A few days ago, I finally watched It Ends With Us, and it is quite easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life. A nonsensical plot, one-dimensional characters, actors who are incapable of acting their way out of a paper bag – it was like a Lifetime movie with a bigger budget. The worst part was the ending, in which a victim of domestic violence uses logic to try to convince her abuser to leave her and their daughter alone and … it works?? Yeah, that would totally happen in real life. All I can say is that this abhorrent film does not deserve the months of drama swirling around it. Everyone involved in IEWU should be deeply ashamed and they all should have made a pact to never speak of it again. Instead, we got months of drama over the summer, and now Blake Lively is suing Justin Baldoni, who directed IEWU and starred as Ryle Kincaid. Blake is suing Baldoni for sexual harassment and waging a PR campaign against her during and after the film’s promotion.

Blake Lively is suing her It Ends with Us costar Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment. Months after rumors of behind-the-scenes discord on the set of the adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, the actress, 37, said in the lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, that Baldoni’s alleged behavior caused her “severe emotional distress.” (Baldoni, 40, also served as It Ends with Us’ director.)

Per the outlet, the lawsuit states there was a meeting held to address Lively’s claims and her demands for working on the film. It was attended by various figures, including Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds.

Some of the demands that were addressed, according to the lawsuit cited by TMZ, included “no more showing nude videos or images of women to Blake, no more mention of Baldoni’s alleged previous ‘pornography addiction,’ no more discussions about sexual conquests in front of Blake and others, no further mentions of cast and crew’s genitalia, no more inquiries about Blake’s weight, and no further mention of Blake’s dead father.”

“No more adding of sex scenes, oral sex or on camera climaxing by BL outside the scope of the script BL approved when signing onto the project,” were other demands mentioned in the lawsuit, according to TMZ.

According to TMZ, the lawsuit states that Sony Pictures, who distributed the film, approved of Lively’s requests. However, Lively claims in the lawsuit that Baldoni then took part in a “social manipulation” campaign to “destroy” her reputation soon after.

Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s lawyer, tells PEOPLE in a statement that Lively’s lawsuit was to “fix her negative reputation.” He also said that her allegations are “false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt.”

Freedman added that Lively caused problems on set of the film, which is currently streaming, “threatening to not showing up to set, threatening to not promote the film, ultimately leading to its demise during release.” Representatives for Lively, Baldoni and Sony did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

[From People]

Some of Lively’s accusations against Baldoni were previewed months ago, when well-informed sources insisted that everyone on set hated Baldoni (for unspecified reasons) and that Blake was hurt that Baldoni asked someone how much Blake weighed (Baldoni apparently has a bad back). We were also told that Blake thought Baldoni “lingered too long” during a kissing scene. I’ll admit, back in August and September, it felt like Blake and Ryan Reynolds were the ones targeting Baldoni. But if Baldoni was doing even some of the sh-t she’s now accusing him of, he absolutely created a toxic work environment. His on-set behavior was absolutely inappropriate, if any of this is true. It also feels like this might answer the questions I had about why Sony was going above and beyond to make Blake happy and give her everything she wanted, including allowing her to bring in her own editor to create a “Lively Cut” of the film.

As for the social manipulation part of Blake’s legal action… more information came out in the NY Times, which I will cover separately. All I’ll say in this post is that it looks like Blake has a really good case against Baldoni and his production company.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.

Back in August and September, the drama of It Ends With Us’s promotional tour was dominating blogs and entertainment sites. Blake Lively was being widely criticized for promoting a film about domestic violence while barely referencing the topic, and while simultaneously promoting her booze line. People were also circulating video clips of Blake’s older interviews in which she came across as rude and unpleasant. It was a real thing, where social media people (especially TikTokers) really turned their ire on Blake. We knew at the time that Justin Baldoni hired a crisis management team – the same team used by Johnny Depp, Drake and Brad Pitt – and that he was “fighting back” against what seemed like Blake’s attempts to turn public perception against him. Well, Blake is now suing Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment and “social manipulation.” From what I can see, Blake has good documentation and evidence of Baldoni’s harassment and Baldoni’s toxicity. But it turns out that she also has extensive documentation on the social manipulation part of her claims too – she subpoenaed records from Baldoni’s production company and his crisis management team and it’s BAD. Magically, the NY Times had a big exclusive about it.

