The New Yorker, 22-Feb-18
By Nicholas Schmidle
How TMZ gets the videos and photos that celebrities want to hide.
In the early-morning hours of February 15, 2014, Ray Rice and his fiancée, Janay Palmer, stepped into an elevator at the Revel hotel and casino, in Atlantic City. Palmer and Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, were arguing as the doors slid shut. When the elevator arrived in the lobby, Palmer was lying unconscious, face down, on the floor.
According to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor. After guards responded to the incident in the lobby, several surveillance officers gathered and wondered aloud if a tape of Rice and Palmer could be sold to TMZ—the Web site that, since its inception, in 2005, has taken a merciless approach to celebrity news.
At around 4:30 a.m., one of the surveillance officers, sitting at a monitoring-room computer, reviewed footage from a camera that faced the elevator and, using a cell phone, surreptitiously recorded the screen. The officer then called TMZ.
It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles, where TMZ is based, so a message was left on the tip line. More than a hundred tips arrive every day. On September 29, 2015, an internal e-mail summarizing tips from the previous night referred to “info regarding George Clooney’s wedding,” “a video of a pro athlete getting attacked by a goat,” and “pictures of Meek Mill being incarcerated.” (The e-mail is one of many that were leaked to The New Yorker.) The tip line also recorded a claim that a major pop star “wears a fake booty in her music videos” and employs a “person who makes the fake butts.”
Many tipsters ask to be paid, and the site often complies. In October, 2014, TMZ received an e-mail that, under the subject heading “Drake at Stadium Club in D.C.,” announced, “I have the original footage. Please call me for price.” Fifty-nine minutes after a producer forwarded the tip to colleagues, TMZ posted a clip showing the rapper accidentally dropping thousands of dollars outside a Washington strip club. (In a message to a TMZ staff member, the source asked to be paid five thousand dollars.) Russ Weakland, a former TMZ producer, told me that he sometimes negotiated payments with tipsters who were anxious about releasing sensitive information. In 2009, for example, he took the call that led to TMZ’s breaking the news that Chris Brown had physically assaulted Rihanna. (The site subsequently published a police photograph of Rihanna’s battered face.) Weakland told me that his attempts to persuade sources to follow through with a leak often resembled a therapy session. “I’d have to talk people off cliffs,” Weakland said. “I’d tell them, ‘We’re not going to reveal our sources, because we want you to be a source for us again. We want you to trust us.’ ”
On February 19th, four days after the incident at the Revel, TMZ posted a fuzzy clip of Rice dragging Palmer’s limp body from the elevator. (According to a former TMZ photographer, the site paid fifteen thousand dollars. TMZ would not discuss payments, or other internal matters, but called this figure overblown.) The video, which went viral, had the phrase “TMZ SPORTS” embossed in the center—a branding practice known as “bugging.”
Investigators at the Revel, trying to discover who had taken the video, ascertained its timing by scrutinizing the clip’s audio track; while the phone was recording the footage, a general request for chips to be refilled could be heard on the casino intercom. The former security supervisor told me that casino officials also identified which computer had been used to review the footage. But Loretta Pickus, the former general counsel at the casino, told me that it could not be determined with certainty which employee had recorded the footage with a phone.
When the video was posted on TMZ, Rice’s attorney issued a statement, warning viewers not to make judgments until “all of the facts” emerged, adding, “Neither Ray nor myself will try this case in the media.” Three months later, Rice and Palmer held a press conference. Rice expressed regret, saying, “Me and Janay wish we could take back thirty seconds of our life.” What happened during those thirty seconds? Rice, the Ravens, and the N.F.L. did not seem especially determined to find out. The league suspended Rice for two games, but by early September he was preparing to return to play. Then, on September 8th, TMZ published a second surveillance video from the Revel. This one, bought for almost ninety thousand dollars, revealed what occurred inside the elevator: after the doors shut, Rice punched Palmer on the left side of her head.
The clip pitched the N.F.L. into a crisis. TMZ, the Times declared, “has the league on the run.” Roger Goodell, the N.F.L.’s commissioner, ducked questions about why its own investigators had not obtained the footage, and said, “We don’t seek to get that information from sources that are not credible.” But the video was unimpeachable, and its impact was immediate. Rice was cut by the Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the N.F.L. Sportswriters declared that TMZ had shaken the league “to its foundation.”
Six days later, Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, appeared on the Fox News program “Media Buzz” to discuss the Rice story. Levin is sixty-five. He has a jittery manner, a wide smile, and a deep tan. For the TV appearance, he was wearing a tight black T-shirt, which showed off his physique—he works out every weekday before dawn, prior to going to the office. Several of Levin’s colleagues told me that he is determined to maintain his youth. Gillian Sheldon, TMZ’s first publicist, who later became a supervising producer, said, “Once, Sumner Redstone”—the former executive chairman of Viacom, who is ninety-two—“told him that one of the secrets of his longevity was that he ate blueberries every day. So then, for months, Harvey was, like, ‘Blueberries!’ all the time.”
Howard Kurtz, the host of “Media Buzz,” reminded his audience that TMZ had published memorable scoops, such as posting police records, in 2006, that exposed Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and anti-Semitic rant. Later that year, the site released video footage of Michael Richards making racist comments during a comedy-club routine. In 2009, TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death, and two years ago it revealed a recorded phone call between Donald Sterling, then the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mistress, in which Sterling urged her not to bring her African-American friends, including Magic Johnson, to Clippers games.
“How does TMZ get this stuff?” Kurtz asked.
