Last year was the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. Like all of the “big anniversaries,” the British and American media did a number of articles, interviews and TV specials about Diana, her life, her work, and the questions people still have about her death. One of the most curious interviews I read last summer was with Lord Stevens, who headed up the British investigation into Diana’s death. Lord Stevens is no Poirot, let’s just say that – like so many figures in the British establishment, he seemed utterly committed to obfuscating and ignoring inconvenient facts in evidence, like Diana telling two separate people (one of them her lawyer) that she was going to be killed in a car accident… just months before she was killed in a car accident. There was also that interview with one of Mohammed al-Fayed’s bodyguards, Lee Sansum, who was guarding Diana for much of her last summer. Sansum said that Diana was being watched by intelligence officers that whole summer, and that she spoke often of a plot to assassinate her.
While Prince Harry’s Spare made it clear that it took him decades to even begin to process his mother’s life and death, it’s also clear that as an adult, he’s studied parts of Diana’s death in detail. He went through the Pont de L’Alma tunnel repeatedly, he studied the photos, he likely thought about what her final moments were like. So, the paparazzi chase in New York on Tuesday night happened, and apparently Harry is thinking a lot about Diana at the moment.
The duke told friends that it was the “closest I have ever felt” to understanding what happened on the night in 1997 when his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, died.
Harry and Meghan’s car chase with the paparazzi is the “closest” the duke has felt to understanding what happened to his mother on the night she died.
A source has confirmed to Yahoo News the incident in New York on Tuesday night left him with a better feeling of what Prince Diana went through prior to her death in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris in August 1997.
I bet it was the closest he’s ever felt. The difference is that Harry was surrounded by top-notch security, he had his iPhone out and he was recording, and he was able to eventually get to safety. I keep getting this nagging feeling that people – specifically British establishment people – are actually really mad at the way things went down on Tuesday. It’s almost as if they’re mad that something didn’t go to plan. I absolutely believe that Harry was thinking about Diana as he sat beside Meghan in that SUV. And I believe his radar was up, because something wasn’t right about what was happening. That same radar which made him want to reopen the investigation into Diana’s death.
Prince William is an angry, disturbed, intemperate man. As a child, Diana called him “the Basher” because he was so short-tempered and aggressive, and that child grew up to be a man with exactly the same traits. King Charles’s biographer detailed (just last year) how William has a “short fuse” and he’s always screaming at staff. William behaves the same way around his father and, obviously, he regularly threw tantrums about and at Harry, and William also physically assaulted Harry in 2019. So, would it be shocking to hear that William is also “tantrum-prone” around his wife?
Kate, Princess of Wales, treats Prince William like the “fourth child”, according to a source who worked with them in Kensington Palace. Kate and William have three loveable children, Prince George (9), Princess Charlotte (8) and Prince Louis (5).
However, like all marriages, Kate and William’s isn’t perfect, but they know how to make it work, a Palace insider has revealed. Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Tom Quinn, author of Gilded Youth: An Intimate History of Growing Up in the Royal Family, has shared conversations he had with a source that worked closely with William and Kate in Kensington Palace.
“Kate treats him [William] like the fourth child because he’s prone to tantrums,” the source told Quinn. According to the source, Kate also knows exactly how to stop arguments from escalating. Quinn explained: “They do have rows. It’s not a perfect marriage. They have terrific rows.”
The royal author continued: “But, where some couples have a row and throw heavy vases at each other, William and Kate throw cushions at each other. It’s always kept under control.”
The royal author attributes the couple’s marital success to the late Queen’s legacy.
“Because William adopts the manners and ways of behaving of his grandmother and Kate is very good at not complaining, both of them have stuck to the thing that made Queen Elizabeth II such a remarkable monarch. They very rarely complain and when they do it’s always in measured terms.”
Quinn is the same guy who talked about how William and Kate “shout at each other” and “say unkind things to each other.” Now Quinn is saying that they throw things at each other – pillows?? – and Kate treats William like a child because he acts like a child. I mean… none of this sounds like a healthy marriage, nor does William sound like an emotionally mature, psychologically healthy 40-year-old man. The image I have of William is someone who can’t control himself, who balls up his fists and screams and punches walls and throws screeching tantrums because that’s always the way he’s processed every single thing in his life.
