A QUARANTINED STAR IS BORN…
The woman lived in New York City, had a career in fashion, and was not the sort you’d expect to be alone on a Saturday night. She considered weeknights superior for nightlife, as seasoned New Yorkers often do. Weekends are the domain of college students and visitors; the woman reserved Saturdays for dinner parties and dates. But on March 21, 2020, New York was in COVID-19’s thrall. The governor had announced a statewide stay-at-home order, so the woman stayed in. To entertain herself, she posted a request on Instagram: “celeb stories (first or second hand) you are willing to share.”
At the time her account, @deuxmoi, had 45,000 followers—holdovers from a short-lived style blog that the woman had launched, with a friend, six years prior. (The blog’s name was nonsense French “because that’s obviously the most chic language,” the pair said in 2015.) The site no longer existed, but the woman still used the Instagram account to share stylish photos, pop-culture memes, and “to bitch and complain about dating & share celeb gossip,” as she once wrote. That Saturday, the woman says, she received a direct message about Leonardo DiCaprio’s sex life. She took a screenshot and posted it. Then there was a story about Jonah Hill. Then a DM, she has said, from one of Hill’s alleged ex-girlfriends. The woman spent the weekend sharing the contents of her inbox: “I’ve been to SoulCycle with David Beckham”; “I met Jim Gaffigan in a bar”; someone knew a model who met a famous actor at a party. “They chatted for maybe under a minute, and he whispered, ‘What would you do if I licked your ear right now?’ ”
For the next nine months, she would solicit and share unverified celebrity gossip nearly every day. By the end of 2020, @deuxmoi would have 530,000 followers, including some people she gossiped about, such as models Gigi and Bella Hadid. “It was just a domino effect,” the woman said in a phone interview in November. She read hundreds of daily submissions and would select a few dozen to post in @deuxmoi’s Instagram Story, where the tales would be available for 24 hours before vanishing. She published the stories anonymously and verbatim, always as screenshots. Sometimes she broke news. She posted about Scarlett Johansson marrying comedian Colin Jost and covered a sex scandal at Hollywood-friendly megachurch Hillsong. She shared a tip about Zoë Kravitz and her husband splitting, the speculation “based on noticeable changes in their Instagram habits”; a few hours later, Kravitz’s rep confirmed the divorce to People magazine. But the woman also published contradictory rumors and some she believed to be false, including a claim that Harry Styles hooked up with Tracee Ellis Ross, which E! News later discussed. The woman herself became the subject of stories in The New York Times, the Daily Mail, Vice, Vox, Grazia, Elle, the Daily Beast, the Federalist, and the Cut. People she gossiped about would be gossiping about her.
With New York City on lockdown, the woman worked from home from March to July—but spent much of her time working on @deuxmoi, sometimes until three in the morning. When she returned to working in her office, she continued posting. Every morning, she would rise early to review hundreds—sometimes thousands—of requests to follow the account, which she’d set to private. (She approved most, other than bots and obviously fake accounts.) Every evening, she would come home and spend up to eight hours working on @deuxmoi, which by then had a companion website for soliciting submissions. But the work product remained exclusive to Instagram Stories.
“Statements made on this account have not been independently confirmed,” the handle’s Instagram bio read. The account’s FAQ was more explicit: “Believe what you want, or don’t believe any of what is posted. This was started for F-U-N.”
“Also, this is my private account so I can reveal or not reveal whatever the FUCK I want.”
Like any juicy gossip outlet, the account has dabbled in controversy. Tipsters sometimes operate as amateur paparazzi, sending candid shots taken across the United States and as far as Tel Aviv. The woman defended publishing an anecdote from an alleged former neighbor of Taylor Swift about scenes viewed through Swift’s kitchen window. (“I live in New York City,” the woman explained on pop-culture podcast Not Skinny but Not Fat. “You can fucking see into everyone’s apartment.”) Stories about celebrity sexual encounters are so common that, the woman told me, she was hoping for sponsorship from Trojan condoms. (“He figured out who I was by like the [second] time,” wrote a tipster who allegedly hooked up with an aging actor who, two decades prior, had slept with the tipster’s mother.) @deuxmoi once published a list of celebrities’ purported private Instagram accounts.
