Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a pop star attends a wedding in New Jersey, several other pop stars dump their manager, and Leo DiCaprio goes on an ice cream date.
Need to catch up on the Scooter Braun rumors? We got into it all in a post just for paid subscribers this week.
Taylor Swift brought chaos and calamity to New Jersey last weekend as she attended the wedding of her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff and his nepo baby actress bride Margaret Qualley. Antonoff, 39, and Qualley, 28, had a fairly normie wedding on Long Beach Island — rehearsal dinner at the Black Whale Bar & Fish House, reception the next day at Parker’s Garage — but with Swift as a guest, they were not able to maintain any sense of privacy. Hundreds of fans swarmed the rehearsal dinner Friday night just to scream at her as she walked inside:
Other celebrity guests included Cara Delevigne, Lana del Rey, and Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum, who are indeed still together and who dressed cooler than everyone else. Del Rey boldly wore white to both events and reportedly serenaded the couple at the reception with her song about Qualley, “Margaret.” Swift, meanwhile, gave a “raucous” 15-minute toast, per Page Six.
Fifteen minutes? That’s too long. The bride and groom probably weren’t even standing up at the altar for that long. A wedding toast should be three or four minutes, max. Get in, say three nice things, make two jokes, and get out.
Swift flew solo to the wedding, at least — I wonder if, back when she got the save the date, she assumed she’d be attending with her controversial spring romance Matty Healy. When Swift and Healy were parading around for the paparazzi in May, the tabloids frequently cited Antonoff as their connector, but Healy did not attend the wedding at all. (His 1975 bandmate George Daniel did.) Oh well. I’m sure everyone loved Swift’s speech.
Speaking of Swift, the pop star’s primary nemesis Scooter Braun is having a pretty bad week, despite his protestations to the contrary:
As we discussed in a post earlier this week, Braun’s top clients including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and J. Balvin have all dumped him or are in the process of dumping him as a manager. Even Idina Menzel, God love her, put it out there that she is seeking new representation. Braun is attempting to spin this as a natural evolution of his business — sources are claiming to the tabloids that he has been eager to step away from day-to-day management duties since selling SB Projects’ parent company to the South Korean giant HYBE in 2021 — but the truth seems much more complicated.
Matthew Belloni, who first reported that Bieber was seeking new management last week, has followed up with more details about the fallout in Puck. According to his sources, Grande decided to pull the plug on Braun after he declined to rush to her side last month when she was dealing with backlash related to her quickie divorce and new relationship with the married Spongebob Squarepants: The Musical actor Ethan Slater.
According to Belloni, Grande wanted Braun to leave his European yacht trip and fly to New York to “help put out the fires.” Braun declined, reportedly telling her team, “I deserve a vacation.” Don’t we all!
As for Bieber, Billboard reports that the pop star still has four years left on his contract with Braun, and that he has hired a new lawyer, David Lande, to help him get out of it. This will be messy and take some time. In the interim, who knows what kind of stories about Braun will leak out to the tabloids? I wouldn’t be making (lame) jokes right now if I were him:
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: This week, Hilary Duff made a case for off-white fall jackets, and I was like, Case closed!
Finally, I’ll leave you with the news that Leonardo DiCaprio is ending Leo summer with yet another new model.
Her name is Vittoria Ceretti, she’s 25, and she’s reportedly married, oops. Page Six spotted the pair on an ice-cream date in Santa Barbara this week. Ceretti married the Italian DJ Matteo Milleri in Ibiza in 2020, and it does not appear that either party has filed for divorce yet. I’m sure this will all work out fine for everyone.
Thanks so much for opening this email. And thank you especially to paid subscribers! Your contributions keep this operation running, and I love you. If you haven’t subscribed yet and would like to, you can do so in the box above. As always, feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments or by replying directly.