How TMZ Gets the Videos and Photos That Celebrities Want to Hide in The

For Immediate Release: February 15, 2016 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 How TMZ Gets the Videos and Photos that Celebrities Want to Hide In the February 22, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Digital Dirt” (p. 36), the culmination of an exhaustive investigation, Nicholas Schmidle reveals how TMZ’s aggressive and, some say, controversial reporting tactics have completely transformed celebrity journalism and moved the network’s influence far beyond the film industry’s “Thirty Mile Zone” for which it was named. The piece provides a window into the mind of the man who founded it, Harvey Levin, a sixty-five-year-old former lawyer who has said he uses his legal training “every five minutes” in his new role as a massive media figure. TMZ, which began as a Web site in 2005, has become the leading source of celebrity bombshells—including Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and subsequent anti-Semitic rant, in 2006; Michael Jackson’s sudden death, in 2009; and, more recently, Solange attacking Jay Z in an elevator at the Standard, in New York. What began as a site is now a multi-platform network, which includes “TMZ on TV” and a newscast, “TMZ Live.” TMZ infuses celebrity coverage with an investigative ethos, and “resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization,” Schmidle writes. It has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of informants. As Schmidle details, TMZ has built a deep network of sources, including entertainment lawyers, reality-television stars, adult-film brokers, court officials—and even baristas, limo drivers, and hair-salon employees—al- lowing Levin to knock down the walls that guard celebrity life. “Everybody rats everybody else out,” Simon Cardoza, a former cameraman for the site, tells Schmidle. “That’s the beauty of TMZ.” Through interviews with TMZ employees, past and present, Schmidle details how the network acquires its most damning footage—including that of the football player Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée, Janay Palmer, at the Revel Hotel and Casino, in Atlantic City. The second video of the al- tercation which TMZ published, which showed Rice punching Palmer, was purchased for nearly ninety thousand dollars and created a public-relations disaster for the N.F.L. Kevin Blatt, a source for TMZ who also worked in the pornography industry—and who recently gathered details about Lamar Odom’s drug overdose in a Nevada brothel—speaks extensively with Schmidle. He details how, after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton, he checked into the hotel, and—after cultivating sources among the staff—acquired photos from the scene of her death. But TMZ doesn’t always publish the footage it receives: Schmidle reveals why Levin withheld video of Justin Bieber, who was fifteen at the time, singing a song with improvised racist lyrics. A former writer for TMZ tells Schmidle that, for Levin, there was more to gain by sitting on the clip, and earning Bieber’s good will, than by running it and ruining his career. Alec Baldwin, who has been the subject of several harsh TMZ stories—including one, from 2007, in which the site posted a voice-mail recording of Baldwin calling his eleven-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig”—tells Schmidle, “There was a time when my greatest wish was to stab Harvey Levin with a rusty implement and watch his entrails go running down my forearm, in some Macbethian stance. I wanted him to die in my arms, while looking into my eyes, and I wanted to say to him, ‘Oh, Harvey, you thoughtless little pig.’ ” Bald- win continues: “He is a festering boil on the anus of American media.” Dozens of former employees describe the TMZ offices as an uncomfortable workplace. “Harvey has no problem publicly shaming you,” a former assignment-desk producer tells Schmidle. But Levin’s influence is undeniable. Steve Honig, a public-relations adviser who, for a time, represented Lindsay Lohan, tells Schmidle, “When my phone rings and it’s TMZ, I pretty much stop what I’m doing and pick it up. Not because I’m bowing to the gods at TMZ but because, when something from TMZ runs, it spreads so quickly that, if there is any inaccurate information, within five or ten minutes it’s been picked up by a hundred other outlets.” Preparing for the Apocalypse in San Bernardino In “Last Days” (p. 50), William Finnegan reports from San Bernardino, California, where, in De- cember, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed fourteen of Farook’s co-workers at the Inland Regional Center and wounded many others—and, through speaking with those close to the victims and the killers, searches for missing answers. Why did the December 