So, you were offline this long weekend enjoying the actual world, and now it’s Monday, you’re back at your desktop, and everyone is talking about this guy Derek Blasberg, who allegedly diarrhea’d all over Gwyneth Paltrow’s guesthouse bathroom at one of her properties in the Hamptons or possibly Montecito, California. You want to know what’s going on without having to ask someone or click on a Daily Mail link. We got you.
News of the shitcident spread like, well, you know, over the past few days, as people who knew or cared about who this person is were utterly scandalisé by the whole affair. What, if anything, is confirmed? What is this man’s relationship to Paltrow? And how are the Seinfelds involved?
Who is Derek Blasberg?
Derek Blasberg (more like Derek Blast-turd, am I right?) is a 42-year-old writer, socialite, and media personality who is based in New York but can frequently be found in vacation destinations around the globe with his celebrity and fashion-industry friends. He’s worked everywhere from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar to Vanity Fair to CNN to the Gagosian Gallery, and he has 1.6 million followers on Instagram, where he frequently posts photos and videos of himself sitting front row at various fashion weeks next to Anna Wintour and having fun with A-listers like Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham, Naomi Campbell, Emma Chamberlain, Bella Hadid, and, yes, Gwyneth Paltrow.
What’s his relationship to Paltrow?
The two have been friends for years. In 2016, Paltrow told New York magazine, “When I first met him, I was a little dubious: ‘Are you a professional best friend of celebrities? And why are you everywhere at once? What’s your deal?’ But after ten seconds, I fell completely in love with him.†She flies private with him, consults him for Instagram captions, and describes him as “a midwestern boy who can’t believe who he’s eating dinner with, while simultaneously being completely comfortable with who he’s eating dinner with.†She’s participated in more than one of his web series, fielding questions and pretending to work at a spa. In his book, which is for some reason a women’s-advice book, titled Very Classy: Even More Exceptional Advice for the Extremely Modern Lady, he calls Paltrow “probably our generation’s most Classy woman alive,†and names her as one of the modern celebrities who he thinks has the best taste, alongside Nicole Kidman and Emma Watson.
What crappened?
Last week, gossip site Popbitch published an item about a rumor that has been floating around Hamptons social circles for “the last few weeks,†purporting that “a recent houseguest of Gwynnie’s catastrophically shat themselves in bed while staying there, then fled back to the city before they had to face the music.†The site claims that the incident is really part of a larger epidemic of “Ozempic-induced diarrhoea†putting a strain on houseguest-host relations.
On July 3, Dailymail.com claimed that an insider identified Blasberg as the culprit, that he blamed it on Ozempic before “fleeing the property,†and that the Ozempic excuse was just that: an excuse. The source alleges that the rumor spread after Paltrow told Oprah Winfrey, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, and Larry David.
Despite Blasberg allegedly leaving a trail of evidence in his wake, the incident is contested. On July 3, Lainey Gossip blogger Maria Tallarico wrote that they had received a letter around three weeks prior that this same rumor (minus the Ozempic detail) was floating around NYC, and that it took place at Paltrow’s Montecito guesthouse.
… And?
And that’s all we know. Blasberg hasn’t posted to grid since July 1, before these items were published, so he has yet to personally confirm or deny. So many folks are flush with Schadenfreude over this story, because we all love a good high-low contrast every now and then, reminding us all that even the wealthiest, most glamorous celebrities take real messed-up dumps sometimes. I do hope Paltrow and Blasberg’s friendship survives this. He lasted posted a photo of Paltrow on Instagram in January. It’s a picture of her staring down a Rothko at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. What’s one more paint job between friends?