Is it Sexist to Follow the Alex Cooper & Alix Earle Feud?

The entertainment world is crackling this week — big projects, bigger events, fresh casting news, and the kind of stories that make you stop scrolling. I’ve tried to focus on the ones that actually mean something, though I’ll admit a few just made me giggle.

A warm welcome to everyone who joined this week, and a particular thank you to those who upgraded to the paid tier for the Harry and Meghan deep dive. It means a lot.

Today’s edition has two stories behind the paid tier: a special report on the Michael Jackson biopic and an analysis of whether there’s a sexism story buried inside the Alix Earle and Alex Cooper fallout. Everything else is free.​​​​

In this edition we also cover:

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

Ciara Miller Dances to ABC… Could The Bachelorette Be Next?

Ciara Miller and Maura Higgins have been announced as the first contestants for Dancing With the Stars Season 35, with the Summer House star becoming one of the most buzzed-about names in the early casting reveal.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: For Ciara Miller, this is a significant moment and a clear signal that her star is genuinely on the rise. Dancing With the Stars books people the network believes audiences will invest in, root for, and follow for weeks. Getting cast this early in the announcement cycle, before the full roster is revealed, suggests ABC sees her as one of the names capable of generating real heat. She arrived on Summer House as a striking presence, but the recent house drama has transcended her beyond the Bravo bubble, and has been steadily accumulating the kind of mainstream visibility that separates reality personalities who fade from those who cross over. And here’s where it gets interesting — with Ciara now under the ABC umbrella and demonstrating exactly the warmth, relatability and audience connection that the network prizes, it could be a potential dance step towards my prediction that she’d be a perfect fit for the Bachelorette. The franchise has a long history of pulling from its own ecosystem, and a woman who can hold a ballroom audience’s attention for weeks on end is precisely the kind of lead that makes the whole apparatus work.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz: A Ring Has Been Spotted

Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz, who have been dating since late 2025, sparked engagement rumors this week after an onlooker told The Sun that Kravitz was wearing “an absolutely huge” diamond on her left ring finger during a coffee date in London, with Styles spotted kissing her outside her hotel. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Calm down everyone. Yes there is a photo of a ring but there is no real evidence that this has happened, I hate to be a gossip cop but it’s all just hot air. Neither has confirmed anything and no friends have even said they are close to this. To me it looks like costume jewelry or a ring and probably a ring she’s bought for herself and it’s on the wrong hand... The development does follow Styles telling Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in March that he had done some honest self-reflection: “I want a family. I want to be fulfilled.” In a 2024 interview with Esquire, Zoe stated when asked about whether she wanted kids, "I was waiting for this light to go off in my head, and it never did.”

Miami Vice Comes Back With A List Talent

Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler have officially closed their deals to star in a Miami Vice movie, according to Deadline, ending months of rumor and speculation.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The casting of these two particular actors says as much about where Hollywood thinks the market is as it does about the project itself. Jordan and Butler are both men who have spent years doing the patient work of repositioning — Jordan shedding his superhero adjacency through the Creed franchise, Butler essentially willing himself into a new tier of stardom through an Elvis performance that could have been a stunt but wasn’t. Miami Vice carries enough cultural cachet and nostalgic affection to justify serious talent and enough name recognition to open internationally without explanation. The real test will be whether the film leans into Michael Mann’s original aesthetic — cool, melancholy, genuinely cinematic — or flattens it into a standard cheesy action vehicle. With talent this carefully curated, the expectation will be the former. But Hollywood has a long history of assembling the right cast for the wrong version of the movie.

Mike Vrabel Finally Speaks And Says Everything by Saying Essentially Nothing

New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel broke his three-week silence on Tuesday over Page Six photos showing him holding hands with former NFL reporter Dianna Russini at an Arizona luxury hotel. Both are married to other people. Russini had already resigned from The Athletic. At Gillette Stadium, Vrabel told reporters, per NBC News, that he has “had some difficult conversations with people that I care about,” and that “that starts with me.” He never said Russini’s name once. NBC Sports noted pointedly that his statement was “a sharp departure” from his initial insistence that the photos were “laughable” and “innocent.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: This story showed a new world of celebrity gossip. Page Six was calm and measured in its reporting and presented just the facts and didn’t scream “there was an affair”. when they clearly weren’t sure. This shows restraint and better journalism than in years gone by in this genre. There is a stark gender asymmetry in how this story has been resolved. The man retains his job, issues a careful statement, and pivots to the NFL Draft. The woman loses hers and writes a resignation letter defending her career. The story is not about football.

Law Roach Had to Sit Upright on a Plane and the Internet Was Not Sympathetic.

