim had done another good deed, or, if to report it correctly, had again paid a team of lawyers to do the work for her while she reaped the public’s positive marks. An Oxygen documentary on her supposed prison reform work came and went with little notice. But in more recent months, the attention’s shifted back to the state of her marriage to Kanye, whose attention-starved bid for the U.S. presidency has sparked speculation that Kim might be ready to file for a divorce and call it a day. Or maybe not.
As I see it, all of these developments fit in well with what I predicted back in 2018, and, if my imaginary crystal ball is still up to snuff, it’s more pieces in the puzzle to the Kardashian family’s next steps, as the fading reality empire struggles to embed itself into a radically different pop cultural landscape than the one in which it’d debuted well over a decade ago.
But I’m sure quite a few of you reading this are begging me to give Kim and Kanye a little slack. Sure, I’ve had a few lucky guesses, but the Kardashians aren’t scheming their way to Washington, right? And if they are, well, it can’t be as bad as what we’re dealing with now!
In that event, I’ve already considered some of the potential lines of defense and addressed them for your reading pleasure. If you aren’t convinced yet, maybe you’ll feel differently after.
“But Kim did a really good thing, she helped free a woman!”
You can be pleased with the sum and not the factors. Alice Marie Johnson being released was good. The Trumps and Kardashians are not. By arguing Kim Kardashian altruistically maneuvered the release of this woman out of the unabashed goodness of her heart is just as hopelessly misguided as suggesting Trump did it for the same reason. Yet people never make such assumptions for Donald. Donald isn’t given Kim’s benefit of a doubt. The same people who praised Kim for her ostensibly good deed stopped short of giving any credit to Donald. Why? Because packaging. Because Kim’s the conventionally attractive thirty-something slathered in bronzer and Balmain, propped next to the babbling, geriatric, orange-hued Hollywood excrement
Shit’s shit, beyond the optics. Believing otherwise is what led people to turn to Ivanka Trump, once upon a time, trusting 'Vanks would be America’s savior, a glimmering voice of reason and a calming force on her father - so picture me posing the following question in the voice of Lisa Love chiding Lauren Conrad on The Hills:
I know some of you are begging I give her some slack. She’s just trying to better herself, right? There’s nothing wrong with someone trying to learn! We as a society have complained for so long that a Kardashian does nothing, so one of the brood finally dips their toes into something serious and now we’re bafflingly barking at them to back off and go back to idling around their mansions and shilling diarrhea-inducing teas on Instagram. I get it, what can they do? Well, for starters, if they truly care so much about the common good: donate. And preferably not just a tiny percentage, nor to a church founded by Kris Jenner that holds services in hotel rooms.
Kim arranging a team of lawyers to hammer out individual releases for her 'Prisoner of the Week’ is as blatant a PR ploy as any, and, quite surprisingly, a lot of the same people I see falling for it are the ones who can’t wrap their minds around how Trump fans can support a racist, obscenely rich reality TV star who lies to them day in and out… while they are doing the same exact thing for another racist, obscenely rich reality star who, too, lies reflexively. I don’t know how many times I can rephrase this but: they’re the same person. If you believe them to be different, it’s because you’re blinded by Trump’s image, likely due to the media’s rewriting of his family and their history, which I attribute in part to the fact you have journalists not accustomed to Hollywood or celebrity writing about a strictly Hollywood entity, so suddenly the filter changes from Kardashian to Kennedy: Ivanka goes from being another rich kid who partied with Lindsay Lohan and merely settled into the common aughts socialite afterlife of family and fashion lines (see: the Kardashians, Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, Nicky Hilton, etc.) to being the more respectable “clothing designer” and “businesswoman” - which is a hell of a lot more prestigious a descriptor than what’s given to Simpson and Richie. And this misconception of who the Trumps are isn’t common, I’ll give you that. If anything, they’re perceived as crazier-than-average Republican types, like Sarah Palin, and not lifelong Hollywood celebrities whose ties to Tinseltown are leagues deeper than the Beltway. If you wiped your memory of the last five years and were only aware of the Trumps of 2014 and earlier, then the Kardashian comparison wouldn’t be up for question.
“But she’s just following in her father’s footsteps! He was a great lawyer!”
Uh, not really.
Kim’s father technically was a lawyer, yes. “Technically” being the operative word.
Robert Kardashian was an heir to a meatpacking fortune. His family, the Kardashians, were known as the “Armenian Rockefellers.” The Kardashians’ wealth, contrary to the quasi-bootstraps narrative that’s been spun about the family from the get-go, was generational. Robert studied law only to escape the family business, but abandoned it after a few years, opting to go into the music industry instead, where he’d befriended and worked beside former Live Nation and Ticketmaster chairman Irving Azoff, hence the Kardashians’ cozy, yacht-chilling relationship with Azoff’s family. Khloe even married ex-husband Lamar Odom at Azoff’s Beverly Hills estate. (In 2016, Azoff was reported as having been quietly involved in securing talent for Trump’s inaugural festivities; he denied it. The reports also fingeredDavid Foster as being involved, which Foster similarly denied. A month later, however, Foster put on a private concert for Donald and Melania at Mar-a-Lago.)
In Kim’s lifetime, her father was attached to one - and only one - legal case, and that was the O.J. Simpson trial. After letting it collect dust for years, Robert Sr. hurriedly reactivated his law license, but not to defend Simpson. Rather, he did it to privilege his conversations with O.J. and avoid testifying about what he knew of his BFF’s involvement in a double murder. Despite popular belief and Ryan Murphy’s rewriting of history, Kardashian did not “get O.J. off” of murder. Nor was he instrumental to O.J.’s defense. Nor did he play any significant role in O.J.’s defense, actually. That’s a piece of Kardashian mythology that needs some checking.
Throughout the duration of the trial, Kardashian never once did cross. Never did direct. He was a glorified babysitter tasked to keep O.J. company, an impressive litigator only by association, as Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey and Barry Scheck did all of the work. Kardashian contributed less to the outcome of the trial than Faye Resnick’s tales of sapphic sex. To call him a lawyer, let alone one of the leading in the country, is no less insane than saying Michael Cohen is a lawyer and one of the best working right now; they were both obsequious lapdogs to Hollywood stars whose all-consuming glow eventually dimmed as Cohen and Kardashian came to grips with the reality their best buddies were actually terrible people. (The fact O.J. and Donald were close friends is just a bonus.)
Kardashian, and I say this in all seriousness, did little more during the trial than stare at the wall and twiddle his thumbs. The idea of him being responsible for O.J.’s acquittal, let alone anything that occurred during the trial, is a complete fallacy that was spun out of the fact he was present in the courtroom. That was it. He showed up; that was the extent of his involvement.
So, no, Kim’s dad was not a great lawyer. To say as much is not only an exaggeration, but borders on complete fiction. Funnily enough, in an episode of Keeping Up, Kim claimed her father had once warned her of how 'stressful’ criminal law is. Meanwhile, the Simpson case was the one and only criminal case he’d ever been attached to in his life and, as I explained above, his role in that was almost nonexistent, his most prominent Simpson-related moves - reading his pal’s suicide note on TV and discarding his Louis Vuitton luggage - happening half a year before the trial even began. (Even during the pre-trial proceedings, it was Bob Shapiro who repped O.J.) Kim has also told tall tales over the years of being torn during the trial, having to choose between sitting with her mother, on the victim’s side, or her father with the defense. In reality, Kris Jenner only actually showed up to the trial twice in the entire eight months it raged on, the first time being in September 1995, only a week before the verdict (she sat with husband Caitlyn, pals Candace and Steve Garvey, David Foster and Foster’s wife/Caitlyn’s ex Linda Thompson), and the second time being the day of the verdict, whereupon she and Caitlyn were told the courtroom was packed and had to watch the decision from a separate room with a TV.
