While Smith railed against the modern tabloid era, the Vanessa to her Ariel (a reference for Disney adults and children alike) is likely a gossip blogger who appeared in the mid-2000s: Perez Hilton. For as hated as he was (by journalists and celebrities alike), Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. changed the tabloid landscape with his self-titled blog, Perez Hilton. (“Perez” for his Latin roots, “Hilton” as in Paris Hilton, who was at that time an easy and lucrative target.) He wasn’t the only one doing it—there was also Trent Vanegas’s Pink Is the New Blog, Michael K’s DListed, and Elaine Lui’s LaineyGossip—but Hilton’s nasty brand of commentary was uniquely addictive. It fought back against the neutered state of both tabloid and magazine journalism, with Hilton’s memorable Microsoft Paint decorating celeb photos. (Sometimes with jokey Mad Libs–esque quotes, sometimes squiggles and dots alluding to cum or cocaine. Sometimes both.)
Hilton was more than problematic, even in his own day: He regularly outed closeted actors, made jokes about celebs’ weight, and spread gossip about the lives of underage stars. (He even prematurely reported Fidel Castro’s death in 2007.) “I’m more trustworthy than Page Six,” Hilton once bragged to Radar in 2006. And while the First Amendment protected the blogger from at least one defamation lawsuit (one of a number of suits filed against him; the lengthy “Legal issues and controversies” section of his Wikipedia page speaks for itself), no one was visiting Perez Hilton for accuracy.
Reading the site felt like hearing a juicy, whispered story from a friend—the OK, don’t repeat this, but . . . type of gossip, the I’ve heard this from a few people, and . . . type of gossip, the type of gossip that was a dash of hearsay, a bit of conjecture, and 100 percent entertainment. Just how your favorite group text might be today, Hilton wasn’t bogged down by a set of journalistic ethics.
Until, at least, the culture caught up with him. In 2010, Hilton posted a video to YouTube called “I’m Going to Be Doing Things Differently” in response to bullying accusations, and only a couple years later he appeared on Oprah’s Lifeclass in a segment called “How Perez Hilton Changed the Negative Energy in His Life,” telling Oprah, “I don’t want to be that person anymore . . . I want to use my platform for good.” His pseudo-redemption tour continued through the aughts, but Hilton couldn’t quite figure out how to use these modern, post-WordPress platforms in a way that stuck with the gen pop: He was banned from TikTok in 2020 after criticizing influencer Charli D’Amelio for dancing in a bikini. The celebrity kingmaker had finally been officially exiled from the royal court. (“I am feeling numb, and I don’t want to seem overly dramatic, but I feel like my world is crumbling,” he said in a video response to the ban. “This feels like a death to me.”)
Hilton came and went, but the internet had discovered how fun gossip could be without the tabloids. Online culture pulled celebrity blinds from message boards to the mainstream. Crazy Days and Nights, a no-frills, text-heavy site run by “Enty Lawyer” (since outed as a lawyer named John Nelson), regularly ran unvetted, anonymous bits of gossip written in entertaining code language. Gawker launched its own controversial celeb feature in 2006, the “Gawker Stalker”: a Google map that pinpointed submitted celebrity sightings throughout NYC. It had a catchy title and a greater purpose: Gawker’s mandate was to break down the decades-old pay-for-play systems of tabloid media. (And stir up a little controversy along the way? Sure, why not.) You couldn’t actually stalk celebs with the Gawker Stalker because it wasn’t posted in real time—but its threatening name had the feature shut down within the year. “We completely acknowledge that there are very many creepy people out there, but the truth is, if there is someone really intending to do a celebrity harm, there are much better ways to go about doing that than looking at the Gawker Stalker,” Gawker editor Jessica Coen said to the Associated Press. “If you’re using the map to do that, you are a really bad stalker.” Not to mention, these posts were gossip minutiae that would barely be of interest to even a tabloid magazine: “Spotted outside the Carroll St. stop on the F line, Saturday 10/15: Paul Giamatti, looking like he was waiting for someone, pushing an empty baby stroller. He was looking comfortably disheveled, as one would expect, but his hair (or what’s left of it) had grown a little longer perhaps than it should.”