“It’s so funny to me that people ask that question,” Levin replied. “We’re a news operation. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Indeed, the site has built a deep network of sources, including entertainment lawyers, reality-television stars, adult-film brokers, and court officials, allowing Levin to knock down the walls that guard celebrity life. (He declined repeated requests for an interview.) TMZ has paid at least one mole inside B.L.S., a limousine service, to provide lists of celebrity customers, their planned routes, and the license-plate numbers of their vehicles. (In a 2015 e-mail, a TMZ employee asked colleagues if anyone had yet established a source at Uber.) Justin Kaplan, a former production associate at TMZ, recalls meeting a B.L.S. source—“a Hispanic gentleman”—at a gas station in Van Nuys, handing over an envelope filled with cash, and receiving in return a client list. The process had been so well honed, Kaplan told me, that “we barely said a word to each other.”
At least one employee of Delta Airlines supplies TMZ with the names and itineraries of celebrity passengers travelling through Los Angeles and New York. In an e-mail dated January 29, 2014, a TMZ manager informed her colleagues that the star of an ABC drama had been spotted sitting in first class, in seat 2A, on Delta Flight 1061, from Orlando to Los Angeles, when his plane was rerouted to Dallas—the result of a bomb threat issued on Twitter. Such information helps TMZ’s crew of a dozen or so paparazzi know when and where to “drop in on” a celebrity who is transiting through an airport. One day’s list, from June, 2010, included the flight details for Robert Redford and Jack Kevorkian; another one, two months later, had the itineraries of Julius Erving, Kathy Ireland, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. “It’s not an accident the guy with a camera is waiting at the Delta check-in counter at 8 a.m.,” a former TMZ employee wrote, anonymously, on Defamer, a Hollywood site owned by Gawker.
TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons. In an e-mail from last year, a photographer reported having four airport sources for the day, including “Harold at Delta, Leon at Baggage service, Fred at hudson news, Lyle at Fruit and nut stand.” A former TMZ cameraman showed me expense reports that he had submitted in 2010, reflecting payments of forty or fifty dollars to various sources: to the counter girl at a Beverly Hills salon, for information on Goldie Hawn; to a valet, for Pete Sampras; to a shopkeeper, for Dwight Howard; and to a waiter, for Hayden Christensen. “Everybody rats everybody else out,” Simon Cardoza, a former cameraman for the site, told me. “That’s the beauty of TMZ.”
Though Levin has changed the rules for confirming gossip, by insisting on documentary proof, scandal has been chronicled for millennia. Thirty-five hundred years ago, Mesopotamian scribes used cuneiform to record the impeachment hearings of a mayor who had been accused of corruption, kidnapping, adultery, and the theft of manure. In 1709, the first modern gossip magazine, The Tatler, started publication, in London. The medium arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, when a weekly named Town Topics began publishing blind items, in a section called “Saunterings.” (In 1905, the section’s editor attempted to blackmail Emily Post’s husband after learning of his infidelity.) Tycoons and politicians were the initial focus of the gossip trade; one British photographer bribed a gardener to gain entrance to Winston Churchill’s house, where he hid, waiting for the perfect shot, until Churchill spotted him and chased him away. With the rise of Hollywood, actors became gossip’s prime quarry; the magazine Confidential courted lawsuits by printing stories with titles like “Mae West’s Open Door Policy.”
On the Fox News program, Kurtz asked Levin whether his willingness to buy material “tarnished” TMZ’s integrity. Last year, Page Six reported that TMZ paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for surveillance footage of Beyoncé’s sister, Solange, attacking Jay Z in an elevator at the Standard, in New York. (According to a former TMZ employee knowledgeable about the deal, the price was closer to five thousand dollars.) The Society of Professional Journalists condemns the practice of paying sources, saying that it “threatens to corrupt journalism.” Levin was unapologetic. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “The video is still the video. So who cares whether you pay money for it?”
Kurtz noted that, amid all the gossip, TMZ had aired some consequential stories. In 2012, the site published a video showing four marines in Afghanistan urinating on dead insurgents, which prompted a criminal investigation and disciplinary action against the marines. Did such posts, Kurtz asked, signal an intent to change TMZ’s reputation as “a raunchy tabloid operation”? (On the day the Fox interview aired, TMZ’s home page featured an “exclusive” about Iggy Azalea, the Australian rapper, who was threatening to sue an adult-film company over the release of a sex tape.) Levin’s face lit up. “We’ve been around for nine years, and if you look at the stories that we’ve broken they are stories that literally every newscast in America has put on the air,” he said.
Apart from running the Web site, Levin hosts two syndicated television shows: a one-hour newscast, “TMZ Live,” and a thirty-minute program, “TMZ on TV,” which is taped each morning, between seven and nine, on the floor of the TMZ newsroom, and features Levin clutching a mug of iced green tea and bantering about the latest celebrity news with his colleagues. Levin assumes the role of semi-hip uncle—cool for his age but amusingly out of step with his younger colleagues’ fads and jokes. On the October 19th episode of “TMZ on TV,” one staffer mentioned that the rapper The Game had recently given Diddy a Ferrari.
“Why did he?” Levin asked, several times.
“We get it,” a colleague retorted. “It’s a terrible joke.”
Later in the show, the conversation turned to a photograph of Diana Ross leaving a CVS, at night, wearing sunglasses and carrying a package of toilet paper. Levin seemed affronted to see Ross so stripped of glamour. “Back in the day, she wouldn’t do that,” he said.
Levin’s exposure on television has turned him into a celebrity himself. The Los Angeles Times has followed his attempts to sell his house in Hollywood Hills West, for which he is asking almost four million dollars. Gossip sites have published paparazzi shots of Levin drinking iced coffee with his partner, Andy Mauer, a chiropractor. When Levin appeared on “The Howard Stern Show,” in 2011, Stern said he’d heard that TMZ was worth as much as four hundred million dollars. “That’s nothing to sneeze at for a fucking Web site,” he added. (The Web site is wholly owned by Warner Bros., but Levin is an executive producer of TMZ’s TV shows.)
