So how’s stuff looking down there? A bit of a shipwreck? I don’t know about you but not seeing my waxing lady in almost a year has really done a doozie in the bush department. Sh-t has been feeling and looking real grim lately. But the Pubic Hair Gods must have been looking out for me because I was …

Many of us burned through Bridgerton and are now catching up with the books while we wait for season two. Shonda Rhimes understands the modern viewer and how impatient we can be, so to keep us entertained, there’s an upcoming Bridgerton podcast that will dive into the details of making the series (c…

In the days since the release of the NYT documentary Framing Britney Spears, and as we’re all confronting and meditating on our complicity (the media, the public, everyone) with how Britney was treated, one name has come up more often than others: Justin Timberlake. He only shows up for a few minute…

Welcome back to What’s Your Drama but more importantly Gung Hay Fat Choy. And to lead into the Lunar New Year Lainey shares her tips on what you need to do. It’s not too late, well it kind of is, but at least you can prepare for next year. Then it’s time to get into your drama! We kick things off…

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Tom Brady is going in for “minor” knee surgery post-Super Bowl. [Just Jared]
Elle Fanning’s Miu Miu dress is not great. [Tom & Lorenzo]
Ryan Reynolds is the king of side hustles. [Pajiba]
Tokyo Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori ended up resigning after he said women talk too much in meetings and that’s why they shouldn’t be included. [Towleroad]
Shelley Duvall lives a quiet life away from Hollywood and why are people desperate to disturb her? Just let her chill out. [Dlisted]
I love an animal print, but Irina Shayk’s coat sucks? [Go Fug Yourself]
More on the Duchess of Sussex’s legal victory. [LaineyGossip]
Some advice for the modern pandemic age. [Jezebel]
Mindy Kaling will produce a show about Velma from the Scooby Doo gang and she’ll voice Velma too! Which is great. [Buzzfeed]
Rami Malek was on Gilmore Girls?! [Seriously OMG]
Emma Corrin looks like a badass pilgrim. [RCFA]

Tom Brady drunk asl ?pic.twitter.com/8Ff2hlUART

— Footballism™ (@FootbaIIism) February 10, 2021

Here are some photos of Sarah Paulson and Timothee Chalamet. She’s in LA, seen here leaving the hair salon and he’s in Boston, heading to work on Don’t Look Up. And they appear to be wearing similar masks. Or at least that’s how I’m segueing into what I want to talk about which is mask-wearing. To m…

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I have no idea what is going on between Kim Kardashian and People Magazine these days. It would not surprise me in the least if we found out, years from now, that she signed some kind of exclusive gossip content deal with People and got paid to provide them with weekly updates, even when there’s nothing really to update. Kim and Kanye West are barely speaking these days and they’ve both hired divorce lawyers, but neither of them has filed for divorce. Hamlet Kardashian is drawing this out, but I suspect she actually has a plan and it might be working. So in lieu of updates about all of that, People Mag’s exclusive about Kim this week is that she’s spending Valentine’s Day with her kids.

Kim Kardashian is looking ahead as she and estranged husband Kanye West move towards divorce. The Keeping Up with the Kardashians star, 40, is planning to spend the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday with her kids, and maintains little contact with West, a source tells PEOPLE.

“Kim is great,” the insider says. “She has a Valentine’s Day celebration planned with her kids and family. She likes to make it special for the kids. She doesn’t have any contact with Kanye.”

“It’s obvious that she is just focused on the future,” the source adds.

Earlier this month, a source similarly told PEOPLE that the couple, who married in 2014, now have minimal communication as they continue to move toward an official split. “Kim and Kanye continue to live separate lives,” said the source. “They have no contact.”

[From People]

I think it’s kind of funny that people are trying to make this year’s Valentine’s Day into… anything. No one should be traveling on romantic vacays. Hopefully, most people won’t be going out to eat. I plan to spend the holiday with my cats, eating takeout and watching tennis. I like my V-Day plans better than Kim’s.