Last summer, as the release of “It Ends With Us” approached, Justin Baldoni, the director and a star of the film, and Jamey Heath, the lead producer, hired a crisis public relations expert. During shooting, Blake Lively, the co-star, had complained that the men had repeatedly violated physical boundaries and made sexual and other inappropriate comments to her. Their studio, Wayfarer, agreed to provide a full-time intimacy coordinator, bring in an outside producer and put other safeguards on set. In a side letter to Ms. Lively’s contract, signed by Mr. Heath, the studio also agreed not to retaliate against the actress.

But by August, the two men, who had positioned themselves as feminist allies in the #MeToo era, expressed fears that her allegations would become public and taint them, according to a legal complaint that she filed Friday. It claims that their P.R. effort had an explicit goal: to harm Ms. Lively’s reputation instead. Her filing includes excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena. These and other documents were reviewed by The New York Times.

“He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Ms. Nathan wrote.

In the following weeks, Ms. Nathan, whose clients have included Johnny Depp and the rappers Drake and Travis Scott, went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Ms. Lively, the text messages show. Jed Wallace, a self-described “hired gun,” led a digital strategy that included boosting social media posts that could help their cause.

An attorney for Wayfarer said in a statement to The Times that the studio, its executives and public relations representatives “did nothing proactive nor retaliated” against Ms. Lively, and accused the actress of “another desperate attempt to ‘fix’ her negative reputation.”

Mr. Freedman did not address her allegations about misconduct during the filming by Mr. Baldoni and Mr. Heath. He alleged that Ms. Lively planted “negative and completely fabricated and false stories with media” about Mr. Baldoni, which he said “was another reason why Wayfarer Studios made the decision to hire a crisis professional.”

The effort to tarnish Ms. Lively appears to have paid off. Within days of the film’s release, the negative media coverage and commentary became an unusually high percentage of her online presence, according to a forensic review she sought from a brand marketing consultant. Ms. Lively — who is married to the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds of “Deadpool” fame, and is close with Taylor Swift — experienced the biggest reputational hit of her career. She was branded tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully. Sales of her new hair-care line plummeted.

Mr. Baldoni, by contrast, emerged largely unscathed. This month, he was honored at a star-studded event celebrating men who “elevate women, combat gender-based violence and promote gender equality worldwide.” On Saturday, however, after this article was published, the talent agency William Morris Endeavor stopped representing Mr. Baldoni, said Ari Emanuel, chief executive of Endeavor, the agency’s parent company.

In a statement, Ms. Lively said, “I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted.” She also denied that she or any of her representatives planted or spread negative information about Mr. Baldoni or Wayfarer.

[From The NY Times]

It’s true that WME has now dropped Baldoni, they did so hours after Blake filed her complaint on Friday with the California Civil Rights Department. WME also represents Blake. According to Deadline, WME’s leadership decided to dump Baldoni on Saturday morning due in part to Blake’s complaint. As I said, it looks like Blake has ample evidence of what Baldoni’s crisis management team did to her, and how they boosted certain negative stories about her. To be fair… um, there was a lot of material for Baldoni’s crisis management team to work with and I genuinely believe that some (but not all) of the backlash against Blake was organic. Anyway, I’m glad Blake is fighting back against Baldoni, his production company and those crisis managers. It feels like this could have larger repercussions for a lot of other toxic men who use crisis managers to attack women.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.

Princess Michael of Kent has been seen out and about twice this month. First, she made an appearance at the Princess of Wales’s Christmas carol event at Westminster Abbey. Then she appeared, along with her husband Prince Michael of Kent, at the pre-Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, hosted by King Charles. It was apparently at the palace lunch where Princess Michael revealed that both of her wrists are in splints after a fall inside her Kensington Palace apartment.

Princess Michael of Kent is on the mend after breaking both of her wrists in a fall down the stairs of her home at Kensington Palace.

Princess Michael, 79, hurt herself after falling down the stairs of the royal residence in London, where she lives with her husband, Prince Michael of Kent. The news was reported by the Daily Mail on Dec. 19, and the outlet said that she attended King Charles’ pre-Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace that day with both of her wrists in splints.

“So many things that you rely on being able to do, like cleaning your teeth, are impossible,” Princess Michael said, according to the outlet. “I can type with one finger on a mobile, but I can’t use a laptop.”

“I am told that, after an accident like this, if you do one wrong movement on top of the unhealed bones, you are back where you started,” she said.