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There is real money behind the anti-Sussex movement, and I find that one of the weirdest and scariest things of all. It’s one thing for terrible people on social media to push dangerous conspiracies and target their individual hate on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It’s quite another when shadowy figures are buying bot-farms to inundate comment sections and social media. It’s quite another when someone is buying push-polls and trying to “prove” set negative narratives. It’s quite another when an American right-wing think tank is spending their time, money and energy to attack a veteran who moved to America with his American wife. The Heritage Foundation is obsessed with the idea that Prince Harry needs to be deported because something something he did drugs! “Doing drugs” is not enough to get anyone deported, but that hasn’t stopped the Heritage Foundation from suing to get their hands on his visa application. Now the president of the Heritage Foundation has spoken to the Telegraph about how no one in America (???) wants Harry to live here. Dafaq?
Americans want the Duke of Sussex to return to Britain, the head of a leading Washington think tank has said. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, is assisting the think tank’s legal action to investigate the Duke’s US visa application following his admissions of drug taking in his memoir, Spare.
Asked whether the Duke should be deported following these revelations, Mr Roberts told The Telegraph: “We don’t like him being in America and we would love for him to come back to you or somewhere. I guess we as Americans, we see Prince Harry the same way you see President Biden. You can have him back.”
The Heritage Foundation, the biggest conservative think tank in the United States, has demanded the release of the Duke’s American visa application. The US government has so far refused to release it, despite a freedom of information request, but a court will rule on whether to compel officials to release his immigration records to the public following pressure from the group.
They are basing their case on US immigration laws, which state that any foreigner “determined to be a drug abuser” is classed as “inadmissible”, although immigration officials can use their discretion to waive the rule. Sources close to the Duke have previously indicated that he was truthful on his visa application, suggesting that he did disclose his past drug use.
Mr Roberts told The Telegraph that only “two to three per cent” of the US population “love the nonsense that Harry and Meghan spew” and that in general, Britons “don’t have to worry about Americans being on their side”. He added that Americans “admire the consistency of the British form of government, which, of course, includes the Royal family”.
The Heritage Foundation is far, far right-wing and they basically want everyone to be deported, including natural born American citizens who have a skin color darker than Kevin McCarthy. In fact, I’m pretty sure they want to deport orange John Boehner, but weirdly, I think they’re fine with Canadian-born Ted Cruz. In any case, the Heritage Foundation does not speak for Americans. In fact, I’m almost positive that Heritage is being paid to be a public nuisance about this, and they’re being paid to provide content for British media. These stories about the Heritage Foundation’s bullsh-t threats and lawsuits rarely make the news in America – it’s just someone’s pet project, a story to make derangers feel better. It’s sad but scary.
Angela Kelly was Queen Elizabeth II’s long-time dresser, companion and “best friend.” What Angela wanted, Angela got. Angela was QEII’s gatekeeper, and she made tons of enemies within the royal family and among palace staff. She wielded her power to bludgeon anyone and everyone. She was the source for basically all of the briefings about the Duchess of Sussex’s “tiara drama,” a story which Prince Harry wrote about in detail in Spare. It’s beyond clear why Angela Kelly is not now and has never been a sympathetic figure. Which is why it’s incredibly funny to watch her comeuppance from a distance. Within hours of QEII’s passing, Angela Kelly was out of work and all of the locks were changed. King Charles kicked her out of the “grace and favor” Windsor home she conned out of QEII. But Charles also knows that Kelly would sell out her own grandmother, so Charles “bought” her a home far away, a home which will revert to the Crown whenever Kelly passes. Now the Mail reports that Charles added a stipulation to the home: a gag order. LMAO.
The King has struck a deal with the late Queen’s dresser banning her from sharing Royal secrets in exchange for a new life in the North. Angela Kelly, one of the late Queen’s closest confidantes, has been allowed to choose a new grace-and-favour home after being forced to move out of the Windsor estate. But The Mail on Sunday understands that a senior Palace aide acting for the King presented Ms Kelly with a new NDA – non disclosure agreement – to sign as part of the deal.
