Lainey Gossip’s Lainey Lui on the Importance of Gossiping Responsibly

Before Kim Kardashian and her butt even had a chance, Lainey Lui broke the internet. Or at least, caused the pre-Gmail personal email server she was using in 2003 to send thousands of subscribers a newsletter jam-packed with celebrity gossip and her thoughts about it to come to a brief halt before spreading the good news of Bennifer 1.0 to Hotmail inboxes everywhere.

More than 20 years later, what started as celebrity-centric email missives to two former coworkers has become Lainey Gossip, a go-to website for gossip and analysis about the lives of the rich and the famous. Lui is also an anchor on Canada’s Etalk daily entertainment news show.

The site’s narrative voice and sensibility is inextricable from its namesake proprietor, who has brought on a handful of other bylines over the years but still contributes several posts a day. And who would want to wipe away Lui’s fingerprints, when she’s so ready to offer up her institutional knowledge of the celebrity industrial complex and the undeniably giddy pride with which she approaches the work?

For example, speaking with Vanity Fair via Zoom earlier this year, Lui recalled her prediction that Zendaya would chair the Met Gala coming true, which she celebrated with the textual equivalent of an end zone dance over on her site.

“Who doesn’t love being right? I also did it to basically remind people unapologetically that I do have this experience. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and I think that my assessment of the landscape counts for something, maybe more than the TikToker who is just aggregating,” she told Vanity Fair.

Below, Lui discusses how to gossip responsibly, her all-time favorite celebrity myth, and the “bigger conversation to be had than just who’s fucking who and who’s fucking over who.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got your start in gossip, both professionally and personally?

Lainey Lui: I think we all gossip, so I think when I became a human being, that was my start in gossip. I also was raised—you know, when people say at my mother’s knee—my version of my mother’s knee is on the mah-jongg table. Mah-jongg is part of our family. My grandmother ran a mah-jongg den at a few points in our lives in Hong Kong. So I was in the mah-jongg den a lot and a mah-jongg parlor is just like gambling and gossiping. So those are two of my life skills, gambling and gossiping.

They’re good ones to have.

I’ve always gossiped and listened to gossip, but also, one of my career themes has been the fact that we all gossip, it’s human nature to gossip. Professionally, I worked in nonprofits for a long time, and I was actually between jobs in nonprofit because my mom had gotten a kidney transplant. And so I ended up, like, sending an email to two girlfriends who were at the job I had left to care for my mom. Those emails were just random thoughts on celebrities, and they happened to like it. It was almost like journal entries, and they happened to like it so much that they forwarded it to their friends. And those people forwarded it to other people, and pretty soon, thousands of people were reading this newsletter.

This was in 2002 or 2003. It’s been so long I don’t remember anymore. I was sending this newsletter to many thousands of people just via [a] regular email server, and it was crashing the email server. So a friend of mine at the time was like, why don’t you just start a blog, I’ll build one for you. And back then, blogging hadn’t become what it is now. So I started the blog and then with the blog, it just reached more people and it reached the television people here in Canada. I’m in my 18th season as an entertainment reporter on television, and Lainey Gossip has been around now for 20 years.

Did you ever have conflicting feelings about professionalizing in gossip?

Once I had quit all the other jobs in nonprofit and just started gossiping, writing about gossip and celebrities, I did in those early years feel some shame, or at least sheepishness, in terms of whether or not it was a career and whether or not it was real, and that was a lot of it. Not only because of the subject matter, but because blogging was still new back then. I would find myself at a wedding or whatnot, and people would go around introducing themselves. They’d be like, yeah, I work in accounting and I, you know, work in this, and then there’s me like, “What do you do? I gossip about celebrities!” A few years into it, I sort of got over that and really understood that there’s a bigger conversation to be had than just who’s fucking who and who’s fucking over who, and I think now in 2024 I hope there’s a baseline understanding of what gossip is and its function in humanity. I mean, there’s university courses on it now, academic research on it, but back then definitely, I felt a little bit of a way about whether or not it was respectable.

Were there any particular characters or incidents that you would say got you hooked, way back in yesteryear? Where you’re just like, I can’t stop thinking about this?