The Daily Mail reported that the royal had her arms full with overcoats when the accident happened, and broke multiple small bones when she outstretched her hands to break the fall.

Princess Michael was born Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnit, and goes by the style and title of her husband, who is a first cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth. She seemed to be in good spirits as she continues to heal, and smiled while driving the King’s traditional lunch before Christmas with her husband.

[From People]

One of my big fears is not something happening to my hands or wrists, but rather, something happening to one of my legs. I don’t know what it is, but I have recurring nightmares of a broken leg or broken kneecap. But this is awful, especially since it’s both wrists/hands. I wouldn’t be able to function in any way. Think about how much you move your hands around in any given day. I doubt she can drive or write or even answer the phone. Granted, Princess Michael is a pretty awful person, and this Christmas lunch was the seven-year anniversary of Princess Michael rolling up to the 2017 Christmas lunch with her blackamoor brooch.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, WENN.

I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s GNX since he dropped it just before Thanksgiving. It’s a great album, maybe the best album of the year. Kendrick really dominated the year, handily winning his hip-hop battle with Drake, creating one of the biggest hits of the year (“Not Like Us”) and basically doing a victory lap with GNX. Kendrick’s many victories are made sweeter by the fact that Drake has completely lost the plot. Drake could have lost with some kind of dignity, but instead he lied about Kendrick, lied about Kendrick’s partner, lied about Kendrick’s friends, and then Drake refused to just go away for a year and come back with some good music. Just before Thanksgiving, Drake filed legal actions against UMG and Spotify over the rap battle. As in, Drake claims that Universal Music Group (his own label) orchestrated Kendrick’s win and that Spotify helped manipulate Kendrick’s win as well. As in, Spotify and UMG somehow wanted Kendrick to win and take down Drake, and Spotify and UMG are guilty of “allowing” Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” to become one of the biggest hits of the year. Well, it’s taken weeks, but Spotify has finally responded:

Spotify is firing back at Drake’s accusations that the streamer helped Universal Music Group artificially boost Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” calling the allegations “false” and blasting the rapper’s legal action as a “subversion of the normal judicial process.”

The new filing is the first response to a petition filed last month in which Drake accused UMG and Spotify of an illegal “scheme” involving bots, payola and other methods to pump up Lamar’s song — a track that savagely attacked Drake amid an ongoing feud between the two stars. In a motion filed Friday in Manhattan court, the streaming giant says it has found zero evidence to support the claims of a bot attack, and flatly denies that it struck any deal with UMG to support Lamar’s song.

“The predicate of Petitioner’s entire request for discovery from Spotify is false,” the company’s lawyers write. “Spotify and UMG have never had any such arrangement.”

Beyond denying the allegations, the filing repeatedly criticizes Drake for going to court in the first place — calling his claims of a conspiracy “far-fetched” and “speculative,” and questioning why Spotify (a “stranger” to the “long-running fued” between Drake, Kendrick and UMG) is even involved. Spotify also criticized Drake for the way in which he brought his claims to court — not as a full-fledged lawsuit, but as an unusual “pre-action” petition aimed at demanding information. The company accused Drake of using that “extraordinary” procedure because his allegations are too flimsy to pass muster in an actual lawsuit and would have been quickly dismissed.

“What petitioner is seeking to do here … is to bypass the normal pleading requirements … and obtain by way of pre-action discovery that which it would only be entitled to seek were it to survive a motion to dismiss,” Spotify’s lawyers write. “This subversion of the normal judicial process should be rejected.”

In a statement to Billboard later on Friday, Drake’s legal team (from the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher) said: “It is not surprising that Spotify is trying to distance themselves from UMG’s allegedly manipulative practices to artificially inflate streaming numbers on behalf of one of its other artists. If Spotify and UMG have nothing to hide then they should be perfectly fine complying with this basic discovery request.”

[From Billboard]

As Kendrick said, “You crash out, then you better break the backboard.” As in, you better smash everything to smithereens when you’re crashing out. That’s not what Drake is doing though. I mean, yes, he’s crashing out. But this is just sad. He’s created this highly specific delusion that UMG and Spotify were in cahoots to make one of Kdot’s songs a huge hit, and for what? I don’t understand what Drake thinks the motive would be. It also looks like the biggest delusional cope from Drake, who fundamentally cannot understand why “Not Like Us” struck such a chord (A Minoooooor). As soon as Kendrick dropped the song on a Saturday, it was a MASSIVE hit, a phenomenon which organically became the song of the summer because every single person was singing it.

