The Mean Girl Is Dead. Paris Hilton Killed Her

This edition includes an essay from Celebrity Intelligence’s first ever guest writer. I’d like to thank India Oxenberg for giving me the weekend off and saving my marriage (joke) by giving us some quality time to catch up on The Comeback, Euphoria and my new guilty pleasure The Night Manager. 

India is the perfect contributor to Celebrity Intelligence as she has spent more time than most thinking about the gap between who people appear to be and who they actually are. The daughter of Dynasty actress and royal descendant Catherine Oxenberg, she grew up inside exactly the kind of rarefied celebrity world her essay examines. Then she survived NXIVM, a cult that weaponized the very dynamics she writes about here, using the promise of belonging and access to devastating effect. She came out the other side with a clarity about image, performance, and the human need to feel seen that most cultural critics simply haven’t earned. India is also the author of From Numb to Normal, a spoken word-inspired poetry collection about fear, identity, love, humor, and becoming yourself again.

India’s story below looks at why we put people on pedestals, and what it means that Paris Hilton is in an Old Navy ad and why we love it. The piece is behind in the paid tier so upgrade here.

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!

When big American stars visit London they are huge news, it’s like Greek gods landing on earth to mix with the mortals and anything they do is huge news and makes headlines in the British tabloids. Taylor and Travis visited this week to much excitement in the city and the itinerary included an evening at Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant, Lucky Cat, a West End performance of Romeo and Juliet starring Sadie Sink, and Poppy Delevingne's 40th birthday party, where also in attendance were Princess Beatrice, Princess Eugenie and Rita Ora. I am British and still know folks in London and some did hang out with Taylor during her trip but Taylor runs a tight ship and people are very tightlipped and won’t say anything beyond they were “very lovey dovey” and that “they love London.” One did go as far to clarify that Taylor and Travis didn’t meet either of the princesses; they were just at the party because Poppy’s sister Cara had suggested they pop by “It was very busy with about 350 in attendance Travis and Taylor were very friendly but didn’t meet Eugenie and Bea.” The only big headline from the trip is a report from The Sun that Taylor was there to plan a London wedding party at The Chiltern Firehouse in August. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Taylor Swift attending a birthday party with the King's nieces is, objectively, a strange and wonderful sentence to exist. But not that surprising as it’s just a case of having mutual friends in common. The lead-up to a major celebrity wedding has become its own cultural season. Every dinner, every outfit, every casual outing is now load-bearing content. I find it surprising that Taylor would be throwing a London wedding party on top of a regular wedding, she isn’t super connected to the city with deep friends and family there. Andre Balaz, the owner of the Chiltern Firehouse was at Poppy Delevingne's party but sources say he didn’t talk to Taylor and that the Chiltern Firehouse is months away from being open again. This report feels like tabloid guessing games to me.

Ne-Yo’s Radical Honesty Has Cost Him Work

On the May 7 episode of the Sorry We’re Cyrus podcast, Ne-Yo told hosts Tish and Brandi Cyrus that his polyamorous relationship with three women has cost him deals. “There are people upset. There’s deals that I missed out on because they’re like, ‘I don’t know if we can get behind the whole polyamorous thing,’” he said.  He has framed the arrangement as a lesson learned from his very public divorce from Crystal Renay.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Ne-Yo chose radical transparency over a comfortable lie, and discovered the advertising industry prefers the pretense ​​​​​​of conventionality.

Over a decade after Sting first announced he wouldn't be leaving his six children much of his estimated hundreds-of-millions fortune, he confirmed that position is unchanged in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning. He said "the worst thing you can do to a kid is to say, 'You don't have to work,'" adding: "I think that's a form of abuse that I hope I'm never guilty of." He has six children ranging in age from 30 to 49, including actress Mickey Sumner and musician Eliot Sumner. All, he says, have extraordinary work ethics.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The philosophy has logic behind it because children who grow up knowing there is no inheritance to wait for tend to build lives of their own rather than hovering in wealthy suspension, untethered from purpose or consequence. That absence of a role, of something genuinely yours to work toward, can be quietly corrosive in ways that are hard to name but easy to see in the children of the very rich. But there is a crucial asterisk Sting glosses over with a joke. His children grew up with world-class educations, famous parents, industry connections most people could not buy, and the quiet confidence that comes from never worrying about the rent. The shoes on their feet he mentions were very good shoes. Telling your children they must work when failure carries no real consequences is a different proposition from the working-class Newcastle scarcity that he credits as his own foundation but still a sensible one.

At 87, Maury Povich has spent the last couple of years helping a New York Times writer craft his advance obituary, which he says is now written and ready. But one thing left him "very pissed off," he told the Founder's Story podcast: when he finally asked the writer if he could see it, the answer was no. The New York Times confirmed their policy, stating that obituaries are "only finalized and published after the subjects are deceased." Povich's response? "Well, then if that's the case, let's have the funeral right now so that everybody can stand up and say all these things about me and I can listen."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: There is something deeply, specifically Maury about this. A man who built an entire career on revealing uncomfortable truths to people in real time, on live television, is now furious that he cannot access the one uncomfortable truth about himself that has already been written. The New York Times policy is the same as any journalistic outline writing about its subject in an obit or not.

On Mother's Day weekend, Kevin McEnroe, 39, son of Oscar winner Tatum O'Neal and tennis legend John McEnroe, published an essay on The Small Bow titled "Dear Tatum" that ranks among the most raw pieces of writing about a celebrity parent and addiction. He recalled his mother sending him to buy her cigarettes as a child, him throwing away her drugs, and her offering him a line, adding "I'm your mother." He wrote of splitting her identity in two: his mom, who showed up when she was clean, and "Tatum," the version that addiction created. Kevin, who had been in treatment himself, writes that he moved through alcohol to cocaine to painkillers while spending years telling himself he was nothing like her. He was wrong, and the essay turns on that realization. "I'm so lucky that I'm like you," he wrote, "because I get it now. Because I empathize, I can forgive." 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The children of famous addicts rarely get to tell their side without it becoming a tabloid grievance piece. Kevin McEnroe managed to create a letter that holds his mother fully accountable and loves her completely at the same time.

NBC greenlit four new scripted shows for its 2026-27 season, including a Rockford Files reboot starring David Boreanaz. Notably, all eight pilots NBC shot this year were filmed in the US, with three shot on the Universal lot in Los Angeles amid a broader industry trend of productions leaving the city. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Hollywood studios shooting in Hollywood is now a headline. The production exodus from LA has become so normalized that staying feels like a statement. 

King Charles filmed a short video at Balmoral Castle to mark Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, in which woodland animals including an eagle, a fox, a red squirrel, and an otter deliver a handwritten royal birthday card across the nation. Charles recalled a seven-decade friendship with Attenborough that began when nine-year-old Prince Charles visited the set of BBC’s Zoo Quest in 1958. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: When the king personally requests a red squirrel for your birthday video, you have lived a life of extraordinary consequence. Attenborough at 100 is a reminder that the most enduring fame is built not on notoriety but on making the world feel precious to the people watching.

Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning this week, Martin Short described his daughter Katherine's death by saying: "Mental health and cancer, like my wife's, are both diseases, and sometimes with diseases they are terminal. And my daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn't."

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: "She did the best she could until she couldn't" is the sentence. It removes blame, contains immense love, and reframes the death of a child from a failure of intervention to a disease that finally won. That Short found this language in grief, rather than in therapy jargon, says something significant about where his mind has been these past months.