Of course, the one and only time Kris was in the courtroom she beelined for the press:
So maybe rethink those memories Kimmy.
If Kim were truly interested in following in her father’s footsteps, she’d work in the music industry - his actual life’s work and passion - but that wouldn’t help her 'serious’ rebranding now, would it? In fact, when Kim first started doing interviews in her early years of celebrity, she’d talk about how she worked for years alongside her father at his music company, and how she was always drawn to the music industry as a result. (She and her sisters sold off the company after his death.)
Isn’t it funny how her origin story can change on a whim? It’s almost as if a family known for lying about everything… lied.
“Kanye’s the bad one, not Kim!”
Let’s compare and contrast for a second. Kim and Kanye have a similar relationship to that of Ivanka and Donald’s. (No, not that kind.) Kanye and Donald are the loudmouths, ranting and rambling, grabbing all the attention. They’re the fire. And Kim and Ivanka have mastered the art of standing close enough to the fire to catch its glow, but far enough away to avoid getting burned. Kim and Ivanka both relish in the attention their associations with Kanye and Donald earn them. Without Kanye, after all, the Kardashian name would be a pop cultural footnote, a fleeting gossip fad that washed away after Kim’s marriage to Kris Humphries went bust. For those who can’t remember, the Kardashians were in free fall at that point, facing incredible backlash to the blatant publicity grab the Kardashian-Humphries union had been. It was Kanye who saved them from hitting bottom, and consequently facilitated their passage from D-List tabloidom to A-List status: Kendall became a high fashion model, Kim scored a Vogue cover and an invitation to the Met Gala. Long gone were the days of ribbon cuttings in conjunction with Charmin.
Kanye, for years, has been the Kardashians’ lifeline, so when people argue his Trump support is jeopardizing the Kardashian brand, they fail to see the Kardashians truly don’t have a brand - they morph to whatever the moment calls for, and if the moment calls for politics, they’re all in. So back to my comparison: Remember the days Donald would do something and people would turn to Ivanka and wonder how she’d felt? How she’d react? Would she do something, anything to quell the chaos?
Nothing. Not a peep. Rather, Ivanka stood by and smiled. Then time would pass and eventually Ivanka commented. She called it, whatever 'it’ may be, a “low point,” as she did children in cages. Or she’d appear on the cover of Us Weekly, insisting she didn’t always agree with her father. Then something else would happen and the cycle repeated.
Kim has the same approach. Kanye says something. She’s radio silent. She stands by and smiles. Then time passes and eventually Kim comments. She says she cried, as she did over his slavery comments. She insists they don’t always agree on things but she loves him nonetheless. Then he says something else and the cycle repeats.
See what I mean?
People continuously push the narrative Kim is captive in her marriage. Kanye faces the brunt of the criticism; woe is Kim. She’s the hapless victim of her husband’s awfulness. She’s preparing a divorce, they say. Any day now, they say. And they’ve been saying that for years, all of this rampant speculation ignoring the contoured elephant in the room: the Kardashians need Kanye. They need the fire and its glow, or else they’re in total darkness and slip into a deeper irrelevance than they are in now.
Expecting Kim to diverge politically from Kanye is expecting her to maintain political views to boot and not just doing whatever it takes to remain in the spotlight. She’s managed to play the best of both worlds, rallying respect from Trump fans who admire her ability to 'put differences aside’ and work with Donald, and the admiration of everyone else who seems to think she’s the great activist of our time for chatting with Trump for twenty minutes, agreeing to free a woman from jail, and then hightailing it to Javanka’s place for dinner, drinks, and selfies.
But why do we make these wild assumptions in Kim’s favor? The packaging I mentioned before - the same packaging that for a while benefited her friend Ivanka.
“But the Kardashians are already annoyingly relevant, why would they need to enter politics?”
I suggested earlier the Kardashians are in fact irrelevant. A fair amount of people reading this would disagree with me, but here’s my argument and, in many ways, it ties to the philosophy behind my blog.
We live in a moment when everyone curates feeds and everyone has their own idea of popular culture. That used to be different. A decade ago, something like Paris Hilton going to jail was a shared cultural experience. We all were touched by the coverage in one way or another. We depended, more or less, on the same media outlets.
Then, a couple of years later, Twitter begins to take its present shape, Instagram comes soon after, and suddenly we can all determine the news we absorb, how and when we absorb it. Something a Kardashian does can trend on Twitter for a little under a day, as did that situation ages ago involving Khloe and Jordyn Woods, but that’s it. Compare that to a tweet from Donald Trump, which bounces straight from our feeds to the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The Kardashians once had a grip, albeit a lot more tenuous, over that same mainstream news cycle, but have since lost it. They’re glorified social media celebrities at this point. They can trend once in a blue moon, get gazillions of likes, but their days seeping into those traditional news outlets - that still matter, mind you - dissipated the moment the Trumps scurried into the White House.
The weekly ratings for Keeping Up are below a million. So, yeah, the Kardashians’ ubiquity isn’t quite so. They made a choice, just like Paris Hilton did: wallow in crushing silence or kiss the ring. They chose the latter. Just as Paris eventually let bygones be bygones and cozied up to Kim after years of stewing in her usurper’s celebrity, the Kardashians were left with no choice but to come crawling to the new reigning family of reality TV.
A Trump tweet will always triumph a Kardashian anything. Those are the new rules of the game and the players are aware. When there was that painfully-manufactured triple pregnancy (Khloe! Kylie! Kim!) a couple of years back, it trended briefly on Twitter before being dwarfed by a new Trump drama. The Kardashians are only left to shake up celebrity-oriented outlets - gossip sites, Twitter, popular Instagram pages, etc. And, depending on how you consume your news, that might be a feat in itself, but try asking the person on the street the last Kardashian story they remember. They’ll scratch their head and likely respond Kim’s meeting with Trump. Before that, Kim’s robbery in Paris - which occurred a month before Trump’s election.
So, if you’ve followed me this far, you’ll start to see why they’re aligning with the Trumps.
Social media’s what you make of it. You create your own feed and that’s your world - emphasis on your. It doesn’t reflect the trends of the world at large, which are still shaped to a significant degree by those older, traditional outlets.
This also touches on that classic definition of “hard” news versus “soft.” The traditional media used to cover the Kardashians from time to time, but it was a choice. It’s a choice for the media to cover celebrities, but it has to cover politics. If the Kardashians wade into politics, then they’re guaranteed coverage. It’s a win-win: for the networks, who need to spice up the 'boring’ news - and have milked a Trump presidency for all it’s worth - and for the Kardashians who are losing grip and need an audience. Donald, perhaps unwittingly, cracked this code when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower and pronounced his bid for the presidency. The Kardashians are catching on and pushing their chips in.