Photos courtesy of Drake’s Instagram.

The trailer for James Gunn’s Superman is here. It actually looks pretty good, although I have superhero fatigue. [Hollywood Life]
I don’t want to think about Justin Timberlake or his bulge. [Socialite Life]
RHOSLC’s “receipts, proof, timeline, screenshots” moment was the top viral incident for this year in reality television. . [LaineyGossip]
Lol at this review of Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. [Pajiba]
What’s your favorite holiday treat? [Go Fug Yourself]
First look at M3gan 2.0.[OMG Blog]
Lea Michele & Jonathan Groff are joined at the hip! [Just Jared]
Zoe Saldana in saffron Saint Laurent. [RCFA]
A teaser for Elsbeth’s new episode. [Seriously OMG]
Jill Duggar needs to shut her mouth. [Starcasm]
Funny tweets about pets. [Buzzfeed]

First poster for James Gunn’s ‘SUPERMAN’

In theaters on July 11. pic.twitter.com/E2ntHW3eS3

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) December 16, 2024

Brian Cox is promoting his voice work in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim right now, which is why he agreed to chat with the Hollywood Reporter. Cox’s interviews are legendary for their grumpiness and tea-spilling. Cox has been around for long and worked with so many people, and he’s fine with talking sh-t about most of them. He has a well-documented dislike of Method acting, and he still seems pretty jazzed that Succession changed his career so profoundly when he was in his 70s. Some highlights from THR:

The moment he knew he was famous: “It was 2019, and I was playing LBJ [in Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society] at Lincoln Center. One of the first nights I came out of the theater, this couple who couldn’t have been older than 17 and had their devices with them said, “Could you tell us to f–k off?” And then subsequently, there were more people coming throughout the week, saying, “Tell us to f–k off.” And I realized, “Oh, I’m well known now.” I realized at my late age just how much I thrived on my anonymity. I can’t do public transport anymore. I can’t do things which I did in the past. So it’s a little tough in that sense.

His most valuable lesson about show business: “Treat it with all the suspicion it deserves.”

Whether Kevin Spacey should be allowed to work again: “I just think Kevin had certain things which he couldn’t or didn’t admit to, and I think it was a strain on him in many ways. And for me, that was Kevin’s only difficulty. But he’s a very fine actor, and I like Kevin a lot. He’s very funny. I met with him recently. I think he’s been through it. He’s had the kicking that some people think he deserved. He’s ready to get back in the saddle again, and people are trying to stop him from doing that. And I really do go back to, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Maybe he got too out of hand, but I don’t think he should be punished endlessly for it. There should be a case of forgive and forget. Let’s move on. I think he should be given the opportunity to come back to work.

Working with Daniel Day-Lewis: “Dan’s a very nice man, but his method of preparation is entirely different from mine. I don’t believe in getting that absorbed in a character because I believe it’s an ensemble art form, not an art form for one person. It was difficult for Emily Watson, because Dan would speak in the Northern Irish accent offscreen. She didn’t know if she had to respond in a Northern Irish accent offscreen. She said, “So how do I talk?” And I said, “Just be normal. This is Dan’s thing. Just be who you are.” That’s his method. It’s sometimes a little off-putting, but it’s different horses for different courses.

He played Winston Churchill in a film in 2017, the same year Gary Oldman played a fatsuited Churchill & won the Oscar: “Our film came out in the summer, and it was a relatively independent film, so you haven’t got the power of the studios behind it. The Oscars are absolute nonsense because everything that’s judged in the Oscars, it’s not a year’s work. It’s just the work that comes out between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think it makes those awards a fallacy quite honestly because there’s a lot of other good work that goes on outside of what they call Oscar season. So my film never even got a look, and I still think my performance is a better performance.”

Working with Jeremy Strong after dissing his Method: “We just got on with our job. We get on with what we’re doing. We’re not going to buy into that thing with Jeremy. Jeremy was Daniel Day-Lewis’ assistant. So that is where you can see a massive influence on how Jeremy prepares for his work. But to act with Jeremy is extraordinary. He’s a great actor. I just think the way he works is not the way I work, in the way that [how] Dan Day-Lewis works is not the way I work. Again, it’s horses for courses.