But the lion’s share of @deuxmoi gossip is banal. Whereas professional gossip outlets cultivate sources who may offer dozens of stories over the course of years, @deuxmoi can run through dozens of crowdsourced items in a single night. The net effect can sometimes feel like a chatty slumber party: “Lady Gaga’s hands felt like silk,” a fan said of a handshake. “Mila is super down to Earth and funny. Ashton obvs perfect,” wrote the friend of a pilot who allegedly flew the couple on a private airplane. “I met Emma Watson at a wedding,” someone claimed, “complimented my outfit and I almost fainted.” Written in frosting in a photo of a homemade cake: “I DMed John Mayer and he responded.”
Other times, @deuxmoi has a populist bent. Contributors have taken to task those who are rude to fans, dismissive of service employees, or unpleasant with hired help. A recurring feature called “Just the Tip” celebrates stars who award large gratuities and scolds misers. As stories accrued, the woman said by phone in November, her quarantine pastime “evolved into posting information that would make people accountable for their actions.”
But who holds @deuxmoi accountable? As the woman’s following grew, she increasingly relied on blind items—still posting user-submitted stories but with names and identifying details obscured: “A-list actor” had an affair with a woman who played his mother on film. “A-list singer” has a pregnancy kink. “A-list singer and sex symbol has hair plugs.” (She published 44 guesses about the last one, followed by a note from the original tipster: “Someone got it right.”) The woman explained to her readers: “I make some of the stories blind because sometimes the information given is sensitive. I have also said I do not research these stories, so if I am blocking out info, it is for a reason.”
“Also, idk maybe like use your brains a little and try to figure it out.” The woman’s fans did just that. Amateur sleuths routinely work together to solve blind items, often on Facebook and Reddit pages dedicated to the practice. The woman launched her own Facebook discussion group, Deuxmoi L’Officiel, in September.
Eventually—inevitably—sleuths pursued the blind item underpinning the whole enterprise: the woman’s identity. And not just on message boards. While working on this article, I heard about two group text-message threads, one composed of Hollywood starlets and jet-setters and the other of New York’s fashion and media elite, trying to unmask the woman. Their theories would become a headache for the woman. Meanwhile, politically charged hostility on Deuxmoi L’Officiel would go “completely off the fucking rails,” according to the woman, disrupting her family life and driving her to reevaluate the project.
“I had this epiphany that I don’t get paid to do this,” the woman said in another phone call in December. “Why do I keep pushing myself every day to turn out content?” Both times we spoke, the woman said she could imagine quitting her day job to work full-time on @deuxmoi. (At the time, the account earned no money; in January, @deuxmoi started selling merch.) And she could imagine quitting the blind-item business just as suddenly and spontaneously as she’d started.
“You have to understand, when you’re responding to hundreds of messages—I’m not an empath in any sense of the word, but just by reading and responding and interacting you’re taking on other people’s emotions,” she said. To post stories about celebrities interacting with their fans, she had to interact with her own. It was exhausting.
“The whole reason I loved the account was because I was able to do what I wanted,” she said. “I didn’t have to answer to anyone. And then it just became so crazy.”
“I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD WORK FOR THE FBI.”
According to many of its foremost practitioners, gossip changed in 2020. Lockdowns mostly eliminated Hollywood media traditions like red-carpet interviews, party reporting, and paparazzi stakeouts at nightclubs, creating a vacuum in celebrity-driven media. “Celebrities were suddenly looking around like, ‘Oh, shit, if no one’s around to see us, are we still celebrities?’ ” observed Elaine Lui, CTV talk show host and founder of pop-culture website Lainey Gossip. Lui noted a quarantine-fueled boom in celebrity TikToks and self-directed content, such as Gal Gadot’s ill-fated “Imagine” video.
