Leonardo DiCaprio's new 22-year-old model
It's Gossip Time!
Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: an actor auditions a new girlfriend, a pop star insists she was never serious about her controversial ex-boyfriend, and Natalie Portman just smiles.
Paid subscribers got TWO exclusive posts this week: a meditation on the Taylor Swift and Matty Healy breakup (in collaboration with Hunter Harris of Hung Up) and a deep dive into the Natalie Portman marriage scandal. Now is a great time to subscribe and catch up!
As I noted a couple weeks ago, we are officially living in Leo DiCaprio’s favorite season, summer. Every year between Memorial and Labor Day, the 48-year-old actor spends as much time as he pleases on yachts in Europe and beach volleyball courts in Malibu. This year is especially exciting for him, I imagine, because he is single for the first time in several years. As such, he seems to be auditioning new girlfriends.
Last weekend, chartered a yacht off the coast of Ibiza for himself and one other passenger: a 22-year-old philosophy grad student I mean model named Meghan Roche. According to TMZ, DiCaprio and Roche sailed off into the sunset together and didn’t come back to port until morning. You know what that means. (They got lost?) Roche is originally from Pennsylvania and has 420,000 followers on Instagram. Page Six reports, however, that she is actually dating an “aspiring singer” named Badius who is apparently a friend of DiCaprio’s.
And so hope that DiCaprio will settle down with someone over the age of 25 remains alive. Days after his yachting excursion, he was spotted hanging out with the aged single mother Gigi Hadid in London! As you may recall, the two first sparked romance rumors after they were photographed touching each other’s shoulders at a club during New York Fashion Week last September. They have since been spotted entering and exiting the same exclusive restaurants once a month or so, throwing the tabloids into a frenzy each time. At this moment, however, it seems Hadid is unwilling to play ball: A source close to the 28-year-old model told People this week, “Seeing Leo was never serious for her and it will never be serious. She likes his attention and enjoys hanging out with him.”
“Gigi is single and is very happy with her life,” the source added. So there.
Also single and allegedly happy with her life: Hadid’s close personal friend Taylor Swift. By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that Swift’s very public relationship with Matty Healy has come to a close after three weeks of non-stop pap walks and strange, on-stage declarations of love. Despite how hard Swift pushed the relationship on the public, many of her fans revolted because Healy is gross, basically. The Ice Spice remix did not fix it.
In the days since TMZ first broke the news of the breakup, Swift and her trusty publicist Tree Paine have been working overtime to convince the tabloids that Swift and Healy were barely dating in the first place. Both People and Us Weekly instantly published different versions of the same source quote:
“Taylor and Matt are no longer romantically involved. They had fun together, but it was never serious.”
“Taylor had fun with Matty, but it was always casual. They are no longer romantically involved.”
Since then, Us Weekly has followed up with a report that Swift’s friends (Blake Lively? Lena Dunham?) never expected Swift to get serious with Healy. TMZ, however, is not sticking to the Paine party line: The gossip outlet reports that Swift always knew about Healy’s controversial podcast appearances and general distastefulness and did not care. The couple broke up for other reasons. Oops!
Healy has not said anything directly about his relationship with Swift yet, but he did thank his fans while on stage with The 1975 this week for supporting him while others “have been calling me a cunt relentlessly.” Unfortunately for Swift, I don’t think that will be the last comment he makes about this whole exercise.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: Hilary Duff showed off her bare skin in a relatable post-workout makeup-free selfie.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this photo of Natalie Portman smiling and showing off her wedding ring to the paparazzi at the French Open on Wednesday:
Looks like everything is just fine, and she is definitely not getting divorced.
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