Which one of his Succession children he would like to be saddled with for the holidays: “It would have to be Kieran Culkin [Roman Roy]. That boy has been through so much with his family situation. And he’s a consummate actor. He really is. And he showed it. He was so nervous when we started the show. I have just watched him grow over the time, and I have such enormous respect for him. He’s a very fine actor, he’s funny and he’s very sweet. And Sarah Snook [Siobhan “Shiv” Roy] would be a close second.

[From THR]

I hate the way people talk around what Kevin Spacey actually did and what he was accused of. This wasn’t “cancel culture run amok,” it wasn’t like Spacey made one mistake years and years ago. That man was preying on very young men and BOYS for decades across several countries. He was a serial sexual predator who hurt many people, including actor Anthony Rapp when Rapp was just 14 years old. I hate everything about Spacey’s attempted comeback and all of these high-profile celebrities trying to make it happen.

As for what Cox says about the Oscars and Oldman’s win… lol. I hated that Gary Oldman won the Oscar for THAT performance (which was awful) and Cox absolutely has a point about which films are considered for awards (films that are released in November and December).

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

I’m pleasantly surprised to see that there’s some kind of reaction to Prince William and Kate’s BS yesterday. They made a point of skipping the Windsors’ pre-Christmas lunch in London, they briefed about their absence to the press, and then they dropped their Christmas card at the same time King Charles was hosting the family lunch. While few people are coming out and saying “something profoundly weird is happening with this family,” there are hints of that in the reporting, they just have to mask it in faux-concern. “Poor William, he can’t sit through a family lunch, he’s had such a tough year!” That kind of thing. Watch how the Telegraph managed to criticize William in a backhanded way.

There was the King and Queen, princes and princesses, a sprinkling of dukes and duchesses, and lords and ladies galore. As the Royal family gathered for their annual Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, there was one thing missing. Not the Duke of York – who had bowed out at the last minute amid the “Chinese spy” scandal, to the relief of some – but the Wales family, who chose instead to spend the day at their home in Norfolk, kicking off their festive break in the countryside early.

The decision says everything about the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the shape of the modern monarchy – the children come first. After a tough year – “brutal”, as the Prince described it – they have swapped the tick-box traditions of the royal calendar for time as a five at home. Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis have broken up from school, they have nothing official on their plates until the Christmas Day walk to Sandringham and, it appears, decided – why not?

The decision to skip the Buckingham Palace lunch was made quite some time ago, a source said, with the King told in advance. The family “look forward” to seeing the Windsor clan in Sandringham over Christmas instead.

The decision speaks volumes on two fronts. First, the Princess of Wales’ renewed priorities after her major surgery and chemotherapy this year. Being out in nature, cuddling her children, making memories. The lure of dressing up to brave the cameras and sit for formal lunch with her in-laws is not so strong in the wake of all the Princess has been through.

Second, sadly, is the steady march of time. If William had once expected to have decades ahead of him as the Prince of Wales, his father’s cancer, and the ongoing treatment to keep it at bay, will have been an awakening the likes of which no child wants to experience.

With a lifetime of duty ahead, he is working out for himself how and where to spread his energy. There are plenty of signs that he is committed to the role of heir to the throne, abandoning domestic plans in order to fly to Paris two weekends ago for the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral and a meeting with Donald Trump, the US president-elect. But when and where he has a choice, his priority is clear.

Just as the school run tends to come first on week days, so a peaceful childhood for his sons and daughter will always prevail where possible.

A palace lunch, on the face of it, is a small concession to make. It is not what his father or grandmother would have chosen, but there is no one more aware of that than William. A source said “it’s been an incredibly tough year”, whle the prince himself said: “It’s been dreadful. It’s probably been the hardest year in my life.” Last week, he told a member of the public he had “a lot of things going on”.

[From The Telegraph]

“…Will have been an awakening the likes of which no child wants to experience” – William turned 42 years old this year. He’s not a child. “With a lifetime of duty ahead, he is working out for himself how and where to spread his energy.” Again, he’s 42. He’s had half his life to work out his priorities, and he’s made these choices. “A palace lunch, on the face of it, is a small concession to make. It is not what his father or grandmother would have chosen…” Exactly. If William is regularly in the habit of throwing tantrums about “going to a family lunch,” imagine how awful he is whenever they try to get him to do something important or job-related.