“The mainstream gossips are even more reliant on retreading whatever is happening on social media, which isn’t ideal, since the core audience for those personalities will already have seen the information,” said veteran party reporter and Avenue editor in chief Ben Widdicombe, whose memoir, Gatecrasher, was published mid-pandemic.
Still, this gossip found a captive audience in the newly homebound America. For years social media and reality TV have enabled new forms of virtual intimacy between audiences and their idols; the phenomenon reached something of an event horizon in 2020, when the pandemic curtailed real-life socialization. Fewer gatherings meant fewer conversations, fewer acquaintances blurting the unexpected, fewer opportunities for people-watching and chance encounters. Casual intimacies normally accrued by sharing space with others—strangers offering seats on the subway, coworkers sharing knowing glances in the hall—came at a slower rate. The human drive to socialize is not just the desire to connect but also the desire to observe. To witness, and thus imagine, the lives of others; to anticipate and then respond to their behavior; to see ourselves through their eyes and adjust accordingly; to judge. People the world over redirected their social energy in 2020—and a lot of it ended up on Instagram.
“Everyone is a gossip columnist now, or can be,” said George Rush, the former New York Daily News gossip reporter and coauthor of Scandal: A Manual. “They have the tools. No celebrity is safe. But then, the celebrities are also armed and dangerous.” He noted that celebrities use the same tools to respond to rumors in real time.
In the fall of 2020, @deuxmoi published an item about “two A-listers announcing a pregnancy in a few months.” The woman said she did not know the solution but published several guesses: “Too easy! Biebs and Hailey!” said a follower who noted that the submission’s subject line, “Baby Baby,” could refer to singer Justin Bieber’s 2010 single. Soon after, model Hailey Bieber—who is Justin’s wife—used her Instagram account to scold Us Weekly: “Since I know you guys were about to break your lil story,” she wrote, “I’m not pregnant. So please stop writing false stories from your ‘sources.’ ”
Several weeks later, in early December, Hailey Bieber posted on Instagram a photo of her feet in polka-dot slippers and white gym socks. Over the image, in black-and-white text, Bieber wrote: “Today I figured out I know who runs the deuxmoi Instagram account.” She continued: “I feel like I figured out who gossip girl is.”
And: “I feel like I should work for the FBI.”
Bieber’s post reinvigorated the amateur sleuths. Several people shared photos from 2014 that suggested teenage Hailey Bieber—then known as Hailey Baldwin—crossed paths with Deuxmoi, when it was a fashion blog. A 2015 item in Us Weekly described the model “showing off her Emily Cho x deuxmoi collaboration bag during a dinner in NYC.” (Products included wristlets embossed with “Tequila is an upper” in gold and “HOT #AF” in silver. If you still don’t recognize the social tribe to which the woman belongs, then you have never brunched in Lower Manhattan.) Armchair investigators cross-referenced archived blog posts with LinkedIn profiles. Theories about the woman’s identity included a beauty influencer, a cast member from 2003 MTV reality show Rich Girls, and a cast member from 2010 The CW reality show High Society. The woman posted an announcement on Deuxmoi L’Officiel: “Please stop naming rando people/those who have nothing to do with this account anymore on this page or any other (I know some of you are in other groups).”
“The names that have come up are not associated with the account at this time,” the woman told me in December. The wrong name in the wrong place “can cause problems for the account, legally. There’s just a lot that goes on behind the scenes.” She declined to elaborate.
The woman said she didn’t understand the interest in her identity. “If the tables were turned, I wouldn’t care,” she said, pointing out that the gossip wasn’t even written in her voice. “I don’t want to be Perez Hilton, I don’t want to be Ted Casablanca, I don’t want to be whoever, Jared whatever-the-hell-his-last-name-is,” seeming to refer to Jared Eng, whose blog, to be fair, is called Just Jared. The woman continued: “That’s not what this account is. The account is just about sharing stories. Sharing information. The fact that there has been information that has been newsworthy, or current, is just by chance.”