The attention that Levin receives is not always so adulatory. The estranged husband of a former sitcom star recently made threats against him, persuading him to take on a twenty-four-hour security detail. The Guardian, in a 2009 profile of Levin, referred to him as the “high prince of sleaze.” Alec Baldwin, who has been the subject of several harsh TMZ stories—including one, from 2007, in which the site posted a voice-mail recording of Baldwin calling his eleven-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig”—told me, “There was a time when my greatest wish was to stab Harvey Levin with a rusty implement and watch his entrails go running down my forearm, in some Macbethian stance. I wanted him to die in my arms, while looking into my eyes, and I wanted to say to him, ‘Oh, Harvey, you thoughtless little pig.’ ” Baldwin added, “He is a festering boil on the anus of American media.”
But for some the significance of the Sterling and Rice stories called for a reassessment. In 2014, Adweek named Levin the digital editor of the year, noting, “Whatever topic your co-workers are talking about around the water-cooler, they probably read it first at TMZ.” The television journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell, who is a friend of Levin’s, told me, “Harvey’s a truth-teller—he has exposed things that people want to keep secret.” Sports Business Daily wrote, “Like it or not, the effect that TMZ’s coverage had with its Ray Rice and Donald Sterling stories was Watergate-esque.” And after Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, died, in late 2014, Deadline Hollywood praised TMZ’s “game-changing” work, and asked of Levin, “Is he the next gen Ben Bradlee, or just the face of the new incarnation of the National Enquirer?”
On May 7, 1968, Levin, then a senior at Cleveland High School, in Reseda, California, stepped up to a microphone, faced a football stadium filled with his classmates, and did his best impression of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for President. Levin had volunteered to stand in for him during Cleveland’s mock election. He had carefully followed the campaign and learned Kennedy’s mannerisms: the Los Angeles Times, which covered Levin’s speech, noted that Levin even “jabbed his finger” the Kennedy way.
A month later, Kennedy came to Los Angeles for an event at the Ambassador Hotel. Levin attended. After the speech, as Kennedy was walking through the hotel’s kitchen, an assassin shot and killed him. Soon afterward, Levin formed a local committee called Citizens for a Safe Society, and he lobbied the Los Angeles* city council for a gun-reform initiative that would require prospective gun buyers to complete a written competency test. “Anyone buying a gun should be familiar with its deadly potential,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
That fall, Levin enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied political science. He considered pursuing a Ph.D. but chose law school instead, at the University of Chicago. One of his professors, Geoffrey Stone, recalled him as a confident student who was “always eager to debate.” Levin took Stone’s class on evidence. One day, Stone was sick and cancelled the class. At home, he turned on the TV and, to his surprise, saw Levin onscreen: “I was flipping through the channels, and there was Harvey on ‘High Rollers’ ”—a game show hosted by Alex Trebek. “It was a pretty terrible show.” Levin lost. The next week, Stone confronted his student. Levin replied, “If you won’t tell anyone I lost, I won’t tell anyone you were watching ‘High Rollers.’ ”
In the mid-seventies, Levin accepted a teaching job with the law faculty at the University of Miami, a period that he recently described as “the single greatest year of my life.” He loved combining the seriousness of academia with the wild fun of South Beach. He subscribed to a new magazine, People, and read it in his office. After hours of poring over casework, it was, he says, “just like crack.”
Levin returned to California, to teach at the Whittier College law school. At the time, a conservative named Howard Jarvis was campaigning to pass a ballot initiative in California limiting real-estate taxes. Levin, who opposed the measure, faced off against Jarvis in several public debates. Though the proposition ultimately passed, Levin made a positive impression, and the Los Angeles Times hired him to contribute an advice column, titled “The Law and You.” Levin wrote about, among other things, a passenger’s rights when he or she is bumped off a flight, and whether blood tests can conclusively establish paternity. When Carol Burnett sued the National Enquirer for defamation, in 1981, he observed that her lawsuit faced significant challenges: she “must prove that the Enquirer published the article about her with either an intentional or reckless disregard for the truth.”
Levin began consulting on “The People’s Court,” and in 1986 he joined the staff of a rival program, “Superior Court,” where he was eventually promoted to managing editor. These shows, in which legal disputes were resolved in fake courtrooms, represented a fresh form—reality TV—that blended the everyday and the outlandish. Levin attempted to give “Superior Court” more credibility. In February, 1987, to commemorate the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, he set out to book a Supreme Court Justice. He initially contacted Warren Burger, who had just stepped down as Chief Justice. Burger’s assistant, according to Levin, told him to “quit trying.” Then, Levin has said, he reached out to Harry Blackmun, who had written the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, and who had a contentious relationship with Burger. “I played Burger against Blackmun,” Levin recalled, in an interview with a local newspaper. Blackmun agreed to go on the show. It was a coup for Levin, even though, he conceded, Blackmun’s appearance turned out to be “terrible television.”
In 1990, “Superior Court” was cancelled, and Levin took a reporting job with NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate. He shared desk space with another general-assignment reporter, Kent Shocknek, who later became the anchor of the morning newscast. At the time, Shocknek told me, the station had more reporters than cameramen; Levin, he recalled, perfected “a great trick” to secure a crew, “regardless of the merit of his story.” Shocknek explained, “He would be on the phone, setting up an appointment, and then he would slam the phone down, and yell, ‘I got it! This is the guy! We have to get him before he leaves!’ I can’t tell you how many times I had to wait for a crew because Harvey convinced the dispatcher that he had the story of the year, every single day.”
After a few years, Levin quit and joined the CBS affiliate. On June 13, 1994, O. J. Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found dead outside her Brentwood condominium. The case combined Levin’s core professional interests—law, celebrity, scandal—and he worked tirelessly on it. A month after the murder, he was reviewing footage taken outside Simpson’s home and noticed that the prosecutor Marcia Clark had been on the premises before a search warrant was issued: the time stamp read “10:28,” though Clark did not receive the warrant until 10:45 a.m. KCBS promoted Levin’s discovery as “a bombshell,” and Levin referred to himself on the radio as “a constitutional police officer.”
