One Body, Zero Agreement, and a Six Million Dollar Kiss

Good morning! Apologies for giving you a little less Celebrity Intelligence last week, I was in Greece and gave you one less email than normal. But it’s a good time for me to recoup as Hollywood, like most industries, slows down in the summer and the royals for sure take a break. Here’s what I find compelling in this world over the last few days. In today's edition: the internet (and society overall) can't agree on how to talk about Ariana Grande's body, a Wachtell partner's affair just cost him a career-defining move, a comedian's joke about a "PR relationship" turned out to be half true, and American Idol turns 25 without the culture that used to make its winners famous.

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The latest flashpoint in the ongoing conversation about Ariana Grande’s body is the video for “Petal,” the title track off her new album, released July 31. Directed by Christian Breslauer, the video casts Grande as Pepper, an aspiring actor auditioning for a role she’s told she isn’t good enough for, before the narrative turns violent as she takes a chainsaw to the panel of executives criticizing her. Stills from the video where she is slimmest are circulating on social media and causing outrage.

That video landed inside a conversation that was already heated. Grande’s health has been a live topic since her Eternal Sunshine tour opened in June, with fans openly speculating about an eating disorder that has never been publicly diagnosed or confirmed. Grande has addressed the scrutiny directly and repeatedly since 2023, most recently resharing a clip to her Instagram Story as a “loving reminder” in which she says commenting on someone’s looks, health, or “what’s going on behind the scenes” is dangerous. Three prominent voices in the body positivity space then took the debate in opposite directions this weekend. Tess Holliday, a plus-size model and longtime body acceptance advocate, posted that bodies aren’t public discourse and it’s time to retire the commentary era altogether. Days later, writer and eating disorder advocate Charlie Howard argued the opposite under recent tour footage, that the teams around Grande, family and management included, are enabling her illness by continuing to release content and put her on stage. 

Jameela Jamil waded into the same debate this weekend and drew immediate backlash of her own. The actress and activist, who has spoken openly about her own past struggles with anorexia, wrote online that Grande “is possibly dying right in front of us,” and argued the styling in the Petal video was built to draw attention to her thinness. She went further, calling it irresponsible for everyone around Grande not to steer her away from an image she said risks glamorizing the look for young fans. The reaction was swift, with critics accusing Jamil of body shaming under the guise of concern and arguing she was projecting her own history onto a woman she doesn’t know. Jamil pushed back on her Instagram Story, clarifying that she said “possibly,” not definitively, and said she felt for Grande, having nearly died of anorexia herself. She added that her real concern isn’t Grande reading the comments, but the young girls watching who are.

Grande's team has now weighed in directly. A representative told People yesterday that Grande will be "taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour." "She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily, and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny," the rep continues. "This tour has been a beautiful experience for her. She loves her fans and has loved every minute of this tour so much." A source close to Grande adds that the show itself is demanding proof against the speculation, not evidence for it: "She performs a very physical show, and there is a lot of athleticism involved. She performs healthily and successfully at a very high level night after night."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The mainstream press mostly learned, over the last decade, to follow Ariana’s guidance and stop commenting on women’s bodies. Most magazines don’t run “best and worst beach body” spreads anymore, at least not the ones still standing. But social media never got that memo, and if anything the discourse has gotten more brutal and clinical, with strangers now diagnosing eating disorders in real time under video clips the way they used to just call women fat. Jamil, Holliday, and Howard are all coming at this from genuine concern and landing in three different places, with opposite theories of harm reduction: one says the industry needs to stay quiet and let women exist, one says naming it publicly is the only responsible thing left to do, and the other says silence has a body count too, and that looking away isn’t the same as being kind. Ironically the video’s audition framing in “Petal” seems to be a meta commentary on the entertainment industry’s physical scrutiny of women, with the panel’s notes in the video, including  “could stand to lose a few pounds,” so it doubles as a dig at the exact commentary Grande has spent years asking people to stop making. And from following stories like these for years, some of the stills already circulating look doctored to me, sharpened at the waist and hollowed at the face beyond what's in the source footage, the same pattern that followed her Wicked press tour and last year's viral photo comparisons. Even a video built specifically to critique this scrutiny gets run back through the same distorting machine. There's something a little uncomfortable about writing a story whose entire subject is other people's takes on someone else's body while trying not to add another layer of commentary myself, but that tension is the story. Right now, a woman is telling audiences directly, in her own music video, exactly how she experiences this scrutiny, and the response has been to debate her body some more rather than her point.