I also think it’s interesting that William and Kate have likely gotten away with not attending the lunch in 2022 and 2023. No one saw them at those Windsor Castle lunches, there was no reporting of their presence, and they got away with just keeping silent about all of it. But once Charles shifted the lunch back to Buckingham Palace, their absence couldn’t be hidden, which is why they made a point of briefing their non-attendance and releasing their Christmas card.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

Buckingham Palace has managed to thread a particularly delicate needle over the course of 2024. They announced King Charles’s cancer in February, just after his hospitalization for a prostate procedure. They never confirmed what kind of cancer he has, although it’s widely rumored to be bladder cancer. They’ve never hidden the fact that Charles has to be in London mid-week, every week, for his cancer treatment, but they have never made it sound like anything more than a necessary addition to his already-busy schedule. They even sent him to France, Australia and Samoa this year and he managed to get through all of it. I even think his color has improved in recent weeks, despite the near-constant briefings from Kensington Palace that Charles is at death’s door. All in all, BP has managed this year pretty well, from what I can see. And they’ll have to do the same next year, because Charles’s cancer treatments will still be ongoing in 2025.

King Charles will continue to need cancer treatment in 2025, it was revealed today. A Buckingham Palace source has said the 76-year-old’s health is still being ‘managed’ but is ‘moving in a positive direction’.

His Majesty intends to return to a full programme of public duties next year. This will include ‘exciting’ UK and international visits in the first half of 2025, the insider said.

‘His treatment has been moving in a positive direction, as a managed condition the treatment cycle will continue into the new year’, the Palace source said.

Charles hosted members of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace for a pre-Christmas lunch yesterday. Today the King and Queen will hold their last public event of the year as they attend a reception at Waltham Forest Town Hall in East London. Royal aides said this would ‘celebrate the strong sense of community cohesion in the borough, highlighted by peaceful counter-protests in August 2024 following disorder in other parts of the UK’.

Charles has increased his engagements recently, including a visit to Apple’s London HQ and a meeting with CEO Tim Cook.

‘You could almost forget at the start of the year this was a man that faced the shock of being diagnosed with cancer’, a source said to Sky News.

[From The Daily Mail]

Next year, the big tell on Charles’s health will be the travel plans. He’s managed his schedule in the second half of this year, to the point where he’s being seen publicly on a weekly basis and he’s managing his “duties.” But if his weekly treatments continue well into 2025, I doubt that he and Camilla will actually travel at all. Camilla got knocked on her ass during and after the Australian trip and she clearly does not want to travel anymore. Charles clearly wants to travel more, but his doctors and courtiers might tell him that he simply can’t do it anymore. I also wonder if there will be pressure, as the one-year-mark on his cancer diagnosis comes up, to actually speak about what kind of cancer he has and what his treatments entail.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

I wondered if royal reporters and commentators would bother to discuss yesterday’s events in detail. As we covered, Prince William and Kate did not attend the Windsors’ annual pre-Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace on Thursday, and what’s worse is that their office openly briefed the media about their absence. The cherry on top was that William and Kate released their long-awaited Christmas card, timed specifically to coincide with the lunch. It absolutely felt like a weird snub to King Charles and Camilla. It also felt like… William and Kate do not care one bit about the royal family or family traditions. Well, some unnamed royal sources had a lot to say to the Daily Beast’s Royalist:

Prince William and Kate Middleton risked appearing to snub King Charles and Britain’s minor royals Thursday as they skipped the monarch’s traditional pre-Christmas lunch with the extended royal family at Buckingham Palace.

One source, a former courtier, told The Daily Beast: “It is another example of the couple’s growing confidence when it comes to challenging some long-established traditions which they are widely believed to consider tiresome. Charles would have liked them to be there, and the fact that he was either unwilling or unable to insist on it shows his inability to maintain family discipline. You can’t imagine anyone missing it when Prince Philip was around.”

The couple’s spokesperson declined to comment, though a friend of the couple pushed back against the courtier’s characterization of events, saying: “It’s categorically not a snub. They have had a full-on year and I don’t think anyone can expect Catherine to be effectively hosting lunch for hundreds of people.”

An official source said the prince and princess had been through “an incredibly tough year” and that the family simply “wanted to start Christmas in Norfolk earlier than usual.”

Kate was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. She has since said she is “cancer-free.”