A well-placed source dubbed the agreement a ‘gagging order’ that would make future earnings based on public revelations about the Royal family difficult. Under the terms of the agreement, Ms Kelly is prevented from using the words ‘King’ and ‘Palace’ for commercial purposes.
With the Queen’s blessing, Ms Kelly, has already published two books about her Royal role. It is understood she also had the Queen’s permission to write a third but the new agreement is certain to impinge on that – if not scupper it. It is understood that the King felt that an updated version of Ms Kelly’s second book, The Other Side Of The Coin: The Queen, The Dresser And The Wardrobe strayed ‘too far’ into revealing intimate details about the Royal Family.
Now the King is understood to have made a move to honour his late mother’s wishes by providing a home for Ms Kelly while simultaneously protecting her legacy by banning the release of further details. The Mail on Sunday first revealed in April that Ms Kelly, 65, had been gifted a house for life by the King after being forced to move out of the Windsor estate following the Queen’s death.
When the Queen died last September, she was made redundant from her role as Camilla was used to working with Jacqui Meakin, the Queen Mother’s former dresser. Without the patronage of the Queen, Ms Kelly was told that she must leave her Windsor home and friends feared she would become another victim of the King’s ‘property merry-go-round’. Some even accused him of being ‘ruthless with all the wrong people’.
One of the funniest parts of all of this is watching the royal rota people write all of these sympathetic pieces about Kelly and how terrible it is that the king kicked her out of her home (a home which she conned out of an elderly queen) and now Kelly is under a strict NDA. It’s been clear for a while now that Kelly was one of the rota’s best sources, and that she had a lot of those reporters on speed dial. Now Kelly is out in the cold, under a strict NDA and far away from the Windsors’ comings and goings. Pour one out for the rota, they lost one of their most vile leakers.
After King Charles and Queen Camilla’s coronation, they’ve been relatively quiet. Reportedly, they spent a week at Sandringham, decompressing from the stressful Chubbly, and then they were in London again last week, conveniently right after the Sussexes were in a near-catastrophic pap chase. Now it looks like Charles is finally ready to travel out of the UK for pleasure. He’s been stuck in the UK since his mother’s passing, save for his royal tour of Germany in April. Now King Charles is headed for Transylvania… solo. Camilla said “I’m not doing that.” So the king will head out without his wife to the little country house he owns.
After the pomp and ceremony of his Coronation, it’s little wonder King Charles yearns for the simple life. He intends to slip off in a few weeks to his home deep in rural Transylvania, the Daily Mail can reveal. But Camilla will not accompany him, preferring to remain in her more modern Wiltshire home. Although she is very happy for her hard-working, 74-year-old husband to enjoy some uniquely traditional ‘r and r’.
The King will sleep in a simple wooden bed, drink hand-pressed apple juice – and maybe even judge the local lawn-mowing competition, as he has done on previous visits. It may come as a surprise that the British sovereign, who is actually distantly related to Vlad the Impaler, is incredibly passionate about Romania.
He loves the country so much that he secretly bought a run-down former farmhouse in Zalanpatak, close to the Carpathian Mountains, several years ago with the help of local landowner Count Kalnoky, his great friend (and another distant relative of Vlad, said to be the inspiration for Dracula). The pair – who share a passion for preserving the rich heritage of the region – now co-own three properties in the area, which are rented out to tourists.
Nestled among the hills and meadows of the Zalan Valley, Charles’s simple Romanian hideaway is surrounded by some of the most beautiful and biodiverse wildflower meadows in the region. The hills above the property are roamed by wolves and bears, and in the forests flourish one of Europe’s rarest and most spectacular orchids, the lady’s slipper. Farmers still use horses and carts and cultivate their land with hoes and scythes, as if the industrial revolution has yet to reach their boundaries. In the early years of his visits, Charles and his security team slept in pull-out wooden truckle beds and used outside toilets. The property has now been restored with authentic textiles and antiques from the region as well as indoor toilets.