Not everyone accepts the woman’s abdication of responsibility. You’d think that the people most bothered by unverified crowdsourced gossip would be its subjects. This has sometimes been the case for the woman, who says a representative for an Olympic gold medalist contacted her to contest a story about the athlete’s wedding. (The woman took down the story.) Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham Law professor and expert in defamation, noted that publishing online and verbatim may actually shield @deuxmoi from liability. Defense lawyers have successfully used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the hotly contested statute that shields internet platforms from liability for users’ posts, to protect websites that post user-submitted gossip indiscriminately. But defamation lawyer Neville Johnson, who has sued major news outlets and individual internet users, said that as long as @deuxmoi “says something snarky or editorializes,” the account would have liability. Still legal entanglement with @deuxmoi probably isn’t worth the trouble, said Johnson. His online defamation clients are mostly concerned about taking down offending material, which happens automatically on @deuxmoi, and anonymous internet users rarely have pockets deep enough to justify litigation. Perhaps accordingly, the woman said that the people she gossips about rarely complain. The problem with crowdsourced gossip, from her perspective, is not the gossip—it’s the crowd.
“A lot of people like to criticize what’s posted, and that takes the fun out of it! I don’t want to be criticized for reposting something that somebody sent me. Give me a break, you know what I mean? It’s like they’re thumbsuckers,” she said.
She described the Facebook group as her biggest stressor. “Who knew people can turn web gossip into an argument? A political issue? Or racial? They turn it into everything.” She pointed to a debate about homophobia, misogyny, and sex work that broke out over a “Just the Tip” submission about Drake’s alleged behavior at a Las Vegas casino, as told by an irate cocktail server. When people tell stories about strangers, they project. Sharing their stories verbatim means sharing their perspectives and assumptions—which can be ugly. Moderating debates on the relative ugliness of those perspectives proved to be a Gordian knot: impossible for the woman to untangle but easy to solve if she was willing to cut it off.
The woman no longer recalled which Facebook post was causing problems on Thanksgiving weekend, but she summarized her family’s response: “What the fuck? Can you be present?” She cut @deuxmoi out of her life for a few days: “I had to really reevaluate myself. What am I doing? This is not my job.” She caught up on television—she’d been too busy to watch the shows her followers were gossiping about—and emerged, for the first time in months, from the fog of internet gossip.
“I guess I got addicted to posting so much,” she said. In December she took breaks from @deuxmoi and posted less frequently. But this too raised inquiries: “People would be like, ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Are you coming back?’ ‘Did you get sued?’ ” Every action, no matter how small, rippled. After posting about, and personally endorsing, Nicole Kidman’s supposed Starbucks order—“bone-dry cappuccino,” just espresso and foam—the woman heard from followers who said they too were now ordering and enjoying the beverage. Then she started hearing from baristas, who said they hated making the drink. “Then I started feeling bad for the baristas!” said the woman.
F-U-N
Around the time of the woman’s epiphany, my friend Juliet Thompson—a New Yorker who works in advertising and, pre-pandemic, rarely spent Saturday nights alone—started sleuthing. Juliet is the kind of woman who obsessively monitors her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends on Instagram. She also alerts everyone she knows every time she sees a celebrity. When @deuxmoi was growing rapidly late last year, two acquaintances texted Juliet to ask if she was behind the account. She was insulted. “I just felt, if I was running the site, it would be less Kate Moss, Paris, sailor stripes, Jane Birkin,” Juliet explained, referring to @deuxmoi aesthetics she considers kind of basic. But she had also submitted celebrity sightings to @deuxmoi, which the woman published, and believed she could figure out the woman’s identity. Juliet was, at the time, working full-time from her East Village apartment. But she was finishing Tana French’s latest novel and needed some new F-U-N, so she joined a couple of Facebook groups and started an investigation.