[From The Daily Beast]

What? “I don’t think anyone can expect Catherine to be effectively hosting lunch for hundreds of people.” No one asked Kate to do that? There was simply an expectation that the Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales take their taxpayer-funded personal-use helicopter and fly to London to enjoy a lunch with their extended family. No one asked William or Kate to play host or organize the lunch? What are they talking about? As for this: “the fact that he was either unwilling or unable to insist on it shows his inability to maintain family discipline” – I mean, it’s sort of true? Charles probably did not insist because he honestly didn’t want those two wet blankets there, nor did he want the lunch to become another event in which Kate tried to steal his thunder. We talk a lot about “Will and Kate are supremely lazy” and “Kate is being benched from this or that,” but there’s also a problem of Charles genuinely not wanting Will and Kate around because Charles is so self-centered and he wants all of the attention.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

Ethan Slater was not a big part of Wicked’s promotional tour. He attended the premieres and gave some interviews, but he and Ariana Grande did not make any kind of coupled-up appearances on red carpets or whatever. It was in July 2023 when all hell broke loose – that was when Ethan and Ariana’s relationship became public knowledge, that’s when we learned that Ariana had left her husband, and that’s when he learned that Ethan was married to his high-school sweetheart, a woman named Lilly Jay, and they had an infant son. Ariana and Ethan’s affair blew up both of their marriages and it definitely hurt Ariana’s image – as Lilly said in a rare public comment, Ari is “not a girl’s girl.” Well, now that dust has settled and Lilly and Ethan’s divorce has been finalized, Lilly Jay wrote a personal essay in The Cut about what she’s learned and how everything went wrong. She’s actually Dr. Lilly Jay, clinical psychologist in perinatal mental health & child development. You can read her essay here. Some highlights:

Mourning her marriage: No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash. But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity. In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.

Giving birth to her son: During my pregnancy, I had never felt happier nor more aware of how precarious happiness could be. When my baby was first placed on my chest, still tethered to me by his umbilical cord, I sobbed with relief. We had done it. He had arrived. I survived preeclampsia, a life-threatening birth complication, and finally, our family was whole. Mine is a story of worrying in the wrong direction. As a perinatal psychologist, I knew all the statistics — how vulnerable a marriage is in the postpartum period, how vital community connection is in preventing depression and anxiety, how new parenthood impacts a whole family — but I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career. Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.

Accepting her new divorced life: Motherhood, I have learned, fills your time but not your mind. In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, marveling at his sweaty little hands grasping a crayon, I work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage. This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide. Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high-school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child. While our partnership has changed, our parenthood has not. Both of us fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided. As for me, days with my son are sunny. Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.

She’s lost jobs because her husband banged Ariana Grande: It’s hard to measure an absence, and I can’t say for sure how much my career has been impacted by what’s out there online. But there have been hints along the way, like the job offer that dissolved without explanation after yet another tabloid news cycle or the patient who’s scheduled for a first appointment but seemingly vanishes. On my darker days, I railed against the unfairness of a public divorce, asking my therapist…Who would trust a cardiologist who had a heart attack because they never got an EKG? Of course, I am not owed anything, whether it be a job or the privilege of being any given person’s psychologist. Still, even as someone who spent years researching how people respond to ambiguity, I hate not knowing if the way my story has been told has impacted my opportunity to help others sort through their stories.

[From The Cut]

“Who would trust a cardiologist who had a heart attack because they never got an EKG?” She’s being incredibly unfair to herself and unfair to her would-be patients. While I’m sure the job offers have withered away because of her husband’s sleazy tabloid dramas, her personal experiences will make her a better therapist, a more understanding and empathetic therapist. No one goes into therapy wishing that their therapist was perfect and in a perfectly happy nuclear family. That’s not the way any of this works. Dr. Jay writing this after Wicked’s promotion has finally ceased, but while the awards season is ramping up… that’s a choice. A really great choice, truly, because Ariana is getting a lot of heat for awards. Dr. Jay is like… btw, this woman f–ked my husband and destroyed my marriage when our son wasn’t even one year old, and their affair has hurt me professionally, psychologically and financially. Well played, Dr. Jay.

Top 8 stories about Ariana’s Grande’s messy affair with Ethan Slater

Ariana Grande and her Wicked costar Ethan Slater blew up both their marriages to have an affair! Ariana was even friends with Ethan’s wife and he has a new baby at home. Sign up for our mailing list to get the top 8 stories about this. I send one email a day on weekdays.

– Katie at Celebitchy

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Photos courtesy of Instagram, Cover Images.