There was some doubt as to whether he would be able to make his annual visit now that he is King, but the Mail understands he is due to arrive early next month and will stay for up to a week. It is understood that he is likely to have a meeting with the country’s president, Klaus Iohannis, while he is there.
‘There are no private secretaries accompanying him and very little in the way of staff generally, in fact,’ they explained. ‘There’s certainly no valet or chef that travel over with him. The local produce and cooks are too wonderful.’
I mean, if I had the money, I would also buy a dilapidated farmhouse somewhere and painstakingly renovate it and modernize it just so, while keeping it in tune with local charm. Like, I would watch that documentary series. I would be obsessed with that. For Charles, I find it an eccentric choice, but whatever, I can see how this project aligns with his many passions, and I’m sure he genuinely enjoys that kind of antiquated rural life.
It’s hilarious that Camilla isn’t joining him though. As soon as she got that crown on her head, she started briefing everybody that she wasn’t going to travel anymore. I assumed that meant she wouldn’t go on royal tours, but it looks like she’s not interested in traveling for pleasure either. Plus, I think something is going on with Camilla – she’s been looking especially sauced whenever we do see her these days. Maybe that’s it.
It really feels like it’s only been a year or two since Jeff Bezos divorced his wife of 25 years in the midst of a torrid affair with Lauren Sanchez. It all came out at once in January 2019 – Bezos and Sanchez’s affair, his separation from Mackenzie Bezos, and all of the prurient reporting in the National Enquirer about all of it. The Enquirer tried to play hardball with Bezos, and he ended up outing his own situation in a Medium essay in which he took the Enquirer to the woodshed. All of which to say, Bezos and Sanchez have been together since 2018 (at least) and he openly dumped his wife for Lauren. They’ve been together ever since and they’re surprisingly solid. I would even say that Lauren brings him out of his shell – he’s given more money to charity, he socializes more, he seems to enjoy being a public figure. Well, now Bezos and Sanchez are engaged.
Amazon head Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, are engaged, an insider close to the couple tells Page Six exclusively.
The pair are currently in the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival, where they have been hitting the star-studded party circuit while staying on his $500 million yacht with a mermaid resembling Sanchez adorning the prow.
Rumors have been swirling for months that the pair are set to be wed, mostly due to speculation about a massive heart-shaped ring Sanchez, 53, wears.
The 59-year-old billionaire and broadcast journalist and have been inseparable since they started dating in 2018. News broke that they were a couple in 2019, but the duo kept a low profile until his divorce from his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Scott, was finalized.
I recently read and covered an interview with Sanchez and I came away from it… sort of liking her. I mean, I think she sounds sort of like a vapid socialite, but I actually think she cares a lot about Bezos and their blended family. Now, does she also give off Big Chaotic Bimbo Energy? Yes. She does. But as I said, I sort of found her charming in a weird way. Like, I get why Jeff Bezos is into her.
Meanwhile, it is crazy that this engagement story popped up while Bezos and Sanchez are in the South of France to party with all of the A-listers at Cannes. They set sail on Bezos’ new $500 million superyacht, Koru, traveling from Rotterdam to Mallorca and now cruising through the Mediterranean. Koru is also traveling with Bezos’ smaller super-boat, Abeona. Lauren is apparently the “figurehead” of Koru. She looks… seaworthy.
The last time I gave Wanda Sykes a great deal of thought was when she was hosting the 2022 Oscars and she had things to say about ‘the slap’. She’s friends with Chris Rock and she described feeling upset and even “traumatized” by what happened. Needless to say, I have to side-eye anyone who’s friends with Chris Rock, even if they go back decades. But Wanda just did a new interview for The Guardian to promote her new Netflix special. Wanda talks about cancel culture and has a refreshingly sane take on the subject, for a comedian. She also voices her support for the trans community, and shares how the homophobia she has experienced is much more frightening than the thought of ‘being canceled’.
While many of her comedian peers have complained about cancel culture, Wanda Sykes says she isn’t worried. In a new interview with the Guardian, the 59-year-old comic explains why it just means people are being held accountable for their actions.
