What The Perez Hilton Incident Made Me Admit About My Own Job

Today’s newsletter is based off a difficult news event, and it took me a week to report and frame it in a way that sat right with me. It’s more personal than what I usually publish here, but I hope you take something away from it. I’m not covering what happened to Perez Hilton directly, that’s still unfolding but it got me thinking about something I’ve been sitting with privately for a while, and I decided to finally write it down.

On a lighter note, the big interview to break this week was Brad Pitt’s chat with Esquire. Two things stood out: he revealed he’s drinking again after seven years sober, and he opened up about a period of suicidal ideation. Both serious subjects, but he handled one of them far more responsibly than the other, and I break down why on YouTube. Click the image below to watch, and please consider subscribing while you’re there

Last week, a concerning story broke about the journalist and content creator Mario Lavandeira, AKA Perez Hilton, with a social media shocking livestream involving self harm, a police response in Miami, and real worry from people close to him about his wellbeing. He is now in hospital. I'm not going to report on his specific situation here. I know Perez, we've crossed paths for more than 20 years in this business and were once close but disagreed fundamentally about how to treat celebrities and operated in very different ways, but it isn't really why I'm holding back. I do sometimes write about a public figure's hardest moments when there's genuinely something to learn from them, once the dust has settled and preferably once the person themselves has had a chance to shape how their own story gets told. This isn't that. This is still unresolved, and it's his story to tell, not mine. There has been reporting on what led to this incident, with theories and anonymous sourcing pointing to financial struggles, guilt over his past treatment of celebrities, and even claims that he faked it for attention. But anyone who has been close to someone going through a mental health crisis knows that logic and cause and effect aren't linear. The one thing I will say with confidence contributed to this incident is his absorption into a life dominated by being online. So I want to focus on that, and on what we can learn from the broader cultural issues that contributed to this brutal incident, because it got me thinking about something bigger after talking to experts.

"Perez Hilton's most recent crisis shows us how dangerous and potentially deadly the machinery of celebrity has become," says Dr. Paul Hokemeyer. "It also shows that depression, shame, impulse dysregulation, and crisis states are universal human experiences. Just because a celebrity has millions of followers doesn't immunize them from the pain of life."

The difference, he says, is that for social media celebrities specifically, there's no line left between the personal and the professional. "It is their allowing us into their inner world that simultaneously creates their celebrity while compounding their vulnerability," Hokemeyer says. "The trouble is, their audiences don't see them as humans. They see them as fictions, characters on a stage playing out a narrow and expected role."

And it's a machinery I've started to feel the smaller gears of myself. Below, what thirty years on the other side of the notebook didn't prepare me for, and the one thing that's made it survivable.

It's the actual toll of building a life and career in public, and I've been living a much smaller version of that same pressure myself, and even the small version has been harder than I expected.

I spent the better part of thirty years assigning other people's stories about fame and its cost. I was trained to never take a photo with a celebrity and hide behind a byline and not make yourself part of the story at all. What I didn't fully expect, until I put myself front and center with Celebrity Intelligence, was how much of that cost would land on me directly.

To be fair, I've never been entirely hands off about my own life on social media. I share the occasional vacation photo with my husband, a meal I've made that I'm proud of and that doesn't look a mess, a night out where I don’t look a mess… and plenty of my dog Misty Day, a bit less of my cats, sorry Mikey and Gus. But there's no relationship drama, no family conflict, nothing beyond the ordinary glimpses of a life. And it still gets to me. Now that I post more often, the feedback is constant. Some of it is genuinely lovely, people building a real relationship with what I write and say, and that part has been a gift I didn't see coming. But a lot of it isn't. I've had hurtful, deliberately cruel messages, and once, an actual threat of physical violence. I'd have called myself pretty thick skinned going in, thirty years in newsrooms will do that to you. I've still felt it wear on me in ways I didn't expect.

There have been times I've dreaded filming a video and just wanted to hide under the duvet. Even working 70 hour weeks at Us Weekly and People, I could still find a day a week where I didn't have to read about celebrities and pop culture. Now I can't afford that time, that escape. The comments have made me feel shameful at times, when people write "who cares" or "get a proper job," when I know I'm doing my job with a better moral compass than most in my industry.