Meanwhile, did you see that Kim donated flowers to frontline workers? She sent bouquets and arrangements of, like, exclusively pale pink roses to healthcare workers at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale, California. She sent them to brighten the days of the healthcare workers. It’s really nice and I think the hospital workers probably enjoyed them, but I do wonder if maybe food would have been a better gift? I have no idea though – it’s quite possible that it would have been a lot harder to send catering or prepackaged meals to a hospital, while a floral delivery was probably less stressful for everyone to coordinate.

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It didn’t occur to me until just now that the women abused by Marilyn Manson were paying attention to Evan Rachel Wood’s words and actions for years. The women who came after Evan were abused, tortured, raped and traumatized as well, and in retrospect, I can see now that Evan became their North Star. They paid attention to what she said, for years, about being the victim of intimate partner abuse. They paid attention to her activism at the state and national level to protect survivors of abuse and punish the abusers. And when Evan named her abuser, those women took their cues from Evan too. Which is why so many of Manson’s victims came out and told their stories, and named Manson as well, all in the wake of Evan telling her story. I realized all of that as I read Esme Blanco’s account of being violently assaulted, tortured and raped by Manson. She, like Evan, had spoken about intimate partner violence publicly, but like Evan, she had not named her abuser before now. You can read Esme’s account here at The Cut (trigger warning: her story is very graphic). Here’s just one section.

“It’s really surreal,” she says over Zoom from her Los Angeles living room. The 38-year-old redhead takes off her glasses and wipes away a tear. Talking about Manson sends her body into flight mode, but more recently, it also fills her with what she calls a dragonlike strength. “I have this hot energy and power in my chest. I just want to open my mouth and be like ‘Ahhhhhhh’ and rain fire down,” she tells me, sticking out her tongue and waving both hands. It’s a strength Bianco says she didn’t have while playing Ros, a character on Game of Thrones who works in a brothel and is abused in ways that mirror the actress’s personal life. Like Ros, Bianco’s alleged abuse often had an audience: members of Manson’s entourage who now say they witnessed his angry outbursts and Bianco’s bruises, along with the fans and industry executives who dismissed the singer’s violent comments about women as just a part of his stage persona. “He’s told the world time and time again, ‘This is who I am,” says Bianco. “He hid in plain sight.”

****

Their [friendly] dynamic changed in 2009, after Manson sent Bianco a plane ticket from her home in London to L.A. so she could star in the music video for his song “I Want to Kill You Like They Do in the Movies.” He explained that it would be shot on a flip camera for a home-video feel and would involve Manson “kidnapping” Bianco in his home. “I need to have a victim/lover,” he wrote in an email. Bianco believed that the job would be strictly professional. “You are gonna have to pretend to like being manhandled by me. Sorry,” Manson emailed her a few days before the shoot. Once she arrived, she says, the line between art and reality immediately blurred. Bianco, who was 26 at the time, says she spent the next three days in lingerie, barely sleeping or eating, with Manson serving up cocaine rather than food. She remembers him losing his temper and throwing the camera at a smoke alarm. Soon, she says, he became violent, tying her with cables to a prayer kneeler, lashing her with a whip, and using an electric sex toy called a Violet Wand on her wounds — the same kind of “torture device” Wood has said was used on her. Bianco was terrified but tried to calm down by telling herself, It’s just Manson being theatrical. We are going to make great art.

While waiting for her flight back home, Bianco sobbed. She felt sad to leave Manson and considered her wounds to be proof of their bond. On some level, she knew what had happened wasn’t BDSM; she says they hadn’t discussed consent or safe words, which she knew from both personal experience and the fetish performers in her circle were crucial for safe power dynamics. A few days after the shoot, Manson emailed Bianco a picture of her back covered in welts with a note reading, “bringing sexy back.”

[From The Cut]

It gets progressively worse from there. Two years after the “video shoot” – which was just Manson torturing her – she moved in with him and the abuse got far worse. He would shake her awake and tell her that she needed his permission to sleep. He would whip her. He would humiliate her in front his friends. The emotional abuse went hand in hand with the physical abuse, and Manson and his crew normalized all of it.