But Levin had made an error. The time stamp depicted the moment that the footage had been filed—at 10:28 p.m.—instead of the moment it had been shot, hours after the warrant was issued. The station issued what the Los Angeles Times called “an extraordinary public apology.”
Levin went on the air and said, “We made a mistake, we know how it was made, we’ve corrected it, and it is something that will not happen again.” He added, “I stand on my record and the stories that I’ve broken. I don’t apologize for being an aggressive reporter.”
Leo Braudy, in his 1986 book, “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History,” defines fame as “the interplay between the common and the unique in human nature.” For Levin, nothing captured this dynamic quite like stars posing for mug shots or appearing in court. In the early aughts, he successfully pitched an idea to Telepictures, a division of Warner Bros.: a weekday newscast dedicated to celebrity court cases. His “mission,” he once said, was “not to make celebrities look bad but to make them real.” To Levin, the O. J. Simpson case offered a glaring example of how differently the law was applied to celebrities and to ordinary citizens.
Levin had witnessed this double standard himself. His father had run a liquor store in Reseda, and in Harvey’s youth it was subjected repeatedly to sting operations by police officers who suspected that minors were being allowed to buy alcohol. At the same time, celebrity-friendly clubs in Hollywood touted their lenient policies with respect to minors. “Harvey thought it was so unfair that these clubs would get away with it, just because they were selling to celebrities,” Gillian Sheldon, the former TMZ publicist, told me.
Levin also disapproved of the way that publicists leveraged access to celebrities in order to control the media coverage of their clients. “The stories that were being told weren’t real,” he said, in a 2009 interview. “Producers knew that they weren’t real, but they played ball to get interviews with the stars.” Most journalism about stars, he said, was “built on a lie.” He set out to infuse celebrity coverage with an investigative ethos by tracking legal filings and court cases. A Web site called the Smoking Gun was already publishing such documents online. But Levin “taught us what else to look for,” Angela Laughlin, one of the early hires at TMZ, said. “How to reach out to all those named in the complaint, how to stay on top of these cases, how to find statements and depositions buried in the file.”
In September, 2002, Levin’s new TV show, “Celebrity Justice,” premièred. It often aired late at night, and it struggled to find viewers. Sheldon, who was the publicist at “Celebrity Justice,” recalls, “We were breaking news all the time, but we weren’t doing it on the show.” Rather than unveiling scoops in the middle of the night, to meagre audiences, Levin and his reporters often took the best material to more established shows like “Access Hollywood,” or to CNN and Fox News. “Celebrity Justice” continued to do poorly in the ratings, and after three years it was cancelled.
Nevertheless, Jim Paratore, the president of Telepictures, wanted to find Levin another project. Paratore had been contemplating a new Web site that could feature unused footage amassed by “Extra,” also a Telepictures production. Paratore discussed the idea with Jim Bankoff, an executive at America Online. (Time Warner, the corporate parent of Warner Bros., had recently merged with AOL.) Bankoff, who is now the chairman of Vox Media, liked the concept: Telepictures would supply the content, and AOL would handle the technical and commercial side. Telepictures offered Levin the opportunity to run the site.
But Levin was not interested in managing a site that functioned as “another thing to puff up Hollywood,” Bankoff recalled. Instead, Levin proposed adapting the combative spirit of “Celebrity Justice” to the pace of the Web. “ ‘Urgency’—Harvey used that word all the time,” Jeff Rowe, another former AOL executive, told me. “He wanted a site that created a sense of urgency.”
The site needed a name, and “Feed the Beast,” “Frenzie,” and “Buzz Feed” were all considered, according to Rowe’s notes. Then, one day, a Telepictures executive suggested “Thirty Mile Zone.” It was an old movie-industry phrase, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, which designated the industry’s boundaries in Los Angeles. Levin suggested an abbreviated version: TMZ.
The domain name tmz.com, however, was owned by a man who built robots—the site’s initials stood for “Team Minus Zero”—and he showed little interest in selling. “We had the guy’s name, and we knew that he worked at a computer-parts company,” Rowe said. One day, Levin decided to go see the man, and he asked to borrow Rowe’s modest rental car, so that he wouldn’t appear to be wealthy. (Levin drove a Mercedes.) “Harvey called him up, went over, wrote him a check for five grand, and bought the URL,” Rowe said.
In November, 2005, TMZ began operations, on the second floor of an aging studio complex in Glendale. On one of the first nights, its lone cameraman caught Paris Hilton and her boyfriend leaving a club in her Bentley, crashing into a parked truck, and fleeing the scene. It was an auspicious start, and Web traffic soon soared to more than ten million unique visitors a month. (Last month, according to Quantcast, TMZ.com recorded more than seventeen million.) Levin has compared the launch to the opening of the Gap in Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union: “Everybody wore gray coats, and then the Gap came in and suddenly you saw blue coats and red coats and green coats. People had choices. When people have choices, you can’t sell that gray coat anymore.”
From the start, Levin’s “crusader mentality” at TMZ caused some consternation, Lewis D’Vorkin, a former senior vice-president of AOL, told me. “Harvey believed that every celebrity was fake, and that it was his job to expose that.”
Alan Citron, TMZ’s first general manager, recalls fielding concerns from both AOL and Telepictures over “the tabloid direction of the stories.” He told me that executives urged him to “move the coverage into the middle.” He hired a reporter from Variety to write more traditional features about the industry—the comings and goings of agents—and experimented with real-estate coverage. But when Citron reviewed the traffic data one thing became “undeniably clear”: “The tabloid material was what people wanted. The rest was like organ rejection—it just didn’t work.”