If you’re reading this and any part of it hits close to home, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is there if you ever want to talk it through. 1-866-662-1235.

Nathaniel Cullerton has gone from one of the architects of Wachtell's defense of OpenAI against Elon Musk to a cautionary tale, and the price keeps climbing. The 45 year old litigation partner was placed on leave amid an internal firm investigation after footage surfaced of him kissing a junior colleague, 29 year old associate Kelsey Borenzweig, on a Central Park bench. The clip, shot by TikTok comedian Jay Guapo, has drawn close to 6 million views on TikTok and roughly 4 million more on Instagram, according to the New York Post.

The number that matters most to Cullerton's bank account though is the one that no longer exists. The Financial Times first reported that he had been part of a planned seven lawyer lateral move to Gibson Dunn led by star trial lawyer Bill Savitt, and that his hire was pulled once the video surfaced. The Blast, citing sources briefed on his pay, reported that as a Wachtell junior partner Cullerton was pulling down roughly four million dollars, and added that although the Gibson Dunn package was never disclosed, Wachtell likely would have countered with even more money to keep him. The Blast report continues that sources believe the scandal could cost him tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career. 

A legal insider who has worked with Cullerton, tells CI it's devastating timing for him. This week was supposed to be one of the biggest of his career, being part of a historic deal, and to have it fall apart from a foolish indiscretion is, in the source's word, mortifying.

But the biggest cost here isn't measured in a compensation package. It's to a family, and to Cullerton's wife Moira, who has been focusing on work and her family while the internet does the rest. Whatever happens with the internal review, Cullerton's own reputation is the one number nobody can put a figure on, and it's the one he'll be paying down the longest.

Actress and comedian Mary Beth Barone made a joke this week about being handed the chef from Emily in Paris, Lucas Bravo, like a consolation prize after her marketing budget request for her brilliant special Galaxy Brain got turned down. On Late Night with Seth Meyers in late July, she described Netflix telling her they could set her up in a PR relationship instead of a bigger promo budget, with their first date court side at a Knicks game back in March. It's funny because everyone in the industry recognized exactly what she was talking about, and because the two of them had already been seen together for real. Bravo and Barone were spotted together during Cannes Film Festival festivities at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, with video showing him affectionately rubbing her back as they stood close together chatting, and the pair were also photographed on a night out in Cannes. People ran it as its own story saying they sparked “romance rumors”, and Barone's deadpan bit only made it harder to tell where the joke ended and the real hangouts began. It's the idea that stars date to raise their profile, that two famous people together become more famous than the sum of their parts, and it's one of those theories that refuses to die because it is, occasionally, true. Hollywood publicist Jack Ketsoyan even went on record about it back in 2019, sitting down on an Australian podcast and explaining, plainly, how the machinery works.

Ketsoyan described what the industry calls “showmances”, romances engineered for hype rather than affection. Sometimes the goal was selling an album or a concert. Sometimes it was burying a bad opening weekend under a more interesting headline. He walked through one deal in detail: a male client with a movie taking on water in reviews, paired with a woman willing to sign on for a year, public appearances and photo ops scheduled in advance, both sides walking away clean once the press tour wrapped, no hard feelings, no extension. He was candid about the trade at the center of it too, that the woman in these arrangements typically goes from the bottom of the call sheet to leading lady practically overnight.