It’s also worth noting that both ERW and Esme testified in California around the passage, last year, of the Phoenix Act, which is an extension of existing domestic violence statutes, and basically makes it easier for survivors to come forward and press charges against their abusers, even years after the fact. Esme says at various points in this piece that Manson belongs in jail for what he did to her and other women. I agree.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Avalon Red.

This story was somewhat complicated to me in that I thought Kristen Bell was responding to negative comments on an Instagram post she made about her husband, Dax Shepard. That would be understandable, but she responded to a comment on an Instagram post by an outlet called Pop Culture which has an some quotes from Dax. Apparently Dax is on Top Gear America, which exists despite Top Gear USA. (It’s like a reboot of that, which was a remake of the original British show. I don’t understand it either, but it has two seasons, the first of which which came out in 2017 on BBC America and it’s airing again this year, on the MotorTrend network.)

Dax premiered a mural on his van for that show which is an old school airbush. He told Pop Culture it was inspired by the movie 1977 Breaker Breaker, with Chuck Norris. However I googled the van art shown in that movie and it was just a big eagle so that doesn’t track. The mural shows Dax super buff and being grabbed on the leg by Kristen, which is a common movie poster trope called the Leg Cling. You can see the van art below. It’s kind of cool-looking but I get why Kristen isn’t a big fan. Dax told PopCulture that Kristen wasn’t thrilled with it, but it didn’t sound like she made a stink except for telling him not to keep it in the driveway.

“[The van] was inspired by Breaker Breaker, a Chuck Norris movie,” Shepard told PopCulture. “I’ve always loved those ’70s muraled up vans. I’ve wanted one. And my wife is pretty adamant that’s the one vehicle she doesn’t want in our driveway. But she wasn’t thrilled with the level of ‘female empowerment’ that was depicted in that mural. Understandably. And my kind of excuse was we had to honor the era in which this was popular. It didn’t fly.”

[From PopCulture]

I don’t think I would want that in my driveway either, especially if I was famous because it would let everyone know that’s where I lived. Anyway, on the Instagram post for this article someone commented that these two seem like they hate each other. I mean we’ve heard them say they regularly go days without talking to each other, so it’s not a stretch to assume this. Plus Dax has been rude to Kristen on camera and they’re always talking about their problems. Kristen deigned to respond to this person and defended her relationship. Here’s what was said:

Comment: Every piece of news I see about them talks about how they just can’t f–ing stand each other, constantly fight, now this dude is apparently objectifying her as well. Just what’s the point? straight people are so tragic.

Kristen: We adore each other, we just try to always be honest about how marriage, or companionship in any form, is hard sometimes. You can’t always be in control, or right, and it’s important to us that we lead with the honesty of your “perfect match” being a myth. You gotta work hard to love yourself, and love other humans. Xo

[From Instagram via PopCulture]

“Straight people are so tragic.” Hard agree. I’m single, but that’s because my husband and I started arguing more than we got along and it felt bad so we got divorced. We tried counseling but it didn’t work. I’m way happier alone than with someone I had to work to be with. It also doesn’t mean we didn’t love each other, just that we couldn’t make it work. Nor does that mean that every relationship I have will be like that. While “perfect match” may be a myth, “someone you get along with better” is not.

I also would never air my business like this, but I’m not famous and I don’t depend on people paying attention to my personal life to make money. Why is she responding to a comment about a random short interview her husband did? There’s less than a paragraph of quotes from Dax and he calls Kristen’s objection to the van understandable. It feels like this was a big fight they had and she’s responding to that, not to what Dax actually said or what this person said particularly. This is very similar to other comments I’ve read about them and she must know that.

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One of the most memorable breakout performances of the last few years was Lily Gladstone in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film, Certain Women. She is quietly devastating in that film, and I have not forgotten her since. Gladstone is one of a handful of actors whose IMDB pages I check regularly, keeping an …