At the start, Levin had only a dozen or so employees. He was selective about whom he brought on, prizing loyalty, energy, and connections over experience. “We’ll hire kids, and we’ll train them,” he has said. One early hire was the daughter of Paris Hilton’s attorney. Another was the son of the assistant sheriff in Orange County—Mike Walters, now the head of TMZ’s news desk. “He ran a forklift at one point,” Levin once said of Walters. Los Angeles was, as he put it, a “very Kevin Bacon-like city,” and he wanted reporters who either had celebrity connections or showed an eagerness to build them.
In July, 2006, a tipster called a TMZ employee to say that he had just seen Mel Gibson on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. Levin made some inquiries, and learned that Gibson had been pulled over for driving under the influence, and that he had called the arresting officer a “motherfucker.” Gibson also had launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, saying, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
Levin went to the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department for confirmation. He was told that his account was “absolutely untrue.” But later that day he secured a copy of the original police report, which contained four pages, excised from the version on file, detailing Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant. The document supplied both evidence of Gibson’s bigotry and proof that the sheriff’s department had attempted to cover it up. After TMZ published images of the four pages, the story made national headlines. Citron said, “That was the moment the rest of the world discovered TMZ.”
Four months later, Michael Richards, the former “Seinfeld” star, was performing at a comedy club in L.A. when he singled out an African-American in the crowd: “Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” One of Levin’s deputies, Evan Rosenblum, got a call from a college friend in the middle of the night. The friend had a sister, and one of her boyfriend’s buddies had been at the club and had recorded Richards’s outburst on a digital camera. “We started working on it at 4 a.m.,” Rosenblum said, in a Los Angeles Daily News article. The resulting piece left Richards’s career in ruins. Rosenblum later said that the Gibson story “put us on the map,” but the Richards video “made us what we are.”
In less than a year, TMZ had become a dominant venue for celebrity news. “We were getting our asses kicked,” Brittain Stone, who was Us Weekly’s photography director from 2001 to 2011, said. “They were at police precincts, doing real beat reporting, and getting things like surveillance video.” In terms of photography, he said, “they were coming up with things that we would never touch: cell-phone pictures, video grabs, things that wouldn’t hold up in print. Our mission was to be aspirational—something that was pretty, shot in a certain kind of light, people looking good. TMZ never really did that.” TMZ did not create its aesthetic. Ryan Linkof, an associate curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has noted that, in 1911, the Daily Mirror published a photo spread of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s wife, Margot, which showed her looking “pinched, pale, almost skeletal,” and “her dress crumpled.” But TMZ’s crude look also emphasized that it prioritized speed over polish. “It was single-handedly creating the news cycle,” Stone said. By February, 2007, TMZ was drawing more Web traffic than the sites of People and “Entertainment Tonight” combined.
Steve Honig, a public-relations adviser who, for a time, represented Lindsay Lohan, told me, “When my phone rings and it’s TMZ, I pretty much stop what I’m doing and pick it up. Not because I’m bowing to the gods at TMZ but because, when something from TMZ runs, it spreads so quickly that, if there is any inaccurate information, within five or ten minutes it’s been picked up by a hundred other outlets.” (In 2009, TMZ published a black-and-white photograph supposedly showing John F. Kennedy sunbathing on the deck of a yacht, in the company of four topless women. It was widely circulated. By the end of the day, the Smoking Gun revealed that the photo had been lifted from the November, 1967, issue of Playboy, and showed a male model, not J.F.K.)
At TMZ, tips often turn into stories within minutes. On January 20, 2015, at 8:32 a.m., a senior producer sent an internal e-mail that noted, “Got a tip from a friend I know from high school. She didn’t wanna say how she knew, but told me Hope Solo’s husband Jerramy Stevens was arrested in Manhattan beach 2 nights ago for DUI.” (Solo is a top soccer player.) Two minutes later, a senior news producer confirmed the arrest from an online database. At 8:41 a.m., “Hope Solo’s Husband Busted for D.U.I.” appeared on the TMZ home page.
“I use my law degree every five minutes,” Levin has said. Over the years, he has trained many employees in the art of court reporting. Ben Presnell, who worked at “Celebrity Justice” and, later, at TMZ, told me he spent most of his days at the Los Angeles County Municipal Courthouse, searching for new filings and trying to charm clerks into giving him information. Currently, TMZ has three reporters stationed full-time at the courthouse; the Los Angeles Times has one court reporter.
In May, 2012, the judge overseeing the case of a man who allegedly extorted Stevie Wonder caught a TMZ cameraman illicitly taping the courtroom proceedings. The judge announced, “The court’s just been made aware that, unbeknownst to counsel and the court, a microphone was placed at counsel table.” (The tape was turned over to the judge for review.)
David Perel, the former editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, and a founder of Radar Online, recalls, “Everything that was hitting the window in the courthouse, they were getting instantly.” To Perel’s frustration, Levin consistently secured documents before others had access to them. “They were throwing around a lot of money,” Perel claims. According to a former TMZ news reporter, documents constantly flowed into the office from the courthouse. “Assistants and couriers would bring them in stacks,” the former news reporter said. “We had court documents coming out of our ass.”
Levin also maintained close relationships with defense attorneys. Many of them received free publicity on TMZ, and were referred to by cheeky nicknames. Laura Wasser, a divorce attorney, was the Disso-Queen. This nickname has appeared on TMZ hundreds of times. In October, 2011, Kim Kardashian, a Wasser client, filed to divorce Kris Humphries, the basketball player, after seventy-two days of marriage. “Kim has hired disso-queen Laura Wasser, who has repped the likes of Britney Spears, Maria Shriver, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Reynolds, and Robyn Gibson,” the accompanying story read. TMZ published exclusive images of the divorce papers moments after Wasser filed them in court. (Wasser said, “This firm has a strong policy of not speaking with media about our cases.”)