“There’s a small group of people that care,” the woman said of those seeking her identity, “because they’re bored.” This bothers the woman. When I asked, in November, why she put so much effort into @deuxmoi, she said: “Working a thankless job for probably my whole life—because most jobs are thankless—it feels really, really nice to be appreciated for work.” Anonymity was part of that: “I’m not getting an ego boost from this because nobody knows me. My friends and family really don’t care, they kind of make a joke out of it. So it’s just nice to be putting out work, and then people appreciating it.”
The woman believes that her aversion to personal attention contributed, five years ago, to the demise of Deuxmoi as a style blog. Agents and potential sponsors wanted real people. When she and her partner appeared on a local comedian’s YouTube channel to perform a makeover, they shrouded their faces with designer scarves and sunglasses. But, the woman insisted, “I was never trying to be Gossip Girl or some mysterious lurker in the night.”
“I don’t know why that’s so hard for everyone to believe,” she said in December. “A lot of people can’t wrap their heads around that. Does everyone want to be famous, or be a celebrity, that bad? That they can’t wrap their heads around someone who doesn’t want that?”
When I asked whether her desire to maintain anonymity was at odds with her willingness to post about others, the woman balked. “They’re celebrities,” she said. “They chose to be in the public eye.” But @deuxmoi also posts about famous people’s spouses and children, I pointed out. The woman countered that she is neither of those things. “I run an Instagram account. It lives in the phone. It’s not real life,” she said. “It was just an Instagram account that happened to turn into this crazy fucking wild ride.” If someone offered a full-time gossip dream job, she would consider using her real name, she said. But, at the moment, she said, “I need to keep my current job.”
There is precedent for the woman’s dream of perpetual anonymity. Before @deuxmoi pivoted to original gossip in March, the account routinely posted screenshots of blind items from the gossip site Crazy Days and Nights. Since 2006, the site’s anonymous author—who says he’s a Hollywood lawyer and calls himself Enty—has published original blind gossip daily. He also reveals the answers of his blinds, including stories about Harvey Weinstein and NXIVM before they were mainstream news. (But when judging blind gossip, remember that confirmation bias is at play: Items that fizzle are easily forgotten or linger, forever unverified.) Like @deuxmoi, Crazy Days and Nights was born from boredom. Enty launched the blog while slacking off at work. By phone from his home office in California—where he says he still practices law but is now self-employed—Enty said that he has a verification process for the items he reveals. As for blinds? “I’m pretty much willing to run any kind of puzzle.” He likened blind items to crosswords, whose everyday players learn a puzzle maker’s favorite words and tricks. Blind-item enthusiasts will learn a gossip outlet’s lexicon. There will be a roster of regular characters, many connected to one another, living and working and alternately breaking and reenvisioning social norms.
When I asked the woman about @deuxmoi’s lexicon, she referred me to a fan-generated spreadsheet documenting her go-to nicknames and descriptions. Each was derived from an item @deuxmoi had posted in the past. Knowing the code phrases is a bit like being on the inside of an inside joke: Shawn Mendes was “headband coffee mug,” for paparazzi photos depicting him with both. Jake Gyllenhaal is the mustache-man emoji, for a rumor that he wears fake mustaches as disguises. Julia Roberts is “salad tosser,” for a claim that she once threw a literal salad during a moment of frustration.
As she texted updates from her search for the woman behind @deuxmoi, Juliet was building her own vocabulary and roster. The account’s early followers and output seemed to reveal likely social and professional milieus. Audio of the woman’s voice seemed to reveal a home state. Juliet considered matters of taste, using early Deuxmoi product recommendations and style choices to build a theory about the woman’s life. She cross-referenced old group photos in which others had tagged @deuxmoi. At one point Juliet texted a group photo of 10 women grinning and throwing deuces. “I think this is how we will figure it out,” she said, scrutinizing each woman as though pinning mug shots to a corkboard.
By December, Juliet had settled on a prime suspect. I had, by then, accepted that the woman might never confirm her identity to me. Juliet had seen a portion of her prime suspect’s CV, which matched a detailed career history that a woman claiming to be the sole operator of @deuxmoi had delivered on a friend’s podcast in 2019. When I asked the woman about that interview, she argued that I could not prove it was really her.
