It was too good to be true. Or was it too bad to be true? Regardless, it wasn’t true, and that’s too bad. Or is it too good? Enough with the questions—I’m stalling—let’s move on to the facts: Jessica Lowndes and Jon Lovitz are fucking liars, we all fucking fell for it, and I should have fucking seen it coming.
On Monday morning, I wrote a post about a young actress America didn’t know all that well was suddenly engaged to a once-beloved comedian we had all but forgotten. The story covered all the bullets of celebrity news that excites us as a culture: it was inoffensive but weird, funny but sort of unpleasant, and centered around a celebrity so rarely covered (for any reason, no shade) that his sudden appearance in the headlines made our heads spin. In other words, it was a perfect piece of celebrity news.
But late this afternoon, the whole thing was revealed (after much speculation) to have been a PR stunt. Jessica Lowndes and Jon Lovitz aren’t actually engaged: they just pretended to be to drum up publicity for Lowndes’s new music video. She’s gone as far as to call it an early April Fools’ Day joke.
Are you mad about that? I am.
Several people—including Gawker’s Executive Managing Editor, Lacey Donohue—told me they suspected it was a hoax. Deafening “YOU’RE BEING HAD” alarms were sounding inside my head. But despite all warning signs and precedents, I refused to accept being duped (by an industry known for being fantastic at duping) as a real possibility. I wanted it to be true. I needed it to be true.
I spend the better part of my workday on the hunt for good celebrity gossip, and this was a creature so elusive I didn’t even know it could exist in the wild. A talking pink unicorn. A rainbow whale that loves to vlog. I thought Jessica and Jon were my trophy, but their sparkling figure was just a trophy-shaped chunk of chocolate. And not even good chocolate, more like melted-together Mast Brothers garbage that’s been sitting out so long that it’s turned all white and crumbly.
I will not link to Lowndes’s video. Not because I don’t want to give it more views—plenty of you will Google it—but because I can’t bear seeing it again. Jessica Lowndes is the ghost of Liberace and she played me like a piano—without missing a single note.
To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Readers. Always the Lovitzes between us. Always the Lowndeses. Always the fucking hours.