Multiple sources told me that Levin is close to Shawn Holley, a lawyer who has represented Lindsay Lohan and other celebrities. In 2011, when Lohan went on trial for theft, TMZ repeatedly posted confidential information. The presiding judge compared the site to the C.I.A., and expressed bewilderment at “how these things leak out.” He added, “Thankfully, this case doesn’t involve military secrets where people’s lives are at stake.” (Holley denies giving information to TMZ.)
Despite its belligerent reputation, TMZ’s coverage could be as fawning as other celebrity news: the day the Michael Richards video appeared, the site featured a picture of Britney Spears in fishnet stockings at a Las Vegas club, and one of Evangeline Lilly surfing in Hawaii. Josh Levine, TMZ’s first cameraman, told me that, once the site became successful, many publicists changed their strategy. “They started tipping us off,” Levine said. He remembered filming Paris Hilton and her boyfriend at a movie theatre in Los Angeles in 2007; Hilton appeared surprised by Levine’s presence, even though, according to Levine, he was acting on a tip from Hilton’s own publicist, Elliot Mintz. Gillian Sheldon told me, “I can’t tell you how many times we got calls from Britney Spears, or her people, who called to say, ‘She’s going to get a tan.’ ”
In 2006, Levin told the Times, “What I love is the business of creating and preserving celebrity.” His “proudest moment,” he said, during a talk in 2010, at the University of Chicago Law School, was when Levine captured footage of the actress Tara Reid standing behind the velvet rope outside of Hyde, a Los Angeles night club, while Paris Hilton—Reid’s former best friend—walked right in with a new friend, a previously unknown woman named Kim Kardashian. “That video just went everywhere,” Levin said. “Literally, that video made Kim.”
The success of the Web site inspired Levin to branch out. In 2007, he created “TMZ on TV,” and the “TMZ Live” newscast followed, in 2012. He started celebrity-spotting bus tours in L.A. and New York. (The tours are managed by Andy Mauer, Levin’s chiropractor partner.) Some stars call ahead with their location, and then act surprised when the bus drives by. “It’s almost like an African jungle safari—they’ll come up to the bus,” Levin said recently.
In July, 2007, Levin moved TMZ into a space in West Hollywood. Instead of taking a corner office, he placed his desk on a riser in the center of the newsroom, creating an editorial panopticon. “Anytime you went to talk to him, you felt like a supplicant,” a former senior producer told me.
On TV, Levin always appears congenial, but, according to numerous accounts, when the cameras switch off he often turns abrasive and domineering. “If there were gaps in your stories, if you didn’t have enough detail, if he wanted another question answered, he would fly off the handle,” a former news-desk reporter told me. The former senior producer remembered Levin impetuously firing people. “We roll through a lot of people,” Levin conceded, in a speech last year.
“Harvey has no problem publicly shaming you,” a former assignment-desk producer told me. “He used to say, to all of us, ‘My fucking dogs are smarter than you!’ You become like a battered child. He beats you down, but the second you’re about to say, ‘Screw this place,’ he gives you a compliment, and you live for that.” The former TMZ photographer recounted that Levin once screamed, “I could get a monkey to do your job!” and, on another occasion, “Do you want me to draw this out in crayons for you fucking idiots?” The former news reporter said that, on one occasion, Levin compared his staff to “a roomful of handicapped people.” Rory Waltzer, another former cameraman, told me, “Harvey Levin would have been a great dictator: he is charming enough so that you want to follow him, but terrifying enough so that you don’t want to fail.”
Some of Levin’s subordinates, such as Evan Rosenblum, the TMZ deputy, mimic his style. “There was definitely a misogynistic culture in the office that was perpetuated by Evan,” a former producer said. In 2014, Taryn Hillin, a former TMZ writer, took legal action, alleging sexual discrimination and unlawful termination. According to the lawsuit, Rosenblum “routinely belittled, berated and humiliated” her, “screaming at her in front of co-workers,” and telling her, “I fucking hate this shit you hand in.” She called the workplace environment at TMZ “hostile or offensive.” (Levin isn’t named in the suit, although TMZ Productions is.)
Dozens of current and former employees characterized the TMZ offices as an uncomfortable workplace. “Sex was discussed casually, as a commodity,” another former producer said. He described employees regularly gathering around computer monitors to watch footage of celebrities having sex. (Stills from these clips appeared on TMZ.)
Many people declined to discuss TMZ on the record, citing nondisclosure agreements and a fear of antagonizing Levin. Gillian Sheldon called Levin to ask him for permission to speak to me—though she left TMZ in 2008. One former employee came to lunch in a disguise, worried that she might be recognized speaking to a reporter. Another stood me up; she later apologized, saying, “I was scared.” Numerous former employees confessed to going on medication to manage workplace anxiety. “Harvey is ruthless,” Simon Cardoza, the former cameraman, said. “He is able to treat people like shit because everybody wants to be near the limelight.”
Levin continued to break big stories. In February, 2009, a private bank, Northern Trust, which had just received $1.6 billion in federal bailout funds, hosted a golf tournament and party in the Los Angeles area. TMZ reporters sneaked into the tournament and recorded sponsored performances by Chicago and Sheryl Crow, and took photographs of Tiffany gift bags that were being distributed to guests. The piece, which was titled “Bailout Bank Blows Millions Partying in L.A.,” sparked immediate condemnation of Northern Trust. John Kerry, then a senator, declared that he was “sick and tired” of “reading about another idiotic abuse of taxpayer money while our country is on the brink.” (The bank insisted that it did not use any bailout funds for the tournament.)