When I was first starting, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were the power couple. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were still married. So you had the power couples of that era. And then I started and those power couples disintegrated. And in many, many ways, in that era, there was an explosion of interest in celebrity gossip because of those power couples falling apart. Bennifer 1.0, they ended in or around 2003, which was when Lainey Gossip was just getting started as a newsletter.

How has the professional-gossip landscape changed since then?

I definitely think that social media, as it did in every industry, disrupted a lot, including the gossip ecosystem and the business of it. That said, I do think that so-called professional gossips, I don’t even know how that’s defined anymore. Like, who is a professional gossip? I would consider myself a professional gossip. Some people might categorize, like, the Daily Mail as professional gossip because it’s a huge publication with resources. And lots of people, despite the fact that we hate the Daily Mail, a lot of people read it, and because they have the resources to buy a series of exclusive photos, and yet, how reliable is that professional source of gossip?

So, it’s not even Deux Moi, right? It’s the TikTok creator who is like, “Okay, so, reportedly from Deux Moi,” so they’re taking Deux Moi stories, and then they’re analyzing it and then they’re like, “When I saw this picture, and in this picture, in the background, was this, like, yellow poster? And yellow means this, which means that these two people are definitely whatever.” You’ve seen those TikToks. Those people are now gossips too and those videos can go viral, and that becomes part of the gossip ecosystem. Then more people see the theory: “Oh, I saw this TikTok, and they’re saying that because there was a yellow background in this thing, it means that Taylor [Swift] is definitely going to be putting out this next album.” And I do find that scary. These takes are often wildly off base, and I think that they corrupt the waters of what good gossip is.

Your voice and opinions are very present in your writing. Do you ever grapple with inserting yourself and your thoughts into these narratives?

The way I approach the site and the way our writers approach the site is that we’re not really that interested in breaking news. We don’t necessarily care every day about being the first to, like, say that these people are dating. We’ve moved away from that, and the site is about conversation and more analysis. It’s hard for me to analyze without putting my opinion in there. Analysis is very much shaped by our own personal lens. Everything, the way you read a book or listen to a song, it’s going to be totally different because you’re carrying a whole different worldview. So I often insert what I think and who I am in my opinions in the pieces, because I wouldn’t be gossiping if I didn’t.

You’re writing about other people, but you’re also putting yourself out there. Has that ever come back to bite you?

Of course, that is one of the things that we are all learning about the internet: What we write in a moment can be permanent and can define you for a long time. I’ve been doing this for almost two decades, and so the things that I thought and said sometimes irresponsibly, at the beginning of laineygossip.com, I don’t stand by today. I’m a different person. I, like many of us, I hope, have learned some things over 20 years. A little bit, hopefully. But those comments and that writing and those opinions live there on the site, the site that I operate, for a long time. So, of course I have been accused of things that I might be critical of celebrities or other famous people for because it’s right there. It’s documented. I’ve been called out. I’ve been called out and criticized quite rightly, and this is the shit you have to eat when you go out there and you so boldly put out your opinions. Yeah, so do I put out my opinions now? Yes, I still haven’t stopped. I would like to think I’m more responsible and thoughtful about them, of course. Was I then? No. And I pay for it.

Everyone has said things that they’re not proud of or that don’t hold up, but not everyone’s doing it with such a big audience.

I know most corners of the internet are garbage. But I think that hopefully in the corners of the internet where people like you and me spend time there is grace and space and understanding for growth. Like I will say that celebrities, when they fuck up, when I criticize them, I don’t expect them to go away. What everyone wants, I think, is for people to just stay present and show up, even when the showing up means that you have to apologize and be accountable. I don’t think the answer is like, “Oh my God, it’s cancel culture, boohoo. Everybody’s being so mean!” I think the answer is, “Yep. I did that. I fucked up. And let’s talk about how I fucked up, and I want to still be in the game to grow with everybody else.” That’s what I tried to do. And there are some people who didn’t consider that acceptable and were like, “I’m done with you forever, no second chances, no third chances.” I didn’t force that upon them. But also for me, I wasn’t ever gonna hide from it. And we’re talking about it today. I always want to talk about it. To me, that’s how you show up and own the shit that you used to do.

Do you have any all-time-favorite little gossip tidbits?

There are so many. Oh, I think that I will forever and ever be amused at, [even though] we know it’s not true anymore—I think it’s not true—but I think the Britney and Justin dance-off was a certain golden era of something.