2nd attack happen? KADIR NELSON The motives remain unclear; Farook and Malik did not make a martyr video or leave a manifesto, and, in the aftermath of the violence, their families, neighbors, former classmates—and, in Farook’s case, colleagues and fellow-worshippers—expressed only astonishment. In the San Bernardino Valley, which is home to more than four million people, Finnegan meets Jennifer Thalasinos, who believes that her late hus- band Nicholas—an outspoken critic of Islam who died in the attack, and who in the weeks prior had been arguing with Farook, his co-worker, about religion—was one of the terrorists’ principal targets. “In an irony too grotesque to unpack, Thalasinos had refused to agree with Farook, a devout Mus- lim, when Farook insisted that Islam is a religion of peace,” Finnegan writes. Finnegan details how Farook, who was born in Chicago, met Malik—who was born in Pakistan but largely raised in Saudi Arabia—in 2013, through a matrimonial Web site. They married, and Malik moved to the United States in 2014. She normally wore a niqab—a face veil, leaving only the eyes visible. After her death, Farook’s male relatives said that “they had never seen her face or heard her voice,” Finnegan writes. Farook experienced an increasingly intense identification with Islam; the director of Farook’s former mosque, the Islamic Center of Riverside, tells Finnegan, “Why did he do it? It’s beyond me.” But Farook, if his former neighbor Enrique Marquez is to be believed, harbored carnage fantasies for years. Finnegan details Marquez’s claims that he backed out of two terror plots that he’d conceptualized with Farook in 2011. After the massacre, Marquez, suicidal, called 911 and told the oper- ator, “The fucking asshole used my gun in the shooting.” Marquez spoke extensively to the F.B.I. in the days that followed, and has since been charged with multiple felonies, including providing material support to terrorists, and denied bail. A manager at Morgan’s Tavern, a bar where Marquez once worked, tells Finnegan, “He thought he’d be safer in [jail]. He don’t want no fourteen families coming after him. He knew he couldn’t survive that.” The investigation into the San Bernardino massacre appears to be largely focussed on the question of whether the shooters belonged to a terrorism network. There were more terrorism arrests—fifty-six—in the United States in 2015 than in any other year since 2001. ISIS is asking its supporters to stay home and stage attacks where they are. “The goal is to provoke crackdowns and divisions—within the West, between Muslims and the West, between different groups of Muslims,” Finnegan writes. “The strategy is working.” Is the New Populism About the Message or the Medium? In “The Party Crashers” (p. 22), Jill Lepore reports from New Hampshire and examines a two-party system in crisis—and considers whether the 2016 Presidential election may change its direction entirely. “The party system, like just about every other old-line industry and institution, is strug- gling to survive a communications revolution,” Lepore writes, adding that accelerated political communication can have all manner of good effects for democracy, while less often noticed are the ill effects, which include the atomizing of the electorate. “The American two-party system is a cre- ation of the press,” Lepore writes, detailing the parties’ roots, which date back to the Federalist and Anti-Federalist newspapers of 1787. As Lepore details, the big shifts in communications, marked by evolving technologies, have played a large role in party realignments. The Internet—and, with it, social media—has become a major factor in this election, and “like all new communications technologies, has contributed to a period of political disequilibrium, one in which, as always, party followers have been revolting against party leaders,” Lepore writes. “So far, neither the R.N.C. nor the D.N.C., nor any of their favored candidates, has been able to grab the wheel.” Lepore notes that the fate of the free world does not hinge on this election. “But the direction of the party system might,” she writes. “With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking.” Lepore continues, “At some point, does each of us become a party of one?” Why China’s Super-Wealthy Send Their Children Abroad In “The Golden Generation” (p. 30), Jiayang Fan goes to Vancouver to explore the opulent, expanding enclave occupied by the children of wealthy Chinese—known as fuerdai, which means “rich second generation”—who are settling there in droves. China’s élite are currently transferring money out of the country at a rate of around four hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, and many of them have their eyes on the West.

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