“To me, the whole complaint about cancel culture is a lot of men — especially straight men — who are just pissed that they can’t say things anymore, y’know?” Sykes explained. “And it’s not like you can’t say these things. You can say them, but now there’s just consequences. So that’s why I say I can’t get canceled. Only God can say: ‘All right, Wanda, that’s enough.’”
The Other Two star doesn’t shy away from tackling hot-button issues. In her new Netflix special, I’m an Entertainer, for instances, Sykes addresses the transgender community, which fellow comics like Dave Chappelle have targeted in their jokes. She takes a different tack.
“I welcome my trans sisters into the ladies’ room,” she tells the crowd during the special. “Maybe you’ll make us do better, y’know?”
Speaking to the Guardian, Sykes shared that she “wants the community to know that I’m with them. I think it’s important to let people know where you stand, especially with all the comments everyone else has been making.”
While Sykes doesn’t have a “fear” of being taken down in today’s cultural climate — “I think it’s just knowing who you are and what you will say and won’t say,” she reasoned — she did once worry that coming out as lesbian would affect her career. Sykes was 44 when she came out in 2008, the year she married wife Alex, with whom she shares 14-year-old twins.
“You don’t want to be on stage trying to be funny and having that other little piece of your brain being occupied by: ‘Are they gonna find out? What if I slip up?’” she said of hiding her sexuality. “Now I’m just 100% there.”
The “ladies room” comment in the special is in reference to the gross things that can happen in women’s restrooms. In her new comedy special she makes fun of the appalling hygiene violations I know we’ve all seen a few times. Anyway, what Wanda says about cancel culture is completely spot on. Male comedians today are so thin-skinned and can’t handle people calling them out for saying racist, sexist, homophobic things that cross a line. What they’re really upset about is not being able to punch down anymore without getting called out. I get that comedy is supposed to push boundaries, but as soon as it turns into ridiculing vulnerable, marginalized groups, it isn’t funny anymore. Maybe because Wanda is a gay Black woman, she approaches comedy differently than her peers. She’s had to work harder to get where she is, and she also knows what it’s like to be made fun of for something that she can’t change.
In my opinion, cancel culture doesn’t really exist–but I think it used to. When people complain about it, I remind them of the Hollywood Blacklist–an era in the late 1940s through the 1950s in Hollywood where anyone suspected of being a communist could lose their job. Hundreds of people did. Sometimes they really were communists, but some people were blacklisted just because they had attended a couple of communist meetings in the 1930s. It was an assault on First Amendment rights, and the blacklist had devastating consequences. The actor John Garfield was blacklisted because his wife had been a communist, and the stress of testifying and losing his job probably contributed to his early death, of a heart attack, at age 39. That is cancel culture. Not being called out on Twitter for saying or doing truly vile things. No one is stopping Louis CK from having sold-out comedy shows or producing movies. No one’s stopping Dave Chappelle from winning Grammys or performing at the Hollywood Bowl. Like Wanda says, these men are just mad that there are consequences now. Even if those consequences prove to be temporary.
Photos credit Netflix and via Instagram
Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are still together. And they’re still running together. The pair were ousted from GMA3 earlier this year, several months after their affair was revealed. And running together was and seems to still be a big part of their relationship. The couple is still going strong and they both participated in the Brooklyn Half Marathon over the weekend. It seems like they ran together the whole time.
Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are still running together.
Running side by side, the two former GMA3 co-anchors took part in the 2023 RBC Brooklyn Half Marathon May 20, in what marked their first joint appearance in [months]. Amy and T.J. wore coordinating outfits—she sported a light pink tank top, black leggings and black and pink Nike sneakers, while he appeared in a dark grey top over black running shorts and tights, paired with pink Nike sneakers.
This marked Amy and T.J.’s first public appearance in almost a month (they were photographed walking while holding hands in New York City in April). The half marathon, hosted by New York Road Runners, took place almost four months after ABC News announced they would leave the company, which followed the pair going public with their controversial romance last December.
