Deuxmoi allowing media to gossip about celebrities without Rude

8 min readDec 24, 2020

Over the past few months, I have heard some new rumors about celebrities. Did you know that Jennifer Lopez orders the spicy rigatoni when she dines at Carbone? Or that Blake Lively’s career is stalling a bit? Also, David Schwimmer is, tragically, not very nice. And if you were curious about what Leonardo DiCaprio is like during sex, he allegedly wears headphones.

None of these things really matter, and whether they’re even true — none of them have been “confirmed,” by any real journalistic standards — is somewhat beside the point. They’re slivers of rather banal (besides the headphones) gossip from the Instagram account Deuxmoi.

A rare bright spot in the digital world during an otherwise gloomy year. Though Deuxmoi accepts nearly everyone who requests to follow it, the fact that it is a private account means that to find the drama, there’s only one place to go.

Deuxmoi is in the business of blind items, where anonymous tipsters send in tidbits of information or sightings of celebrities, sometimes with names attached, sometimes without. A certain A-list actor may be said to be cheating on his wife, for instance, but we can only guess as to whom (whereas the more mundane intel, like a pasta order, is fair game to attribute to a certain person).

Celebrity media is nearly as old as the idea of a celebrity, but talking about stars takes on new meaning in a time when many people have described themselves as starved for gossip. With more idle time separated from family and friends and other forms of escapism — such as literally escaping on vacation — chatter about the scandalous, enviable, or surprising goings-on of the rich and famous provides a way out of the endless boredom of quarantine.

Deuxmoi, and the endless gossip or “tea” accounts like it, is thriving in 2020. Since March, Deuxmoi has grown its 45,000 followers more than tenfold. TikTok Room, an Instagram account devoted to niche drama between TikTok stars, has grown from 300,000 followers to nearly 2 million in the same time span. They may not be subject to rigorous fact-checking, but they offer a choose-your-own-adventure for readers, who perhaps care less about the end game of finding the truth and are just happy to be along for the ride.

This has always been the case with gossip and blind items, which, to their credit, have laid the groundwork for some of the biggest celebrity scandals in history. Yet in providing seemingly low-stakes fun for readers, the industry can often end up derailing individuals’ lives in the process. The new generation of Instagram tabloids is attempting to change that dynamic. Instead, they’re asking, “Can gossip be good?”

What is Deuxmoi, the anonymously run celebrity gossip Instagram account?

Like so many of this year’s most engrossing cultural phenomena, Deuxmoi was born out of quarantine boredom. Its owner has remained anonymous during its rise in popularity, though we know she is a woman based in New York who does not work in the entertainment industry (I’ll refer to her as simply “Deuxmoi” in this piece). She said she’d happened to gain 45,000 Instagram followers from a project she and a friend started in 2013. But with the page mostly dormant for the past few years, she took advantage of a slow news day in March to post a few blind items she thought were interesting. Then she encouraged followers to send in their own.

As thousands of new people have flocked to the page, more and more tea has been spilled. Some followers are regular folks who happen to have had run-ins with celebs, others are in the entertainment business, and many more work in hospitality spaces where celebrities often expose their best and worst behavior.

A few highlights over the past few months: James Corden might be the next Ellen DeGeneres (in the bad way). Adrian Grenier has nice-looking genitals. Sex and the City actor Chris Noth hates when you take his picture. Someone once saw Bernie Sanders ordering tomato soup at the Senate cafeteria. Celebrities said to be famously nice include Steve Carell, Drew Barrymore, Luke Wilson, the Hadid sisters, and Pink. Celebrities who are not: Marisa Tomei, Leslie Mann, and the aforementioned “Rude Ross.”

Again, these are not necessarily “facts” like you would expect to read in a reputable newspaper or magazine, nor does Deuxmoi pretend to be a reporter. “I don’t consider myself a news source,” she told me. “I’m honestly like the moderator of a live message board.” When I ask her what’s valuable about Deuxmoi versus traditional tabloids, she explains that traditional tabloids often have narratives they’re trying to sell, whereas her posts are composed entirely of screenshots of direct messages or emails she receives with little or no commentary.

“What I’m receiving is what everyone else is seeing,” she says. This, in turn, lets her audience piece together whatever narrative they want. “The community of people that the account generated is honestly the most interesting thing about the account,” she says. “They’re very, very active in participating. If I ever have a question, I’ll get an answer in sometimes less than a minute. It’s crazy.”

