Inside The A List Attack on Influencers. Are They The Future of Celebrity?

This week, I’m giving you a Monday morning edition because we have news of a new royal baby and it’s interesting as it to what it means for the royal family. Also something came up that I wanted to write about and when I started I couldn’t stop as my thoughts surprised me. It was in reaction to what Robert Downey Junior said about the stars of our future and his harsh words against influencers. I investigate the future of celebrity and you will be surprised at where I land. In the story I cover:

I also wanted to get this to you early as I’m attempting to do give you a special edition on the Met Ball tomorrow morning so wanted to clear my head of all my regular celebrity thoughts. Yes this is a thing…

The full essay on the future of celebrity is behind the oh so reasonably priced pay wall ($5.99 a month) but the rest is free. Enjoy.

If you have any celebrity tips or story ideas you’d like me to investigate, please reply to the email. Enjoy!

Buckingham Palace announced this morning (May 4) that Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank are expecting their third child, due this summer. The statement confirmed that their sons August, five, and Ernest, two, are "very excited," and that King Charles has been informed and is "delighted." Eugenie shared a photo on Instagram of her two boys holding an ultrasound scan, captioned "Baby Brooksbank due 2026." The announcement comes as Eugenie's father, Prince Andrew, remains embroiled in serious legal trouble following his arrest earlier this year, and her mother Sarah Ferguson has spent months in hiding, most recently tracked to a mountain resort in the Austrian Alps. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: In the middle of what has arguably been the most turbulent period in the York family's already turbulent history, Eugenie just reminded everyone that life insists on continuing. A new baby, announced by Buckingham Palace with the King's blessing, is quietly but unmistakably a signal that she and her family have not been written out of the royal story. Andrew may be a scandal, but Eugenie has always been something different: a woman who built a real career, a real marriage, and is now building a real family, right through the chaos.

Cast your mind back six months. Formerly Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office , Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir landed like a bomb , and the monarchy’s approval ratings were wobbling. Republic, the anti-monarchist group, was having its best season in years. The institution felt genuinely fragile.

Then came this week on top of the pregnancy news.

• King Charles’s Washington state visit, crowned by an address to Congress, played globally as a masterclass in soft power

• William and Kate marked their 15th wedding anniversary with a warm social media post that reminded the world exactly why the Wales family remains the monarchy’s most valuable asset

• Two days later they introduced Otto, their new cocker spaniel, in a sunlit garden photograph with three beaming children

• Princess Charlotte turned 11, marked with a daisy field portrait and a beach video montage that between them told the whole Wales story: royal and human, formal and ordinary, institution and family

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: None of this is accidental. Charles handles the statecraft. William and Kate supply the warmth. The puppy, the daisies, and the 11-year-old in a striped jumper do the rest. The monarchy’s greatest survival tool has never been ceremony or tradition. It has always been the ability to make the public feel something uncomplicated and good at precisely the right moment. After 29 years covering the royals, I can tell you this week was that moment, engineered to near perfection.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Whitney Leavitt made an announcement during her final Broadway performance in Chicago on Sunday night, revealing she is officially exiting the hit Hulu show, TMZ reported. Video showed her making the announcement onstage, which was met with a roar of cheers and applause from the crowd.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The jump from reality TV to prestige reality TV with Dancing With The Stars and then to Broadway and then using the Broadway stage to close the reality TV chapter is impressive. The standing ovation was not for her Chicago character, it was for the reinvention.

Nick Cannon Admits a "Double Standard" on Dating for His Twins, Internet Erupts

Nick Cannon told The TMZ Podcast that while his 15-year-old son Moroccan with Mariah Carey has been dating with his encouragement, he applies an entirely different standard to his daughter Monroe. "First of all, it's absolutely a double standard," Nick admitted, "and I know I get in trouble a lot 'cause I say things with my chest." He added that Monroe had struck a deal with him: she must explain what will happen on dates before being allowed to go. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Nick Cannon, a man who has fathered twelve children with six women, is now the gatekeeper of his daughter's dating life. Patriarchy, even when it comes wrapped in protectiveness, is ironic and doesn't go unnoticed by the internet.

North West, 12, dropped her debut EP N0rth4evr on Gamma Records this week, launching it with a pop-up at Complex LA. The project runs six tracks across 11 minutes — rage-rap, nu-metal, hyperpop and Japanese digital culture colliding in a sound that, frankly, no one saw coming at this level. She self-produced every track. Rolling Stone noted that she traverses the sonic styles of her generation with startling confidence and The Fader observed that it rarely feels like it’s relying on famous riches to shore up her artistic persona, and that West leans on every resource available in an effort to deliver 12 minutes of fine-tuned pandemonium. Kanye and Bianca Censori attended the Complex LA launch in person. Kim stayed home.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The resources are undeniable. Gamma Records, expensive samples, a team of engineers, a Complex LA launch event, this is infrastructure most adult artists spend years trying to access. And yet the reviews are treating it as a genuine artistic statement, not a vanity project. It must have been Kanye’s weekend, and as parenting moments go, showing up counts. Whether Kim’s absence was scheduling or something more considered is hard to say, but the optics put dad firmly in the front row. At 12, North West already understands something essential: the only nepo baby sin is wasting the head start.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The BBC announced the full lineup for The Celebrity Traitors season 2, filming this summer at Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands .And the cast has established prestige TV and movies stars including Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen, Richard E. Grant, James Blunt, and Jerry Hall, the model and actress formerly married to both Mick Jagger and Rupert Murdoch. Claudia Winkleman returns as host. Season 1 averaged 14.9 million viewers and ended with comedian Alan Carr winning for Neuroblastoma UK.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The Brits resisted the celebrity take on this show for four seasons until trying the format with celebrities to huge success. British celebrity reality television has quietly become the most prestigious version of the genre in the world. There is no American equivalent where you'd get an Oscar-nominated actor and a rock star's ex-wife, competing under the same roof for charity. The casting of Jerry Hall alone is inspired. The show’s secret is that it is intellectually respectable, and the best talent will sign up. In America the show so far only attracts predominantly reality stars which will be tough to improve on but who knows, American TV and film stars may look towards the UK and see what fun they are having and how it’s improving careers and images. 