After nearly three decades in celebrity journalism, I am skeptical of the showmance as most people imagine it. I am close to celebrities and their publicists, and it does not happen nearly as often as the conspiracy minded corners of fandom believe. Calling these arrangements fake misses what is actually going on. People behind the scenes do introduce two clients to each other because they know it will raise both profiles and build something that benefits everyone involved. But the relationship itself, the actual time spent together, is not fabricated in the way people assume. Nobody is handing over a script. It is closer to a very well informed setup than a performance, the kind of introduction any good friend might make, except this friend also happens to know exactly how good it will look for both of their careers.

A fake relationship implies two people pretending to feel something they don't. What actually tends to happen is two real people meeting because someone in a position to know saw the advantage first, and then choosing, for their own reasons, to let it play out. Which in a sense is not so different from dating in the real world. You are looking for someone who benefits you, who makes you feel safe, happy and secure. These situations are not a lie so much as a very calculated matchmaking service, dressed up afterward as fate, or in Mary Beth Barone's case, dressed up afterward as a bit.

The one pairing in recent times I believe, without reservation after falling for it as real, was engineered for the press tour rather than born out of it, is Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson, who dated from roughly July 2025 to December 2025. They met filming The Naked Gun reboot in spring 2024, and by the time the press tour kicked off that July, the chemistry looked less like acting than something the world desperately wanted to be real. Anderson confirmed in December that they had briefly dated after wrapping the film, and by then it was already over, filed under friends. The truth sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle. There does seem to have been real feeling and a real connection between them. But it never got the chance to be properly explored on its own terms. It got swept up in a press cycle instead, PDA scheduled around premieres, a Today show bit where they pretended to be caught making out, all of it doing double duty as promotion for a movie that needed the noise. Whatever was actually there between two people who clearly liked each other got used by the press cycle around them, rather than given room to become something on its own.

ABC has confirmed American Idol returns for a milestone 25th season, with virtual auditions kicking off August 25 across all fifty states, Variety reports. Season 24 posted the franchise’s best premiere in four years. Which is odd, because I’d wager most of America couldn't name any of the last ten winners.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Back in 2002, the entire country tuned in to watch Kelly beat Justin, and everyone from your postman to your gran had an opinion on it. Same with Ruben and Clay a year later. That’s the bit people forget when they get nostalgic for talent shows, it was never really about the singing but a shared Tuesday night, forty million people heading to their land lines to dial the same phone number and vote. We don’t have that anymore, and it’s not the show’s fault. We fractured into a thousand ways of viewing content, each one feeding us a slightly different pop star, and the monoculture that made those winners into actual stars simply isn’t there to catch them when they land.

You can see the split playing out with two very different recent experiments. KATSEYE, the girl group HYBE and Geffen built through the competition show Dream Academy, turned into a proper Netflix hit, then a proper touring act, with streaming numbers most Idol winners would sell a kidney for. Meanwhile Simon Cowell tried the exact same trick on The Next Act, assembled a seven piece boy band called December 10, and watched their debut single limp in at number 72 on the UK chart, shifting a genuinely brutal 6,300 copies in its first week. I loved the show but it didn’t work, it had the same format, but a wildly different fate, and the difference wasn’t talent. It was that KATSEYE arrived already fluent in the internet, built for TikTok clips and fan edits and parasocial closeness, while December 10 got the old fashioned television treatment and discovered the old fashioned television audience simply isn’t there in the numbers it used to be. That’s the real reason competition shows don’t hit like they did. It was never really about discovering talent, there’s talent everywhere. It was about all of us discovering it together in the same room, at the same time, on the same channel. That room moved to social media with TikTok comments and stan Twitter threads and group chats reacting to the same clip within minutes of each other, and that's still forty million people gathering, just no longer through a landline and on a network all at the same time. Any competition show that wants a Kelly Clarkson moment again has to build for that room from the start, not bolt a hashtag onto a format designed for appointment television and hope it travels. KATSEYE never had to retrofit anything. December 10 did, and the chart numbers are what happens when a show discovers the room it built for doesn't exist anymore.

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