I'm not writing this to complain. If anything, this job has given me something I didn't have for most of my career. For decades I was writing under a masthead, filtering everything I actually thought through what a brand would allow, what a legal team would sign off on, what a boss would tolerate. Now I get to just say what I think. That's been genuinely freeing, but freedom cuts both ways and the same lack of a filter that lets me speak for myself also means nothing sits between me and the response when it comes.

For a long stretch of my career, overseeing upward of 200 stories a day across major entertainment titles, I noticed something impossible to ignore: it felt like we were covering the death of an influencer or content creator every few days. Not the occasional headline. A recurring assignment. Names like Cheslie Kryst, the former Miss USA turned Extra correspondent, and Stephen "tWitch" Boss, the DJ and dancer from The Ellen DeGeneres Show, are the ones a mainstream audience might recognize. But there were dozens more the wider public never clocked: Desmond Amofah, the YouTuber known as Etika, and fitness creator Chris O'Donnell among them, each ruled a suicide, each with an audience in the hundreds of thousands who watched them build a following and then watched them disappear. At the time it just registered as a grim beat. Looking back, it was a symptom of something much bigger than any single story could hold.

The numbers back up what I was seeing. A 2025 study by Creators 4 Mental Health, surveying more than 500 full and part-time creators across North America, found 65% experience anxiety or depression tied directly to their work, and 62% report burnout. Only 8% describe their own mental health as excellent, dropping to 4% among people five years or more into this work, which tells you the toll compounds rather than fades. One in ten reported suicidal thoughts specifically tied to their work, nearly double the national adult rate. A separate 2025 report from Billion Dollar Boy found 52% of creators have experienced burnout, and 37% have considered leaving the profession altogether.

I put some of this to Jake Clay, a New York-based content creator about a year and a half into full-time posting, a sharp observer of work culture and genuinely funny (you should follow him here). He'd already landed on the same word I keep coming back to. "You think you're an entrepreneur, but you really do still have a boss," he told me, "because it's the algorithm. You are still being judged and getting feedback, no matter how many followers you have."

Dr. Judith Joseph, a psychiatrist who studies the condition, has a name for what a lot of us in this position end up doing instead of breaking down. Joseph isn't just observing this from the outside, she was named to TIME's 2026 list of the 100 most influential creators, the only physician to make the list, which means she's built and sustained her own public-facing platform while researching the exact toll it takes. "High functioning depression is when people show signs of depression, like low energy, low joy in things they used to enjoy, guilt, changes in sleep, changes in appetite, poor concentration, hopelessness," she says. "But instead of breaking down, they over-perform, they overwork in order to cope. They don't get the help they need because they look pathologically productive."

It's worse for public-facing work specifically, she says, not incidental to it. "Their identity and sense of self is so intertwined with their ability to show up and perform with a brave face" that stopping doesn't feel like an option. "They don't feel safe enough to ask for help or rest when they need it. They wear a mask of pathological productivity."

Here's why I think this work costs what it does, from my own experience and from what the research bears out:

"In this case, Perez's audience was confused," Hokemeyer says. "Given his extreme character, the audience wasn't sure if they were witnessing clickbait or a genuine crisis. And here lies the central problem: social media, with its crassness, has created a culture where the fastest way to be seen is to be witnessed falling apart." Attention, he says, has become the only currency guaranteed to convert into views. "The antidote for this unfortunate state of affairs isn't more scrutiny of the person breaking down. It's fewer incentives that reward the breaking."

So what actually helps? A few things I've picked up myself, some from creators further down this road than me.

None of that fixes the bigger structural problem. But it's the difference between carrying this weight and being flattened by it, and right now most people doing this job are handed no instruction manual on the difference at all.

This same work has also given me things I never had before, real independence, an actual voice, a direct relationship with readers who choose to be here. But doing it honestly, even carefully, even with thirty years of a thick skin behind me, still costs something. If it costs me something, with every advantage of experience behind me, I think often about what it costs the people doing this at nineteen, alone, with nobody ever having stood between them and the worst of what an audience can say.

Which brings me back to where I started. Whatever's actually going on with Perez Hilton this week, I hope he's okay, and I hope he has people around him who can hold that for him properly, away from all of this, for as long as he needs.

If any part of this piece hits close to home for you personally, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741) are there if you need them.

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