On May 11, the news group revealed that Eva Pilgrim and DeMarco Morgan would officially take over the pair’s hosting duties on GMA3.
The half marathon marked the third time Amy, 50, and T.J., 45, have run a major race together since they took part in the TCS New York Road City Marathon last November.
Are they going to do the New York Marathon as an official couple in November? This is one of the qualifying races. In 2022, they ran in the New York Half and New York Marathon together, with the latter being shortly before their affair was revealed. Amy is an avid runner, having run four marathons in 2022 alone. She’s said to have inspired T.J.’s love of long distance running. When I wrote about that, I said: “Amy even said he beat her by one second in the half marathon last year and I kind of think she let him win because she sounds like quite the dedicated runner with all those marathons.” And the exact same thing happened this year! I got curious and looked up their times and they finished one second apart, with T.J. “winning” yet again. Hm! He seems like a guy who would need an ego boost like that. Especially since she got a better exit deal than him. Anyway, having someone to run with for the whole race is nice, though I do suspect that Amy is a little faster and slowing her pace for T.J.
Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes are sharing their love of running.https://t.co/9aKx0xozSK
— Entertainment Tonight (@etnow) May 22, 2023
photos credit: Cover Images
Two weeks ago, a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, the woman he raped in the mid-1990s. Carroll told her story in a book and in New York Magazine in 2019. Soon after, Trump lied about everything, claimed he didn’t know Carroll, claimed she was making the whole thing up and that he’d never even been to Bergdorf’s. So Carroll sued him and won $5 million in damages for the abuse and the defamation. A day after the verdict, CNN gave Trump a lil’ Nazi town hall in which Trump spoke about Carroll again and defamed her again. Now E. Jean Carroll is asking the court to add an additional amount to her damages because Trump continues to lie about her. Good!!
E. Jean Carroll, who this month won $5 million in damages from former President Donald J. Trump, is now seeking a “very substantial” additional amount in response to his insults on a CNN program just a day after she won her sexual abuse and defamation case.
Monday’s filing came in a separate defamation lawsuit that Ms. Carroll filed in 2019 against Mr. Trump, 76, which is before the same judge who presided in the civil trial. That case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made that year, shortly after Ms. Carroll said that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. The suit has been sidetracked by appeals and is still pending.
In a separate letter to the judge, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, revealed with little elaboration that Mr. Trump has threatened to sue Ms. Carroll “in retaliation and possibly to seek sanctions.”
On May 10, Mr. Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency, went on CNN and echoed his earlier denials, calling Ms. Carroll’s account “fake” and a “made-up story.” Despite a photograph showing them together, he claimed again that he had never met Ms. Carroll, 79, called her a “wack job” and said the civil trial was “a rigged deal.”
Monday’s court filing argues Mr. Trump’s statements “show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite. This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same.”
I don’t understand the legal stuff – so Carroll has two separate defamation cases against Trump, one which is completed (in Carroll’s favor) and one which is still making its way through appeals, and the one in appeals is what she wants amended to include the new defamatory statements? Is that right? In any case, I hope the court gives her whatever she wants and I hope there are even heavier financial penalties for Trump’s broke ass.
Irina Shayk’s Mowalola Fall 2023 look in Cannes was not great. [RCFA]
Jude Law had an unconvincing mustache in Cannes. [Just Jared]
Ted Cruz continues to be awful & useless. [Towleroad]
This TikTok of Kanye West’s wife made me so uncomfortable. [Dlisted]
I’ll probably talk about this at a later date, but Angelina Jolie has some kind of fashion collective now? That’s kind of cool. [LaineyGossip]
Review of Fast X. [Pajiba]
Gucci’s Resort line seems very… button-intensive. [Go Fug Yourself]
I love it when restaurants have punny names. [OMG Blog]
Krysten Sinema is using campaign money to fund her lifestyle. [Jezebel]
Dove Cameron wears purple. [Egotastic]
Anwar Hadid is mad that his ex, Dua Lipa, has a new boyfriend. [Buzzfeed]
Jimmy Buffett has been hospitalized. [Seriously OMG]