To summarize: the Kardashians aren’t as popular as you might perceive them to be. Unless you’re making a conscious effort to absorb only celebrity content, which they’re likely to infiltrate, or to directly follow the family’s social media accounts, then chances are you’ve heard a lot less about them since Trump was elected. In that sense, they’re hardly relevant. The one and only celebrity that unifies us all in this presently fragmented pop cultural landscape, that manages to reach every pocket of the Internet, whether you love or hate him, is Donald Trump. Trump is pop culture, pop culture is Trump.
“But the Trumps are bad! The Kardashians aren’t!”
There’s a quote that’s stuck with me these last few years. It came from an op-ed penned in 2017 by a former editor at the Observer who’d bore witness to a pre-D.C. Javanka. “When I knew them,” the person wrote, “Jared and Ivanka were hanging out with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, not trying to keep immigrants out of the country.”
Beautiful, right?
The Trumps, in my eyes, are the picture perfect example of the much bemoaned “Hollywood Liberal”: voting and donating blue, mingling with famouses of the like, but quick to betray their ostensibly liberal principals when it came to furthering their own self-interests.
They were floundering Hollywood celebrities who’d discerned in the presidency an opportunity to achieve the stardom that’d long eluded them, particularly at a moment when their relevancy had worn frighteningly thin - The Celebrity Apprentice’s ratings were sinking and Donald had grown insecure about his own place in the star system. It was then he’d tossed behind his blue-hued checks and tacked his name to rhetoric that seemed, at least on the surface, the polar opposite of what he’d previously claimed to endorse.
And even with Donald’s ranting and raving, Ivanka remained so beloved in moneyed liberal circles that for some time she was granted immunity from the criticisms lodged at her father, despite her accompanying him to stop after stop on the campaign trail and even being the one to introduce him, with the smiley cadence of Vanna White, the day he launched his bid for the presidency and simultaneously touted Mexican immigrants as rapists. (Example: Bravo’s Andy Cohen, who’s since made a habit of attacking Donald on Twitter, professed his “love” for Ivanka at the onset of 2016.)
And that dynamic continues. A-Listers like Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman continue to cozy up to Ivanka and Jared. (They’re all pals through Rupert Murdoch and his onetime wife Wendi Deng; Hugh and Nicole are the godparents to Murdoch and Deng’s children, and for many years Ivanka was the kids’ trustee.) Javanka attended Hugh’s birthday party a couple of years ago, where they rubbed elbows with their pal Kidman and also Cate Blanchett. When Hugh was pressed about their friendship on The View shortly thereafter, he insisted that friends don’t abandon friends just because their dad becomes president - conveniently ignoring Ivanka and Jared both have official roles in the White House as senior advisors to the president. He also said Ivanka wrote a nice letter to his mom once, or something.
So how does any of this relate? Well, if I had to guess, your idea of the Kardashians being comparatively good or 'harmless’ is likely informed by their public image. Their non-threatening friendships, or at least the ones they usually publicize. Their ability to mix and mingle with Hollywood types. Just like the Trumps once upon a time.
And public image is fleeting, especially when one’s brand is reliant on doing whatever necessary to grab headlines, the undying need to remain on camera. Someone can party with Demi Moore today and pal around with a dictator tomorrow, it all depends on where the cash is coming from and the lens is pointed - and in the Kardashians’ case, they can do both. Remember Kim and Kanye’s quality time in Uganda a while back? Signing Yeezy’s for Yoweri Museveni? Just a week earlier she was snapping selfies with Kimora Lee Simmons. (Funnily enough, Russell and Kimora were also close friends of Donald’s. In an interview, Russell admitted in the past he’d personally witnessed“off-color” comments by his longtime pal, but thought nothing of it at the time since, well, Donald wasn’t president! So imagine all the “off-color” comments the Kardashians have made that get slipped under the rug since they’re not in the White House yet, either.) See how fast they turn?
“But the Kardashians are better businesspeople than the Trumps!”
I see this line tossed around on social media from time to time, and I’m never quite sure if it’s being said in earnest or if the person saying it just wants to use it as a quick gotcha, but I cannot stress how embarrassingly wrong this is.
There’s a narrative we’ve all come to accept, the Kardashian come-up. The oft-told tale of the sex tape, which led to a reality show, which then led to a nauseating degree of ubiquity - and that all couldn’t be farther from the truth.
It’s a revisionist history that helps the Kardashians more than it hurts, and it’s quite stunning how that narrative’s been casually purveyed over the years, especially by writers whose focus lies in celebrity and pop culture. But I’ll toss aside my journalistic judgements for now and focus on reworking the story to resemble the reality of the situation, which isn’t as linearly woven.
Tis the summer of 2007. The Kardashians are languishing. Kim’s sex tape, released a few months prior, was a dud, contrary to since rewritten history. Still, she pocketed a decent sum for her effort, due only to the fact she was a personal friend of Vivid Entertainment CEO Steve Hirsch, who’d distributed the tape. Kardashian and Hirsch were introduced via their mutual pal Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild fame, and many a rape and child porn allegation. (Allegations against which Kim proudly defended Francis, even selling shirts at her boutique, Dash, emblazoned “Free Joe” and “Judge Gone Wild”. Donald Trump, likewise, was a close pal of Francis’ and appointed one of Joe’s Beverly Hills-based attorneys as head of the IRS. You see how small this circle is?)
While Paris’ home movie preempted network news, graced the front page of the New York Post and Daily News and snagged a five-page Us Weekly cover story, Kim’s own cinematic turn earned passing mentions in Star Magazine and In Touch - not even a full page. There’d been rumblings of a Kardashian reality show at the time, but they fell to the wayside as Kim’s fleshy audition left audiences yawning, if they showed up to begin with.
Why, at first, was Kim’s less successful? Well, it’s important to remember the landscape in which her tape debuted: roughly three years post-Paris, when everyone from Chyna to Dustin Diamond were pumping out skin flicks, yearning for that same Hilton-level celebrity. Kim, similarly desperate, gave it a go, but it was DOA. And why would it have been an instant hit, anyway? Who exactly was breaking down doors to see Brandy’s brother screw Paris Hilton’s hanger-on?
Seriously, who?
The video, prematurely titled “Kim Kardashian Superstar”, only became an object of great interest years after the fact, when the Kardashians eventually did reach household name status and everyone was scratching their heads looking for ways to explain how exactly they became famous, so the myth was born: a sex tape and reality show. It was a narrative they were familiar with due to Paris, so they erroneously glued it to the Kardashians as well.
When Keeping Up was given the green-light in July 2007, roughly three or so months after Kim’s tape was released, it came not out of demand but as a last-minute substitute after another planned show on E! was temporarily canned. The timing was a fluke. E! needed to fill a suddenly vacant time-slot, so the Kardashian-fronted project collecting dust was rushed into production. As you’ll see, sheer luck is a common theme with the Kardashians’ few successes.
However, even with a show on the air, the family remained relatively obscure. Keeping Up’s premiere that October was accompanied by roughly a million viewers, decent for its cable TV home, but hardly anything compared to the major network premieres of The Simple Life - thirteen million plus - or The Apprentice - roughly eighteen million. At its ratings peak in the early 2010s, Keeping Up scored barely a third of those audiences and, at its most explosive, just over four million viewers for the rare episode, compared to, say, the eight to nine million weekly viewers of fellow cable reality shows like MTV’s Jersey Shore, back at its early 2010s peak, or the nine to ten million weekly viewers of A&E’s Duck Dynasty.
