From a Blind to News

When a blind item becomes more than a rumor, it is usually a scandal that needs to have its story told. This was the case of Ronan Farrow, son of actress and activist Mia Farrow and director Woody Allen, who released one of the most important pieces of his career in 2017.

On October 10, The New Yorker published his article “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories,” where Farrow gathered several accounts of sexual harassment and assaults by the director. For decades, there were whispers about a possible sexual misconduct by the film director, and Farrow states that several publications, including The New Yorker, report on this issue, yet they “fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence.”

For example, one of the earliest blind items available online about the director and his “favors” was posted on Lainey Gossip the end of 2009. The blog post describes a “Casting Couch” blind, which talks about an actress whose career was dying, and in a desperate attempt, offered to exchange “her sexual services for his professional services.”

The item also states that it was not the first time this actress recurred to this director for help, and the more he rejected her, the more she’d “humiliate herself” to get the career she saw him “create” to other popular names in Hollywood.

Lainey describes the director as a married man, who is a legend in the business. She also details this supposed encounter that the actress had with the director and a third man, “both of them enjoying her as she allowed herself to be taken, and, um, decorated appropriately” just to be able to read a script, with no promises of actually working on it.

The actress was revealed to be Gretchen Mol (An American Affair, Broadway Empire), who this director, whose description resembled Weinstein, cut off right after the encounter to focus on a third “blondie” whose career was taking off, believed to be Blake Lively.

Fast forward six years, Farrow spent ten months researching and connecting with victims, spending over two years investigating the story, conducting interviews and finding documents that incriminated them. For this article, he included thirteen women who had been sexually assaulted or harrassed by Weinstein between 1999 and

If blind items were being shared for so long, why did it take this long to be publictly? When you are powerful in Hollywood, you have your ways of silencing people. The director and his associates allegedly paid victims and witnesses off, threatened them, or the sole reason of being such a power in the industry might have scared them off as well. Fear of retaliation, especially if you’re women, silenced several people that decided to look the other way when a harassment occurred.

Weinstein diminished the accusations by stating that he was only “compliment people, and some took it as me being sexual, [I] won’t do that again,” or claimed the acts were consensual. Worst case scenario, if the women spoke out and his name was in tabloids and news outlets, his favorite way of revenge was gossip itself, making sure that these women’s careers are destroyed by sharing something intimate or “career-ending” about them.

Farrow won several awards for this reporting, including a Pulitzer Prize for public service, besides helping the launch of the #MeToo movement. Being in the industry for as long as he lived, did he hear about Weinstein’s case through whispers, or did he hear it simply for being in the industry?

Being son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen came with being in the spotlight from very young. Coming from Hollywood royalty, he was also raised in a family that had very public history of sexual harassment allegations. His older sister, Dylan Farrow, accused their father, Allen, in 1992 of sexually abusing her when she was only seven, and his mother found explicit photos of her other daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who was 21 at the time, that were taken by her then-husband.

A whisper, a rumor, or a blind item led Farrow and many other reporters to run after leads that would expose the stories behind those riddles. These discoveries are finally exposing years of Hollywood men’s privileges and the ease to sweep violence and abuse under the rug, but that was able to ruin — or at least make them look bad enough — the careers of those that actually deserve it. Blind items can be something harmless like a new couple alert, but if you dig the hole deep enough and pay attention to what is being shared, you discover that Hollywood is not as glamorous as they once tried to be to outsiders. The #MeToo movement has finally given these blind items more recognition, and those who share the information tend to be safe, since no author’s names were shared.

Interview: Shannon McNamara (@fluentlyforward)

McNamara gained popularity on her account after sharing blind items of TikTok star Addison Rae. What she did not expect was to receive a shower of comments asking what a blind item was. Ever since explaining the idea behind blinds and which blogs were popular, her followers started to share interest in hearing about their favorite celebrities, helping her grow on the platform.

She believes that most of the people who submit blind items are caterers or extras on a film set, and people who had an experience or oversaw something by a certain celebrity. McNamara herself has talked to Enty before, who states that after posting a certain blind item, the publicist or representative of this celebrity would contact them trying to revert the situation, and in some cases share a different gossip in order to defend their client, giving more items to be shared online.

McNamara used Bill and Melinda Gates as an example of how media is involved with reverting critical situations created by blind items. The ex-wife of the billionaire used the online platforms to take herself out of the scandal when it was discovered that Gates and Jeffrey Epstein knew each other and have hung out plenty of times. The TikToker finds it difficult to believe Melinda’s claims that she had never met with Epstein or that she did not know anything about her exhusband’s friendship with the same. This is where blind items come in handy, providing evidence and contradicting certain statements.

McNamara, who accidentally entered the blind items world in 2020 has 19.4 thousand followers on her TikTok account and 11.5 thousand on her Instagram. She has also started a podcast of the same name (Fluently Forward) where she talks about blind items, its history, and even collaborates with other podcasters in the same genre to talk about conspiracy theories and the entertainment industry.

The blogger-turned-celebrity who rose to fame through name-calling, exposing secrets and being loved or hated by celebrities.