Ashley Graham spoke candidly to Marie Claire about the soaring popularity of GLP-1 weight loss injections, saying the phenomenon is "really disheartening" given her years of advocacy for body acceptance and self-worth beyond size. Graham has been one of the most prominent voices in the body positivity movement for over a decade. Her comments come as the body positivity conversation is being actively reframed in mainstream media and entertainment, with many former advocates now openly discussing their own use of weight-loss medication.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Ashley Graham's discomfort here is genuine and worth sitting with. She built her platform on the idea that bodies are acceptable as they are, and now a pharmaceutical shortcut is reshaping the very landscape she was navigating. The deeper cultural question isn't whether GLP-1s are good or bad. It's whether the body positivity movement was ever really about self-acceptance, or whether it was a temporary truce that lasted exactly as long as the alternative was unavailable.

“Middle of Nowhere", Musgraves' sixth studio album has folks transfixed by a track called "Dry Spell," in which she documented a 335-day stretch of celibacy in terms that her grandmother reportedly did not appreciate, she told Sin this week's cover story. "I've never talked about self-pleasure before," she said. "So that's a first for me." She confirmed to Variety the drought ultimately crossed the one-year-and-a-half mark before breaking, and teased she may update the lyric count when performing live. Musgraves has called this her most honest and personal album, written during her first extended period of singlehood as an adult.

She is hardly alone in her dry spell confessional. Kacey joins a surprisingly long list of A-listers who have gone public with their celibacy, each for their own compelling reasons. Lenny Kravitz confirmed in May 2024 he had been celibate for nine years calling it "a spiritual thing." Julia Fox declared in May 2024 that she had been celibate for two and a half years, framing her abstinence as an act of political resistance following the rollback of reproductive rights, Halle Berry spent four years solo and celibate before meeting her now-fiancé Van Hunt, using the time to, in her own words, "sit myself down and be alone and grow and reflect and realize my value." S Tiffany Haddish, characteristically, made the announcement funny, confirming on Jay Shetty's podcast that she had gone celibate and declaring, "I am the prize and these dudes gotta qualify."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway:. Celibacy used to be a religious statement. Now it is increasingly a conscious act of self-preservation, and a generation of women is leading the charge. The Kinsey Institute recently found that more than one in three Gen Z single adults now claim the label

Tara Lipinski, 43, revealed on May 1 that her surrogate experienced a pregnancy loss during the second trimester while carrying her and husband Todd Kapostasy's second child. The announcement came just hours after she had appeared on the Today Show to share that she was trying for another baby, and was made, she explained, because she had just returned from Washington, D.C., where she had been on Capitol Hill advocating for IVF access — and realized on the plane home that she had to speak. Lipinski and Kapostasy welcomed their daughter Georgie via surrogate in October 2023, following a five-year fertility journey that included four miscarriages, 24 surgeries, eight egg retrievals, and six failed transfers. Their second surrogacy journey had already hit significant setbacks — their first surrogate, who carried Georgie, was not medically cleared to proceed, requiring them to start over entirely. The road then included medical clearance challenges, a failed embryo transfer, and ultimately the second-trimester loss. She still has embryos remaining and has made clear her intention to continue, telling Maria Shriver, "I joke — we're going to use all five of those embryos."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Tara Lipinski turned private grief  into one of the most consistent acts of public advocacy in celebrity culture. The fact that she disclosed this loss the same day she was on Capitol Hill fighting for IVF and reframed her own story as something that happened to her, but as something she is using to help others, is powerful.

Tom Holland, 29, has opened up about his sobriety journey, telling USA Today that drinking was "ultimately really getting in the way of my professional life" before he quit in January 2022 after a challenging Dry January that alarmed him. "All I could think about was having a drink," he said. The Spider-Man actor said his problem was that he would start with one drink and then just go too far, and the realization prompted him to stop entirely. He has since launched his non-alcoholic beer brand Bero, and reflected, "I've been so lucky in the last four years that my career has really blossomed in a really lovely way, and I really don't know how much of that would've come to fruition had I still been drinking." His sobriety has also influenced those around him. "All of my friends have really slowed down drinking," he told E! News. "I had all my mates over the other night. I don't think anyone had a drop of alcohol."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The cultural shift in young men's relationship with alcohol has been significant in the last decade. Celebrities talking openly about their challenges can have a big impact because other people model the change first — and Holland is proof that the ripple effect is real.

Robert Downey Jr. did not hold back on the April 26 episode of the Conversations for Our Daughters podcast. “When I hear people talk about, ‘Oh, the stars of the future are going to be influencers,’” he said, “I go, ‘I don’t know what world you’re living in, but I think that that is absolute horses—.” The 61-year-old Oscar winner, who took home Best Supporting Actor for Oppenheimer in 2024, added that he hoped younger generations would focus on developing skills and producing meaningful work rather than chasing attention on social media.

He is both right and wrong…