Even the family’s very first Us Weekly cover, the era’s ultimate demarcation for celebrity, came over two years after the release of Kim’s sex tape, and over a year after the premiere of Keeping Up. And it wasn’t even Kim on the cover, it was Kourtney, baring baby bumps with Kendra Wilkinson. So what were you saying again about Kim becoming famous from a sex tape?
By the time the Kardashians did begin to achieve their present ubiquity in 2009, they emerged less as direct successors to the Paris Hilton’s abdicated throne (left bare for many reasons I’ll get into another time, another place) than as a reality act that got lucky at a time when the tides were turning in their favor. They gained a tabloid foothold when the high-living Hollywood stars of the aughts fell second in cover value to the more demure and relatable reality fixtures, quickly gaining favor in the wake of the financial crisis. Movie stars fell to reality stars. Reese Witherspoon fell to Octomom. The Kardashians’ peers in celebrity were the Gosselins and the cast of Teen Mom. It was good timing, rather than genius strategy.
Come time for Kim’s brisk betrothal to Kris Humphries in 2011, and its unfavorable fallout, the Kardashians had spent barely two years on top, and even then to a less intense degree of celebrity than Paris had assumed at the height of her fame years earlier. In the wake of the 72-day wedding, the already tepid ratings for Keeping Up tumbled. The family was booed at public events. The Kardashians’ shoddy empire of sorts crumbled almost overnight, but then came a miracle in the form of Kanye West, and, as I’ve noted before, he’s been their lifeline ever since. Without him, they’re nothing.
So, contrary to popular belief, the Kardashians aren’t these impressive engineers of celebrity. The reality, which isn’t as perfectly packaged a Hollywood tale, was they were desperate and kept at it, trying countless times over countless years, to failure more often than not. Various one-off gigs on reality shows, from Dancing with the Stars to The Celebrity Apprentice. Sundry endorsements. Numerous products that went bust, or were quickly swamped in lawsuits. And the few ideas that managed to stick the landing (Kylie’s makeup) have been wildly inflated in terms of financial success. In all, a flop-ridden track record almost identical to their pals the Trumps’. They’ve essentially failed upwards.
And sure, persistence can be admirable in itself - that’s if you believe an unquenchable ambition for fame to be a cause noble enough. But maybe the Kardashians’ trajectory would wow me if they hadn’t had every resource in the world at their disposal. Bizarrely, I see a lot of people say the Kardashians came from 'nothing,’ or they parlayed 'nothing’ into a multi-million dollar empire. Or I’ll see the occasional, mind-numbingly dumb tweet saying that 'plenty of girls share their nudes online’ but only Kim became a household name, so she must have done something right; she must be smarter than all the rest of us, and not just born wealthy, connected, and in the heart of Hollywood. (And, of course, that’s to incorrectly assume Kim’s tape even propelled her to celebrity to begin with.) But still, all of this 'nothing’ talk seems to presume we’re talking about Kim Smith, from Nowhere USA, a plucky small-town girl who stumbled into the big city and through hard work and grit became a big shining star… and not Kim Kardashian, of Beverly Hills, California, of Bel-Air prep schools and birthday parties at Neverland Ranch, whose childhood neighbors ranged from the Jackson family to Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary, whose own father was a music executive and whose pals growing up included the Hilton sisters and Nicole Richie.
Where exactly is this “nothing”? Since if that’s nothing, my suburban New York ass is below the poverty line.
Believe me, I give credit where it’s due. As much as I personally loathe Trump and Hilton, I do recognize their role in shaping the mold of modern celebrity. The Kardashians never changed the mold. Like putty, they’ve merely shaped themselves to accommodate the mold as it’s changed over the years. They’re creatures of replication, only ever doing what’s worked first for others, and it’s a pattern that stretches back to their earliest days in the spotlight. Back in the nineties, when Kris’ second husband, Caitlyn Jenner, was in financial straits, Kris pitched an idea that in retrospect is regarded by the few that study Kardashianology as brilliant and a portent of her supposed jaw-dropping business smarts: home fitness merchandise.
Home fitness? In the '90s? A decade post-Fonda, when everyone from Heather Locklear to Zsa Zsa Gabor had already taken turns in spandex? Groundbreaking.
And there’s the other much-praised follow-up ideas: a sex tape, years after Hilton’s; a reality series, on airwaves already clogged with family acts (the Hogans, the Osbournes, the Simmons, et al.); and in recent years, branded makeup, as it’s enjoyed a surge in popularity due to YouTube and Instagram and an overarching 'influencer’ culture.
So with this pattern becoming clear, you can see why I’m reluctant to give the Kardashians the dubious distinction of being 'businesspeople’ (unless sticking your name on random products, hiring people to handle all the details, and snagging a few covers of Forbes is all it takes these days - right, Kim? Kylie? Donald?). And it also puts into focus why - at least to me - it’s obvious politics is the family’s new frontier: it worked for someone else, and that’s all they need to give it a shot.
“Then what do we do? Are the Kardashians just going to Trump us with ease?”
In my 2018 post, I suggested ignoring the Kardashians, but online folk won’t let happen. For some reason people are fascinated by them. I never was. Compared to their peers they’re incredibly boring, but I digress. My amended advice? If you’re going to talk about the Kardashians, at least be accurate. Stop propagating their mythology. They want you to think their interests are directed anywhere but themselves. They want you to think they care about women - they only care about themselves, and they happen to be women. They want you to think of them as shrewd businesspeople and not just another wealthy Hollywood family that struck out a dozen or so times before hitting it big. I can go for days, but I’ll cite an example of one of the aforementioned myths.
When Kylie Jenner stirred up social media a couple of years back with her “billionaire” status, thinkpiece Twitter pounced and readied themselves to exploit the news to their benefit, whether it be hailing it as a feminist triumph or a testament to society’s ills, ignoring the obvious ramifications of spreading the initial story: the more you say Kylie’s a billionaire, whether it’s in a positive or negative light, the more people accept the “billion” figure as fact and cement a lie as truth. And it’s very much a lie, so let’s start there.
The Kardashians don’t care if you think their wealth is disgusting, the fact you know they’re wealthy is all they want. Let’s say in a decade, or possibly sooner, a KarJenner is on a ballot, people aren’t going to think of that Twitter hot take they read, they’re going to think of the presumed fact Kylie’s a billionaire and assume that since the KarJenners were able to obtain that level of wealth, they must have some brains, they must’ve done something right. People mistakenly correlate success and wealth with intelligence and skill. Look at all the people who thought Donald Trump must have a speck of intelligence because he’s rich, ignoring the fact that his wealth was inherited.
Not that it truly matters if the Kardashians aren’t as wealthy as they claim. They’re rich nonetheless. But the fact they want you to think Kylie’s a billionaire goes beyond status. They could flaunt their wealth with a dozen diamond-studded Instagram posts, but a Forbes cover in a power-suit with the word “Billionaire” splashed across has a motive. Try to consider what that motive may be. And then take into consideration the source of Forbes’ piece wasn’t extensive documentation in support of Kylie’s “billionaire” claim - that incredible, headline-grabbing figure rested merely on the word of Kylie’s mother, Kris. Yet few people raised concern over that, instead they argued about whether or not Kylie’s ostensible billionaire status was 'deserved.’