“Is it not?” I asked.
“I’m asking how do you know?” she replied.
As a snowstorm enveloped New York on December 16, Juliet texted that she’d found a Venmo account with publicly visible transactions that seemed to connect her primary suspect to the 2019 podcast. I told Juliet that Venmo snooping was a step too far. Then I reviewed the evidence and agreed that she had probably solved the puzzle.
I wish I could say Juliet’s sleuthing project was beneath our dignity. But the truth is that, as far as virtual hangouts go, it was fun. There were prompts to overanalyze others and, thus, ourselves. It was a paranoid style of socialization, conducted in a DIY surveillance state of selfies. When the final piece fell into place and Juliet seemed to have solved the mystery, I texted her in giddy celebration. I felt lucky and accomplished, as though I’d helped my friend win a round of bingo.
If Juliet was right, then the woman was also right that her name does not matter. The name in question offers no further information. It’s the name of a person with no claims to fame and a sort of classically white-collar-woman-in-the-city life, as depicted in a December feature on the woman on Bustle, which cataloged 24 hours in her life. She ate a Sweetgreen salad, commuted to work in an Uber, and sent a late-night “you up” text. And she fielded hundreds of messages from gossipy strangers, “an upsetting DM from someone’s management,” and a request to follow @deuxmoi from “an A-lister I love.”
If the woman quit @deuxmoi, I asked, what would she do with the account? She told me that a few people had expressed interest in taking it over. She might give the account to one of them.
She also said she might not announce the change in management. Nobody would know she was gone. Nobody would be able to prove who was running what.
In January, shortly before a mob at the U.S. Capitol would prompt the FBI to put out a social media dragnet for insurrectionists, I emailed @deuxmoi one last time. I repeated the name Juliet uncovered, which I’d heard others had discovered independently. “We appreciate the heads up,” the response read. “The person you keep naming is no longer associated with our account.” In my interactions with the woman, she had never before used the first person plural to describe her work on @deuxmoi.
I wrote back: “Is the person I interviewed still associated with the account?”
I received no reply.
When I told Juliet about my final exchange with the @deuxmoi email account, she weighed the possibilities. The email could be a lie. The email could be true and indicate that the name she found belonged to a different collaborator, such as the Deuxmoi cofounder who dropped out years ago. Or perhaps there had been a change in management. Returning to Instagram, I studied @deuxmoi’s latest posts. Had there been a shift in the account’s voice ? Or was that my confirmation bias? Juliet reviewed the evidence, tossed out a few theories, then changed the topic to a politician she’d walked past on a New York City sidewalk whom she believes checked out her friend. She was busy. Her attention was elsewhere. The story of @deuxmoi, for at least one woman, had ended.
Critics of gossip sometimes argue that it’s not fair to judge a person based on their worst, best, or juiciest moments. Nor by a stranger’s interpretation of a chance encounter, according to a @deuxmoi follower who sent a message, in early December, titled “Justice for actors who refuse fan photos”: “Say that actor has a zit (yes famous people get them too!), has bags under her eyes from a night shoot, and just broke up with her boyfriend…. Please try to be understanding that they just weren’t feeling it that day.”
“Btw,” the follower added, “I only speak on behalf of actors here. Influencers should always take photos with fans.”
I considered naming the woman in this article. But @deuxmoi is (or was) but one piece of a broad life. Attaching this anecdote to her name for all the infinities of Google eternity is a responsibility that I don’t want. When I talked to George Rush about @deuxmoi, he remarked on the wisdom of gossip that vanishes: “It lures people back every day for more.” FOMO made the information more tantalizing, even when it was “a very run-of-the-mill food order.” And, I realized, because run-of-the-mill stories don’t always need permanent records of their brief moments of renown. The most important element of 15 minutes of fame is that, in the 16th minute, it ends.
Besides, blind items are more F-U-N.
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