That community now includes more than 460,000 followers, who show up not only for the drama but for the intra-Deuxmoi language and the hyperspecific inside jokes. Bring up “studio execs,” for instance, and Deuxmoi superusers will recall the hilarious days-long back-and-forth between unnamed people purporting to be film studio executives arguing over which celebrities could get any project produced (Emma Stone, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose careers were getting “cold” (Channing Tatum has apparently “lost momentum”), and other tidbits like “Kaitlyn Dever is this generation’s Laura Dern” or “Blake Lively needs to find her niche, which is honestly whatever Jen Garner has just about aged out of playing.”

That was one of my favorite things; people went crazy for that,” Deuxmoi says with a laugh (though she believes not all of the people said to be involved were “execs,” more like assistants or other industry folk). “It was really funny, but it was also an insider’s take on what’s going on. That’s what the account is all about. You don’t have to take it all so seriously.”

The messy history of blind items and the celebrity rumor mill

Obviously, this is meant to be fun. To follow Deuxmoi is not only to read industry insiders’ takes on famous people’s careers but also to feel like a studio executive yourself, keeping tabs on the minutiae of celebrity power rankings as though you’re in charge of casting your own film project.

That celebrity gossip is interesting to us as people is nothing new, but the blind item format — the tidbits too legally or morally risky to publish outright — has a more recent history. In Alyssa Bereznak’s thorough retelling of how blind items changed Hollywood for the Ringer in 2018, she explains that the first modern blind item column began in the New York media scene in the 1890s, when a Civil War hero named William d’Alton Mann hired a team of underlings to pass on rumblings about the Manhattan elite.

But the current gossip landscape was mostly built 100 years later with the rise of the internet: Sites like Perez Hilton, Socialite Rank, Lainey Gossip, Crazy Days and Nights, the Shade Room, and Blind Gossip trafficked largely in rumors about society’s elite rather than fact-checked reporting. Though the now-defunct Gawker also regularly published investigative journalism, its longtime tagline was “today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,” where rumblings about New York media figureheads were often described in an editorial voice that was as entertaining as it was snarky.

Though they often refused to name names, these websites were the first to report, however indirectly, on many of the biggest celebrity scandals in history. Crazy Days and Nights published one of the first whispers of the NXIVM scandal in 2012, six years before cult leader Keith Raniere was charged. Gawker blogged about the Louis C.K. sexual misconduct allegations in 2012, five years before the New York Times did. Page Six ran a blind item about politician John Edwards’s infidelity in 2007 while his wife was being treated for cancer; he would admit to it three years later. Harvey Weinstein was a fixture in blind items because rumors about his serial sexual abuse had circulated for years; Lainey Gossip founder Elaine Lui told Vox in 2017 that “for the 15 years that I’ve been reporting, that’s how long I’ve been hearing about it.”

Yet the rumor mill goes both ways — Weinstein also is alleged to have smeared those who threatened to expose him in legacy media gossip channels. When whispers circulated of certain actresses “sleeping their way to the top,” for example, many of them were actually victims of the producer’s abuse. “Though tabloids like the Enquirer do sometimes pursue stories with an admirable moral end goal, they’re also frequently guilty of using their aggressive reporting to assert culturally conservative viewpoints,” Bereznak writes.

As entertainment journalist Dave Quinn, who’s covered celebrities since the mid-2000s, most recently at People magazine, tells me, blind items are as powerful as they are unwieldy. “Look at what the media and the tabloids can do to someone’s psyche — what it did to Britney Spears, to Princess Diana.”

Deuxmoi intentionally steers clear of more serious topics, partially for legal reasons (her website includes a lengthy disclaimer that it publishes rumor, not fact; she says hasn’t faced any legal issues yet), but also because Deuxmoi herself isn’t as interested in the hardcore drama. “I like the stupid stuff,” she says. “I like the coffee orders and I like what products they buy. [My readers] want the salacious stuff. They want to know who’s [secretly] gay and who does drugs.” These are the types of messages — cheating rumors, addiction — that Deuxmoi will blur out to protect the identity of the accused, turning them into blind items rather than potentially expose a celebrity to a serious allegation that may or may not be true.

Deuxmoi allowing media to gossip about celebrities without Rude

What is Deuxmoi, the anonymously run celebrity gossip Instagram account?

The messy history of blind items and the celebrity rumor mill

Written by Pinkydaroga