And the typical response I see when a Kardashian pulls a trick like this is to praise mama Kris. People consider her a mastermind, a marketing genius. I don’t. Your own willingness to be fooled shouldn’t be confused for someone else’s intelligence. There’s an adage I see touted on social media quite often: "The devil works hard, but Kris Jenner works harder.“ The reality is Kris Jenner hardly works, we do all the work for her by choosing to accept even the most egregious of lies as a debatable truth. When I made my post in 2018, I’d noted in it how the family had recently been wrapped up in a "cheating 'scandal’ involving Khloe.” That was two years ago. I could write that same statement today, as a little while back there’d been another supposed “scandal,” almost identical to the last one, and, again, people bought it - despite the same exact trick being used roughly the same time a year prior. If that’s an example of Kris Jenner’s quote unquote genius, then she’s not really a genius - we’re just stupid.
Lest we forget: after Trump University shuttered its doors, Donald moved another business school into Trump Tower and tapped his pal Kris to be the face of it. It was fraught with lawsuits. Amid renewed interest into Trump’s past business ventures during the 2016 election, Kris wiped her social media clean of the school. If you praise Kris Jenner for her supposed business acumen, then you have to praise Donald Trump; they’re one and the same, and even scam in tandem.
“What about Harvey?”
Good question, if anyone even cares to ask. In the last post I suggested TMZ head Harvey Levin was a driving force of this political surge. His heart has been in the Beltway for quite some time. In 2007, he’d tried and failed to establish a D.C. outlet for TMZ. One of the great obstacles was developing sources. In Hollywood you can tattle with ease, but on Capitol Hill you run many a risk: law-breaking, policy violations, miscellaneous upsets. So it was a no-go. He settled for Fawn Hall sightings at Book Soup. But with a celebrity now in the White House, Harvey’s once-foiled dream became a reality. Look at the TMZ website today, and nearly every other video is politically-tinged. There’s as much paparazzi footage shot on the Hill as there is the Sunset Strip. Earlier this election cycle, Pete Buttigiegstopped by TMZ’s offices to chat politics, Kardashians, and play the guitar.
As for Levin’s relationship with Trump, things hit a snag a couple of summers ago. There’d been a falling out between Levin and the celebrity-in-chief, or at least that’s how it appeared. Around the time of Trump’s tiff with LeBron James, Harvey took a shot at Donald on Twitter:
He’s got to go!! https://t.co/dS6IX3Khvo
— Harvey Levin (@HarveyLevinTMZ)August 4, 2018
And in a write-up on the Trump-James beef, TMZ referred to Trump as “the most vile President ever to hold office.” It seemed Harvey had finally cracked, or at least skipped his iced coffee that day.
Before we assume hurt feelings, there’s the potential business twist: LeBron’s production company, SpringHill Entertainment, had previously signed a deal with Warner Bros., which owns TMZ. But I have other theories. A source from inside Levin’s lair told me that Harvey was bitter Trump couldn’t land him an interview with Tom Brady for Harvey’s Fox News series OBJECTified, as he’d promised, and which has yet to be renewed for a third season. There’s also the chance Harvey saw what happened to American Media Inc. honcho David Pecker and wanted to cut ties to avoid a similar fate of federal investigation. But things aren’t going well for TMZ, from what I’ve heard. It’s in an anxious state. Harvey’s been running into some personal trouble, but I’ll cover all of that later in this post.
So what does this starry future hold? Who knows. I’m only guessing, as I did years ago. Last time I noted there’d been buzz Kris is eyeing a congressional run. Her philosophy, according to friends, is that if Donald can do it, why can’t she? Later that year Kris appeared on OBJECTified and Harvey similarly egged her to run for office, citing her massive following as proof Jenner already has public sway.
With her recent decision to learn how to spell the word tort, Kim could be gearing herself up for a future run, too. Or perhaps she’s molding herself into an ideal first lady to President Kanye. When Kanye first teased an Oval Office bid back in 2015, Donald welcomed the idea, telling Rolling Stone, “He’s actually a different kind of person than people think. He’s a nice guy.”
Or there’s Ivanka, who’s floated the idea of a presidential bid of her own. There was chatter when the book Fire & Fury dropped. There was talk again with her profile in The Atlantic; Donald said in it that she’d be hard to beat. With that in mind, there’s the chance her private dinners with Kim have a joint-ticket edge to them. If that’s the case, the Situation Room could someday star Trump, Kardashian and Hilton, and we can be sure of one thing: Lindsay Lohan has a Grecian ambassadorship on lock.
Page Sixreports that Kim’s divorce is imminent. “Kim has the whole divorce planned out,” a source told the outlet last month, “but she’s waiting for him to get through his latest episode.” People said the same back in July, after one of Kanye’s Twitter outbursts: “There has been enough communication, both in the past few days and in the weeks prior, to establish that both sides feel the marriage is over.” If true, even without Kanye, Kim might have already found solid footing for a political afterlife. Ivanka and Jared continue to be in regular contact. It was rumored over the summer that the couple had paid a visit to the Wests’ home while in Wyoming for the 4th of July holiday. Meanwhile, many are speculating what’s next. Reports have surfaced of a rumored streaming deal for Kim and her family, at either Netflix or Amazon, while other stories allege the family is directing focus to their lucrative social media presence, perhaps bypassing my political theory altogether. Or not. We shall see. As a wise man once said, truth and time tells all.
I’ll leave you with the Kardashians, c. 2008, discussing their civic duty with Access Hollywood.
TMZ’s New Trouble
A couple of years ago, I made a post about Harvey Levin and TMZ’s lengthy past of protecting rich and powerful abusers. The trip down memory lane came on the heels of Bill Cosby’s conviction for sexual assault, thanks to the testimony of his accuser, Andrea Constand, who’d first made her claims to police back in early 2005, before TMZ was even in a glimmer in Levin’s eye and the pint-sized gossip tyrant was still wrapping up his previous web-and-TV venture Celebrity Justice (likewise produced by Warner Bros. and Telepictures) that would shutter later that year. In the Celebrity Justice days, Harvey pounced on Constand’s story, attempting to poke holes (“Why did the woman wait a full year after the alleged incident to go to police?” wrote Levin in one story) and going as far to leak her identity to the press, prompting a police investigation into how Celebrity Justice obtained the confidential police report to begin with. Harvey blamed the Constand name reveal on a member of his staff.
But, as I noted in my story then, Harvey’s relentless going to bat for anyone rich and bad spans far beyond Cosby, and has only intensified in the years since. Back in the '90s, when he was a mere TV reporter in L.A., he gladly threw down for Michael Jackson amid child molestation claims against the pop star, spinning a now-infamous tale of “brainwashing” done by the 13-year-old accuser’s dad that fans of the Gloved One tout as gospel to this day. And his Jackson victim attacks lasted well into the 2000s and 2010s as new accusers continued to come forward, with Harvey picking apart each of their stories on his evolving media platforms - first Celebrity Justice, then TMZ. He also gleefully mocked accusers of Rande Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s husband and dad of model Kaia, when Gerber was facing allegations of sexual harassment and assault from female employees.