Levin called the Northern Trust story “the most important thing we’ve ever done,” and commended his team for dealing with the financial crisis in terms that ordinary Americans could appreciate. “It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around $800 billion in bailout money,” he told the Times. “It’s much easier to understand paying for a Sheryl Crow concert.” The Times piece quoted Waltzer, the former cameraman, saying, “Britney is fluff, but the stories about Northern Trust and Madoff and politicians in D.C. really have an impact on the country.” (TMZ reported that Kevin Bacon and Larry King had invested in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.) Waltzer told me that Levin prepared the quote for him. “All Harvey wants is respect,” he said.
Five months after the Northern Trust story, Michael Jackson died. A first responder, upon arriving at Jackson’s house, called TMZ to tip off the site. (Ed Winter, the L.A. assistant chief coroner, is also a regular source, according to numerous former employees; Winter says that it is part of his job to speak to reporters.) TMZ confirmed the death through one of Jackson’s security guards and Jackson’s father, Joe, and broke the news eighteen minutes after Jackson stopped breathing.
In a 2013 radio interview, Levin said that his kind of journalism was as rigorous as any other: “You could take me, put me in Afghanistan, and I’ll use the same principles I’d use with Britney Spears.”
In January, 2011, an anonymous tipster, using a voice modulator to disguise her identity, called TMZ, offering to sell a compromising video of Justin Bieber. At the time, Bieber was sixteen* years old and about to star in a bio-pic, “Never Say Never.”
The caller e-mailed a teaser from the video that reached Diana Dasrath, who until recently was TMZ’s “clips-clearance manager.” The teaser showed Bieber, sitting alone in a room, singing his hit “One Less Lonely Girl” a cappella. In place of the usual lyrics, Bieber had substituted “nigger” for “girl.” He giggled as he sang, “There’ll be one less lonely nigger” and “If I kill you, I’ll be part of the K.K.K.”
Levin faced a tough decision. “You have no idea how many stories cross our desks that we don’t do,” he said in 2013. He has pointed out that he frequently passes up “the juiciest stuff.” In 2008, he received photographs of Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer, smoking a bong, but elected not to publish them. “It felt like he was set up,” he told an audience at the National Press Club. (The News of the World published the photos.) Two years later, Levin declined to post voice mails and lewd text messages that purportedly had been sent by the quarterback Brett Favre to a New York Jets gameday host.* “It felt like bedroom police to me,” he said at the time. (Deadspin published the messages.) In November, 2014, according to a leaked e-mail, Jonathan Stinson, a publicist from Relevant Relations PR, submitted gossip about a former child star, backed up with “legal/hospital documents left in a backpack of her former roommate.” Mike Walters, TMZ’s news director, told his colleagues, “We don’t want to be involved with hospital records.” (When reached by phone, Stinson claimed that he had been trying to sell the records on behalf of an acquaintance.)
Levin claims to live by a code that precludes him from crossing certain lines, such as targeting minors or policing bedroom affairs. (Dr. Phil, on a 2014 episode of his program, said, “I know Harvey Levin . . . and I know him to be someone that values children and family relationships.”) Levin is sensitive to any insinuation otherwise. In 2012, Ellen DeGeneres, whose show is produced by Telepictures, implied on the air that TMZ outed gay people. Levin called a Telepictures executive and said, of DeGeneres, “She’s ruining the brand!” DeGeneres phoned Levin to apologize, according to three former TMZ employees, but he refused to take her call. When she sent him a gift basket, Levin refused that, too.
Despite Bieber’s age, the clip was too compelling for TMZ to pass up, and Dasrath was involved in efforts to procure it. (She declined repeated requests for comment.) Dasrath managed several of TMZ’s critical sources, including those inside Delta and the limo company. She also fostered relationships with hackers. In 2013, TMZ broke a series of stories about hackers “swatting” celebrities: calling 911, falsely claiming to be the celebrity victim of a home invasion, and then watching as a swat team descended on the celebrity’s house. During this period, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, and Selena Gomez were all victims of “swatting.” While the L.A.P.D. searched for the culprits, TMZ continued publishing scoops about the incidents.
After a deal was made for the Bieber clip, Justin Kaplan—the former production associate who had received the limo lists at the gas station—was sent to Levin’s house.
“They liked the way I handled things, and they used to pick me to go on these cool trips,” Kaplan told me. At the house, Andy Mauer gave Kaplan an envelope containing a check for about eighty thousand dollars. Kaplan drove to the Burbank airport and caught the next flight to Las Vegas. He rented a car and headed to an apartment building on the outskirts of the city. On the second floor, a middle-aged African-American woman in an oversized T-shirt answered the door. Kaplan tried to ascertain the woman’s identity: did she have a son who was friends with Bieber? But she didn’t want to chat. “She handed me a laptop, and a disk, and I gave her the check. I got on the next flight back to Burbank.”
In the newsroom, staffers made preparations to publish. “It’s part of the machine—you own every angle related to the original story,” another former production assistant told me. “You find family. You find neighbors. You find associates and friends. You find affected groups. You call the record label, you call the N.A.A.C.P.—what do they have to say about it?” Such posts draw more readers to the original story, helping it to go viral. “That’s the way Harvey controls the game.”
That afternoon, TMZ contacted Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, for comment. A source close to the situation told me that when Bieber was informed of the leak he broke down, confessing that he had made the video a while back, as a joke, and that he thought he had deleted it from his laptop, which was later stolen.
In a phone conversation, Braun pleaded with Levin not to post the video, saying, “You’re going to ruin this kid’s life.” Levin hesitated for four seconds, then said that he was moving ahead, and that he would need a statement from Braun by the morning. “Harvey, whatever those four seconds were—whatever that place is—that’s the place that I want you to go back to,” Braun said. He and other members of Bieber’s team stayed up all night crafting a statement. In the morning, Braun and Levin spoke again. Levin confided that he’d been unable to sleep. “A lot of people call me and tell me I’m an asshole—they say, ‘Fuck you,’ ” Levin said. “You didn’t. I’m not putting the video up.” Braun broke down in tears. Bieber later called Levin and thanked him.