Celebrity stylist Law Roach, best known for his work with Zendaya, posted a complaint on X on Monday reading: “Dear Delta, I’m Delta 360 and a Million Miler. This morning I paid for a Delta One seat from NYC to LA and when I got on the plane it was not a lay flat seat. I was very disappointed.” Delta told TMZ the aircraft change was made for an on-time departure and that their customer care team had reached out. The internet, meanwhile, was decidedly unimpressed. One widely shared response: “Lawwww please. People can’t afford groceries rn.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: We all hate uncomfortable air travel and yes you can grumble but Law it’s probably better to send an email to Delta instead of making your first world (and first class) problems public. The celebrity complaint tweet has a very narrow runway (pun intended). The grievance must be either genuinely outrageous or self-deprecating. Publicly identifying yourself as a million-miler in the first sentence of a lay-flat complaint, in an economy currently generating significant economic anxiety, is a masterclass in misjudging the room (or Delta One Lounge).

Eminem Posts a Coin and Gives Hope

On Monday, Eminem marked 18 years of sobriety with a single Instagram post: a photo of his gold recovery chip engraved with “unity, service, recovery” and the Roman numerals XVIII. The 53-year-old previously told Rolling Stone he had been taking pills “to feel normal,” and that rebuilding his brain post-recovery meant having to relearn how to rap.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Eminem is one of the most guarded figures in music — rarely posting anything personal, rarely sharing, rarely letting the public past the work. That’s what makes this moment land so hard. A single image, no caption, no performance of vulnerability,  just the chip. For anyone quietly fighting the same battle, that kind of witness from someone at his level helps others going through struggles to feel less alone and gives hope.

Charles Gets Emotional, Poetic, and Oddly Relatable

In his recorded video tribute marking his mother’s centenary, King Charles told the nation “much about the times we now live in, I suspect, may have troubled her deeply,” before finding solace in her belief that “a brighter dawn is never far from the horizon.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: It was classic Charles: elegiac, slightly anxious, sincerely felt. Sometimes the most powerful thing a public figure can do is admit that the world feels frightening. The king who spent decades being perceived as out of touch has, after facing his own mortality with his cancer battle, quietly become one of the more emotionally honest voices in public life.

The A List Wedding Of The Year So Far! Jack Quaid and Claudia Doumit Get Married

Jack Quaid, son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, reportedly married his Boys costar Claudia Doumit in a private ceremony at Mona Farm in Braidwood, Australia on April 18, with the guest list including Tom Hanks, Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, and Henry Golding.  The couple danced their first dance to Donovan’s Atlantis, and Dennis Quaid, who is divorced from Meg Ryan, reportedly played piano and sang at the reception.  The local Nepalese restaurant Smokey Horse confirmed the marriage on Instagram after hosting the wedding party, writing: “What a beautiful couple you two make.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: There is something genuinely charming about A-list Hollywood descending on a small Australian town with 1,800 residents and then getting post-wedding Nepalese food before the place spilled the news on Instagram. The fantasy of a truly secret celebrity wedding remains just that. In 2026, the restaurant always talks

Leo DiCaprio Sends Pasta. No, Really.

After roasting Leonardo DiCaprio at the Golden Globes in January, Nikki Glaser told The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon on April 21 that she sends flowers to every celebrity she mocks as a thank-you for being good sports. DiCaprio was the only one who sent something back: three baskets of pasta, a callback to her joke about a 1991 Teen Beat profile in which the then-teenage actor revealed his favorite food was “pasta, pasta, and more pasta.”   Glaser joked to Fallon that she momentarily wondered if Leo was flirting, before concluding: “The type of girl he goes for, he wouldn’t send pasta to. It was dry pasta.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The gift is doing a lot of work here. DiCaprio, who almost never engages with the press about his personal life, just deployed a witty, self-aware response that costs him nothing (well maybe $50. It depends on the size of the baskets!) and makes him look charming. It’s a masterclass in soft image rehab. Humor, when wielded correctly, is the most underrated PR tool in Hollywood.

Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence Are Now Grandfathers-in-Law

Eddie Murphy confirmed at the American Film Institute Achievement Award ceremony on April 18, exclusively to E! News, that his son Eric and Martin Lawrence’s daughter Jasmin have welcomed a baby girl named Ari Skye. “They just had her two weeks ago, or a week ago,” Eric and Jasmin married in May 2025, having announced their relationship to considerable delight from both families. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: I could pretend to come up with something here but to be honest, there isn’t one,  I just found this sweet and surprising and worth including!

Bethenny Frankel waded into the Alex Cooper and Alix Earle drama this week with a message that sounded eminently reasonable on the surface: stop pitting successful women against each other. “People are picking sides, making assumptions about things they don’t know. You would never have this with men.”