But I bring up all of this not as a preface to another case of Harvey’s shaky celeb defenses, but this time because Harvey’s the target of some ugly allegations himself. In August, a former employee of TMZ and its sister site TooFab filed a discrimination and retaliation complaint against the website and Warner Bros. over instances of belittlement and abuse from Levin’s male employees, and resulting abuse suffered after going to HR about the behavior. (Read it here.) The employee, Bernadette Zilio, was at the website from 2015 to 2020, and described the work environment as “100% a bro fest” and a “[f]reaking frat house.” In papers filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Zilio claimed she and fellow female employees were “held to different and more stringent standards, excluded from business and social interactions in which only male employees participated… and denied advancement opportunities.” Finally, in February, after filing a complaint with the website’s human resources department, Zilio was axed, and subsequently threatened with reprisals if she went public with her claims. The suit came amid headline-making workplace misconduct claims by former employees for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, also produced by Warner Bros. and Telepictures.
In response to Zilio’s claim, a rep for TMZ and TooFab alleged Zilio was booted for “plagiarism” and “innaccurate reporting” (if that was the case, Harvey would’ve been canned a long time ago), telling Page Six: “This is a blatant attempt to use negative publicity and inaccurate claims to force TooFab and TMZ to pay a monetary settlement.” But the bad press didn’t stop there.
This past month, Buzzfeed News amplified talk of discord in Levin’s lair, speaking with twenty-three former employees and one current employee at TMZ who echoed similar sentiments of bullying and abuse under Harvey’s direction, with Levin often levying taunts of his own: According to former staffers, Harvey called people “retarded” and “morons” and made comments like “Talking to you is like talking to a room full of special ed kids.” He confused black employees with each other, and was prone to violent mood swings. Female employees were degraded, while male colleagues left porn playing on their computers. Several EEOC complaints were filed, including by an ex-staffer who claimed Levin outed him as being gay to colleagues, and another who complained of gender discrimination; repeated trips to HR were to no avail. And that’s just the tip of it. I won’t rehash the rest of the details, so give it a quick read.
A week after the Buzzfeed story, The Hollywood Reporter ran its own takedown, zeroing in on Telepictures in particular and its history of workplace terror spanning back decades. But since the original Zilio suit, TMZ and Harvey’s remained unresponsive. Any further acknowledgment of the mounting backlash against the website is playing out in secret, although I can only imagine the meltdowns.
Now, time for my inside scoop. What? You think I wouldn’t have some?
My own sources inside TMZ have been keeping me up to date with the goings of Harvey’s gossip dungeon for quite some time, and things aren’t pretty. According to one well-placed spy, Harv’s been on edge for over a year now. TV ratings are slacking. Last year, AT&T supposedly brought in “specialists” to remedy some issues, with speculation that the corporation is hoping to tidy things up at the website for a potential sale of TMZ to another conglomerate. And in recent months, Harvey’s tasked the website’s inconveniently-staffed photogs, finding themselves without much celeb street hassling to do amid L.A.’s on-and-off lockdowns, with combing through the website’s archives and removing any content that wouldn’t bode well with the recent surge in racial discourse. And given TMZ’s always delicate handling of all matters pertaining to race, I’m sure that’ll be an easy job. Perhaps we should have a little scavenger hunt: Find the most offensive TMZ post, and win one of my spare Star Magazines? Or is that not tempting enough? I’ll keep brainstorming!
And while the recent TMZ exposés haven’t exactly been the career-ending floodgates we’ve been waiting for (likely due to the fact anyone who works there has to sign both nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements, as told to me by several ex-TMZers I know), I think we’re off to a promising start. After all, all it takes is one poorly-made iced coffee and Harv’s bound to snap. Just be sure to watch this space when he does!
Last Year’s Gossip, Revisited
Anyone in the mood for a PCD2009 origin story?
Well, long before this little blogger arrived on the scene, Mama PCD was an equal, if not greater, gossip fiend, furiously thumbing through her '80s gossip rags and studying up on all of the starry knowledge that she’d someday pass off on yours truly. She was also a soap opera groupie that mixed and mingled with the stars, camping out at the Oak Room at the Plaza and riding around town with her actors of choice. And year after year, she’d sneak her way into the Daytime Emmy’s, taking photos she still proudly holds with the almighty Lucci, and even John Stamos in his General Hospital days, “back when his mom was his date.”
But my entire life she grumbled about one star she’d met, never going into much detail, but making her disdain clear. It was a fellow Long Island girl, Hauppaugue-raised, with a stint on a mostly-forgotten ABC soap and a reputation that was squeaky clean.
“She’s a complete phony and a fake,” my mom would rant to me. “I can’t stand her.”
The actress? Lori Loughlin.
(Lori and her co-star on ABC’s Edge of Night, Mark Arnold, whom my mom went out with a couple of times in the early '80s. Photo Credit: Mama PCD.)
To this day, my mom refuses to divulge the root of her venom for La Loughlin, but growing up on Long Island, one’s not left without a few run-ins. Only a week before shit hit the fan and our fallen C-Lister was cuffed and perma-booted from the lot in Canada wherever Hallmark films their shit, my mom was greeted at a car dealership by a signed picture of an employee with Lori.
“Isn’t she great?” the staffer gushed. “She came in and leased her mother a car!”
Since then my mom’s working conspiracy is that Grandma Loughlin turned her daughter into the feds for sticking her with a leased car, not even fully bought.
“She leased the car. Can you believe it? She has all that money and couldn’t fucking buy it for her?”
As for my own thoughts on Lori, I long was indifferent. I was never one for Full House - I preferred the Olsen Twins’ later work. But a few weeks before the scandal erupted I was flipping through the latest Us Weekly, wherein Lori was interviewed for my favorite section, the mag’s “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me,” and among her fast facts she revealed that she’s a Charlie’s Angels fanatic and once spotted Jaclyn Smith in the heavily-augmented flesh at Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom or someplace in Beverly Hills, completely geeking out and trying her best to resist from running up to my second-favorite angel (Sorry Kate Jackson, your freaky fling with Michael Jackson’s dermatologist was juicy but not enough to bump up your ranking). It endeared me to her.
Well, next thing I know cops are busting down Lori’s door in Bel-Air while she’s off filming some movie in Canada for the Hallmark channel, which, mind you, I didn’t even know was a real network. I thought it was just something that existed during the holidays. But you should’ve seen my face when I discovered that not only did it exist, but Lori was its biggest star, helming a long-running series in which she played a 19th-century prairie woman alongside Jack Wagner from Melrose Place (so that’s where he is post-Heather, apparently) that was pulling in triple the ratings of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and armed with a loyal fanbase of viewers that call themselves “Hearties.” It was a lot to process.
And as fast as the story broke, I was hooked, reading off each count from a PDF of the federal indictment to the unfortunate soul stuck beside me in my class as if it’d just been nailed to the wall by Martin Luther. For days I refreshed my feeds ad nauseam, anticipating each update, and being satiated beyond my wildest dreams as the story played out - it had everything: faded TV stars, bloodthirsty photographers, news choppers hovering over a Spanish-style mansion as a scorned starlet in a hoodie shields herself from the glare of the lights. It was the kind of scandal I thought couldn’t exist anymore. The kind of scandal that Hollywood once delivered on the weekly, but ceased as soon as smart phones and Twitter controversies seized the gossipsphere. But, for just those moments, I was proven wrong, and I rode it as far as it took me. And fancying myself a sort of gossip archivist, tasked with preserving celebrity sin for future generations, I saved and savored every magazine cover and daily front page, knowing someday I’d look back at this debacle with a fondness equal to the celebrity upsets of yore. Never did I think that day would come so soon, but tragic times call for even hastier nostalgia.
As anyone who’d had even the most passing of conversations with me during those months could tell you, I wouldn’t shut up about it. Nor would I stop analyzing the movements, or lack thereof, of its biggest star - no, not Lori. Her spawn. The fabulously clueless 19-year-old faux-coxswain whose blossoming career as a YouTuber was cut short by the headline-making ugliness. I watched in realtime as nasty comments flooded her videos (she promptly turned them off), which I then proceeded to watch in their entirety, and rewatch again once I was done like it was the Criterion Collection. For days I cycled through them all, and just as I’d warmed up to her mother, I’d become fond of her as well.
Now now, don’t roll your eyes just yet. You had to expect this from me. I love a good trainwreck. This blog is built on as much. And there was something captivating to me about this girl, in a way I don’t feel for any other YouTuber, aside from maybe ForeverKailyn. I’m sure the added Hollywood pedigree helps. But as I came to watch the way this saga unfolded, I felt Lori’s little Olivia Jade oddly reminiscent of another media target whom we all grew to love, first out of irony and then out of genuine appreciation - Alexis Neiers.
Both were scammers of varying degrees, the former a celebrity thief and the latter a nepo-baby squeezed into USC. Both seemed to float on a laughably superficial plane of bags and beauty that, in a way, is refreshing from all the posturing and pretension of celebrities nowadays. Both were exposed under the most ironic and spectacular of circumstances - Alexis on the first day of shooting her new reality show for TV, and Olivia while Spring Breaking on the yacht of a billionaire member of USC’s Board of Trustees. And both were the sort of ugly end-result to their respective decades of celebrity. Whereas Neiers was the defecatory answer to the early-to-mid-aughts Hilton era of hyper-materialism and unattainable glamour, Olivia is an effortless representation of the last decade’s social media star, the ostensibly “relatable” celebrity (the stars pretending to be just like you and me whilst shacked in a palace in Beverly Hills), and influencer culture. Neither girl seemed particularly nasty, merely out of touch, and while Neiers was scorned by the reality that mass-theft of wealth only works for the already wealthy, not for girls from the Valley, Olivia was doomed by a culture that actively encouraged her to brand herself from the time she came of age, her now-infamous attempt at recreating the basic college experience for her hordes of young viewers being on a larger scale the same smoke and mirrors we all put on in our day to day lives, with hours spent constructing the perfect selfie and curating social feeds to make ourselves seem a little more magical than we really need to be. Excuse the corny sentiment. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I couldn’t help but see the parallels.
In both cases, the girls were less the cause than the effect, though savaged as badly as if they’d been the former. Now, was Olivia’s accomplice role in her mother’s scheme bad? Of course, and I’m not denying that. The swift boot from school and public shaming was punishment enough, if you ask me. And Lori’s impending stint in the slammer is deserved as well. But I think there’s something to be analyzed of the world that led them into this, with many of its most notorious beneficiaries quick to criticize Loughlin without detecting even a smidge of irony: Donald Trump Jr., not quite aware that the reason he got into school wasn’t his grades, lambasted Lori on Twitter, making some quip about “Hollywood” in the process. (Aren’t most of his lifelong friends “Hollywood”?) And Trump buddy Kim Kardashian, a contemporary leader of the culture that would perhaps convince a teen that the way to self-realization was self-branding, proudly told an interviewer she would never do what Lori did: “If they couldn’t get into a school, I would never want to use privilege to try to force them into a situation that they wouldn’t thrive in anyway.” Did Kimmy forget about mama Kris’ aforementioned Trump Tower business school? Maybe you two should sit this one out.
Meanwhile, with a gossip target on her back, Lori trudged on. Shortly after the arrest, she was digitally scrubbed from her home channel of Hallmark, apparently being a greater threat to society than half the actors in Tinseltown who smack their wives, and surfaced for the first contrite pap stroll exiting a church service in Beverly Hills:
This wasn’t just any house of worship, however - it was the Church of the Good Shepherd (“Our Lady of the Cadillacs,” as Dominick Dunne would say), the same trendy parish where Paris bowed her head and clasped her hands after being sentenced to 45 days in the slammer for her suspended license snafu (Lori was one of Paris’ defenders at the time, funnily enough), and where Saint Mischa solemnly posed for photogs after her Christmas 2007 DUI bust.
a hollywood tradition! pic.twitter.com/QSAqcJdEJR
— popculturediedin2009 (@pcd2009)April 16, 2019
It seemed Lori knew all the old tricks, even retaining the services of a former crisis publicist for another Long Island bad girl, L. Lohan, per Page Six. (Have Lori and Lindsay had a powwow yet? If not, please!) But no amount of spin could salvage her trashed image.
Next came the Boston court hearing (she arrived by private jet), repeated paparazzi outings sporting a visor and yoga mat, an unceremonious resignation from her Bel-Air country club (the horror!), and most recently the off-loading of her $19 million Bel-Air digs, cruelly overlooking her former club, in favor of a more affordable $9 million Hidden Hills hideaway.
From Bel-Air to the Valley? This is getting hard to watch!
She found herself without much starry support (aside from one of Paris’ aunts), with her most notable defenders, including Full House co-stars Stamos and Candace Cameron, appearing to bypass an outright declaration of solidarity and opting for measly comments calling for kindness. Former actress-turned-YouTuber-with-bad-bangs Shenae Grimes (haven’t heard that name in a while, have you?) hasn’t said a virtual peep for her CW mama; Summerland star Zac Efron’s remained similarly silent. There hasn’t even been a message of hope from her Back to the Beach guest star O.J. Simpson.
Come on, Juice, you’ve weathered worse image woes - give her a hand!
Meanwhile, Lori’s scam-worthy spawn have been tight-lipped, even as their mom counts her days until jail. Not so much as a public statement aside from a loving Mother’s Day Insta message and an ill-advised snap flipping off the press:
Not the wisest move, but one lives and learns. And as for Olivia’s vlogging career, she’s remained radio silent on her medium of choice as well, aside from a lone comeback video and a follow-up never to come. Has she abandoned her loyal fans (a.k.a. me)? Come back to us, mini-O.J.!
Shortly after the scandal, Olivia moved out of home, opting for a solo pad with her on-and-off boyfriend, Jackson, an aspiring singer who was a tiny groomsman at Spencer and Heidi’s wedding on The Hills. (Sounds like a keeper, Liv!) There were the frequent reports of familial strain, with every tabloid tattling La Femme O.J. was pissed that her mom quashed her lucrative YouTube career for a stint in college she didn’t ask for, as well-evidenced by her wonderfully oblivious videos. (“Do you remember your major in college?” “… No”). Her deal with Sephora was pulled amid the backlash, and her college-tied endorsement package with Amazon was snatched away and handed to fellow celebuspawn and PCD2009 follower Ava Phillippe. She made the odd appearance at parties and clubs in Hollywood, displaying a consistently-questionable sense of style, and appeared unaffected by the ongoing turmoil that’d swept up her family. Us reported at the time Olivia and sister Bella, whose attempt at TV acting makes Bristol Palin on Secret Life of the American Teenager look like Glenda Jackson, were booted from their sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and rumblings persisted of a potential showdown in court, with Olivia possibly having to testify against her mother. “[The girls] want to help their parents, but absolutely can’t lie,” alleged a source to OK! Magazine.
If I were her, I would’ve milked the drama for all it was worth. She had a rare gift placed in her lap. Overnight, she was a household name, achieving more notice in the span of 24 hours than any of the other Hollywood nepo-babies have with their excruciating attempts at careers in showbiz - acting, modeling or the like. Her face was on every news program. Her name appeared on the front page of the tabloids, no Loughlin surname needed. She snagged a level of publicity you can’t buy, the same kind of mainstream media infamy that we haven’t seen for an up-and-comer since the Hollywood bad girls I built this blog on. If she handed me the reigns, I would’ve booked her on reality TV - major network, no E! or Bravo shit. Think a hybrid of The Simple Life and Tommy Lee Goes to College: Drop her off at a school in the middle of nowhere and have cameras follow her as she gets her degree. It would’ve been a ratings bonanza. But, alas, she opted to count her remaining blessings and hide until the bad feelings blew over. And judging by her continued silence, she still has some time to go. Though she’s apparently not averse to the occasional PR stunt. Last fall, Papa PCD2009 was enjoying a brief stay in L.A. with one of my sisters whereupon my recommendation he stopped for dinner at the Melrose hotspot Craig’s (I love the table bread) and, straight from the mouth of the man who taught 12-year-old me everything I ever needed to know about Pam and Tommy Lee, he told me that he spotted O.Jade dining with a blonde pal who told the paparazzi outside “to take a lot of pictures.” Thatta girl!
Lori’s due to start her sentence by November 19th. A judge approved her request to serve the time at a low-security facility outside San Bernardino, igniting social media rage. Last year Felicity Huffman served a little less than two weeks at FCI Dublin, where Heidi Fleiss and Patty Hearst served their time. Though Lori’s pokey alumni are a little less glam; Dance Moms doyenne Abby Lee Miller was the prison’s last high-profile guest. Us Weeklyreports she’s fearful of catching COVID behind bars. A close friend’s aunt is part of Lori and hubby Mossimo’s inner-circle, and recently dined with the scorned couple in the Pacific Palisades. Per the dishy relative, Lori and Moss are scared shitless, as to be expected under such circumstances, but I’ll pull for more gossip as the jail-hammer nears closer. In the meantime, Usalso claims Olivia and Bella are somewhat pleased with the prison outcome, having dreaded the possibility of a trial. The girls threw their parents a “going away” party in August, with a cake and friends, according to one magazine.
If Lori’s smart, she’ll turn herself in early, à la Paris, to avoid the probable press mob awaiting her if she waits until the deadline. Though that wouldn’t be fun for us now, would it? Following this story’s made me wax nostalgic for the days when a jail-bound star would be given the works - a daily countdown-to-lockdown on E! News, a three-part TV special on their last days of freedom, paparazzi camped outside the slammer for that emotional final snap before booking, and the bated breath as you refreshed your screen for the first glimpse of the mugshot (will we even get one?). Unfortunately, this time around it looks like it’s just you and me.
But before I wrap up, there’s one supporting character from this saga even more elusive than the rest, and whose input I eagerly crave: Olivia’s former USC roommate, sportscaster Joe Buck’s daughter Trudy, whose Tumblr I found around the time of the scandal (on her blog she includes a quote from Asher Roth, of “I Love College” fame, among her 'words to live by,’ between musings from Heath Ledger’s dad and F. Scott Fitzgerald). What does Trudy know? What has Trudy seen? When will we get the tell-all (or at least a YouTube confessional) recounting the final moments she spent with her dearly departed roomie before the scandal came crushing down and uprooted her first-year living arrangements. I need to know!
I’ll leave you with a video of mini-O.J. getting down to Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl” a couple of Christmases ago, months shy of her downfall.
If we’re following the Bling Ring template, doesn’t this fit right in with Nick Prugo’s awkward “Drop It Low”? Who wants to write the big screen script with me?
Love Lives
Sienna Millersplit from reported fiancé Lucas Zwirner, the son of an art gallerist. They were first linked together in December 2018. They attended Jennifer Lawrence’s wedding, to another gallerist, last October, and in February Us Weekly reported they were engaged. Sienna “isn’t torn up about the breakup and has been spending time with her sister,” the magazine reports. This was her third engagement, following Jude Law and Tom Sturridge. I rewatched all of Sienna’s movies at the start of quarantine (my mom: “She acts? I thought she just fucked Jude Law”) and Alfie was even more of an abomination than I remembered. I love Interview. Her most recent film, American Woman, is pretty good, too - very Lifetime, but with a budget. No comment on Factory Girl.
Demi Lovato was engaged to someone else’s John Hinckley, Max Ehrich, a former actor on The Young and the Restless. They started dating at the beginning of quarantine, and were engaged by June. Then fans uncovered a history of obsessive tweets from Ehrich about Demi’s former friend and fellow Disney alum Selena Gomez. He reportedly got a tattoo on his wrist to mimic one of Gomez’s. In one post from 2010, authenticity unknown, Ehrich wrote “selena gomez and demi are cute togueter [sic] but boy if you think demi is prettier… you’re WRONG!” Demi’s stubborn, with an 'us against the world’ mentality, so I fully expected her to ride this out, get married, and have a kid - not out of love but spite. Thankfully she had some common sense. Ehrich found out Demi dumped him through “through a tabloid,” he wrote on Instagram, then he made another post begging Demi to contact him. A meltdown followed. Now he’s found God. “One chapter finally closed this a. And now I turned the page. Focused on wellness, love, God, my family, and my art. Good vibes only :)” he posted. Demi’s already released a post-breakup ballad.
#NewCouples: Matt Dillonsteps out with an Italian actress, Pamela Andersonrebounds with her bodyguard, Halle Berry and her man wear matching masks, new bride Lily Allen is moving to New York, and Brad Pitt’s 27-year-old model doesn’t hateAngelina Jolie.
#BabyWatch: Leighton Meester and Adam Brodywelcome a boy, Kelis and Meghan McCain have girls (is Tila Tequila the godmom?), and Bindi Irwin, Ashley Tisdale and Jessica Szohr are all expecting (not with each other).
And Woody and Soon-Yi wear masks:
His new movie looks bad.
What Else…
As some of you might remember from when I’d done these sort of posts in the past, I usually reserve the end for “Random Tidbits” - links to other celeb stories. Though, for some unknown reason, Tumblr’s glitchy system won’t let me add that extra bit of HTML to the post, or the entire thing will vanish from my blog. (Trust me, I tried!) It makes no sense, but alas, neither does most things about this website. I also had to trim an entire section of the post I’d written on Katie Holmes’ messy new relationship, with some inside #dirt from sources well-acquainted with her new beau, so you’ll just have to wait until next weekend for that bit of scoop.
If you have any stories you’d like to see me cover in the coming weeks, pop a message on here or DM me through Twitter (@pcd2009) or Instagram (@popculturediedin2009). It feels good to stretch my gossip fingers again!
Have a good week!