In the 2010 lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, Levin hinted at his calculations in such moments. “I don’t live by hard-and-fast rules in this job,” he said. “I can’t give you a rigid principle on where the line of privacy is.” He claimed that he struggled with this dilemma “all the time.”
Twenty-four hours after the Bieber video came in, the newsroom learned that Levin had decided not to run the story. He did not destroy his copy of the video, however, and Bieber’s camp was aware that Levin could reverse his position and post it. Celebrity secrets are treated like commodities at TMZ, not unlike the way they were treated by J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. “The power of secret information was a gun that Hoover always kept loaded,” Tim Weiner* writes, in “Enemies,” a 2012 book about the bureau. A former writer for TMZ told me that, for Levin, there was more to gain by sitting on the clip, and earning Bieber’s good will, than by running it and ruining his career. (Older gossip publications followed this strategy as well. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the “dark genius” of William d’Alton Mann, the publisher of Town Topics, was his realization that “stories that came into his possession were perhaps worth more untold than told.” In the nineteen-fifties, Confidential gained access to the head of Columbia Studios by leveraging tapes of Rock Hudson that referred to his homosexuality.)
In the months before TMZ obtained the video, its coverage of Bieber had often been antagonistic; it ran a post suggesting that he had hit a twelve-year-old boy during a game of laser tag. After Braun and Levin had their phone conversation, numerous flattering Bieber-related exclusives appeared on the site: a photograph of Bieber backstage during a commercial shoot; pictures of him getting a haircut; a video of him and his girlfriend Selena Gomez performing karaoke; a story about how he bought “every single flower” at a florist’s and sent the flowers to Gomez’s house; video from a trip that Bieber took to Liverpool; and others, including a report of him watching “Titanic” one night, with Gomez, inside an otherwise vacant Staples Center. (“Sources connected to the Biebs tell us . . . Justin hatched the idea after seeing the movie ‘Mr. Deeds’—where Adam Sandler surprises Winona Ryder with a date at Madison Square Garden.”) Bieber also made some appearances on “TMZ Live.”
In June, 2014, the Sun published a copy of the scandalous “One Less Lonely” video. (Unbeknownst to Levin, the seller had continued to shop around copies of the footage. Radar Online also owned a copy of the footage.)
Levin dedicated a segment to the clip on “TMZ on TV.” Mike Walters, the head of the news desk, said, “So there’s a video of Justin Bieber, when he was fourteen, singing a parody of his own song, ‘One Less Lonely Girl,’ where the ‘girl’ is replaced by the n-word.” Levin feigned shock.
A few weeks after TMZ acquired the Bieber video, Charlie Sheen was rushed to the hospital following a party at his house involving wine, cocaine, and sex workers. Kevin Blatt, a source for TMZ who also worked in the pornography industry, got a call a few hours later from an adult-film director. One of Sheen’s escorts wanted to talk: Courtney Roskop, a twenty-two-year-old who had just been with Sheen. Blatt drove across town to see her.
Roskop recounted her evening with Sheen, which included “tennis-ball-size” hunks of cocaine and attempting to have sex. Blatt feared that Roskop’s statement alone would not be enough for TMZ to run a story; he knew that Levin expected documentary proof. (The National Enquirer also seeks photographic and video evidence, but when it is not available the Enquirer will subject sources to polygraph examinations. Levin, in the absence of video, generally tells his reporters to keep digging.) Roskop said that Sheen had written her a thirty-thousand-dollar check, which she had already deposited. Blatt drove with her to her bank, photographed the check, and brokered a deal, in which, according to Blatt and Roskop, Roskop sold TMZ the licensing rights to the image for roughly eight thousand dollars. Blatt took fifteen per cent, as his commission. Blatt, citing a clause in his TMZ contracts that prohibits publicizing the terms with anyone other than an accountant, an attorney, or a judge, refrained from disclosing precise amounts that he has received, adding, “Even if I could tell, I would probably undershoot.”
Blatt arranged other deals for Roskop, including an appearance on “Good Morning America.” He helped make a video of her discussing Sheen’s “binge,” which she sold to TMZ for twenty-five hundred dollars. TMZ also bought a screen shot of a text in which she informed Sheen that she was pregnant. Roskop told me that she received “a small sum” for it.
The Roskop stories boosted Blatt’s status at TMZ. Soon afterward, he offered TMZ a lead on a tape involving Tupac Shakur. The tape’s owner had called Blatt anonymously. Sex tapes were Blatt’s specialty. He had obtained and marketed a video of Paris Hilton, and one of Verne Troyer, the actor who played Mini-Me in the “Austin Powers” franchise. “There’s nothing like a good sex-tape story to really drive clicks and searches,” Blatt told me. Though Levin did not post explicit videos on TMZ, he was adept at translating the existence of a tape into news, Blatt said. “If I know who got offered the tape, that’s a story,” he said. “And if there’s a cease-and-desist that comes after that, that’s another story.”
Blatt gave the Shakur tip to Mike Walters. Walters wanted to see the video, so Blatt called his source, who lived in Oakland, and, a few hours later, the three of them met at a Kinko’s in the Bay Area. “We went in with an envelope full of money and said, ‘Let’s see the video,’ ” Blatt recalled. It showed Shakur receiving oral sex. “Mike took a picture with his phone, we threw down the cash, and we left.” They had paid eight thousand dollars, according to Blatt, who, apart from his commission on the deal, also received a tip fee.
Three days later, Levin promoted the story on Twitter, saying, “It’s the real deal.” Over the coming days, TMZ published eight stories pertaining to the tape: “Sex Tape Surfaces,” “6-Figure Bidding War Erupts,” “2Pac’s Family: We’ll Sue anyone Who Tries to Sell the Sex Tape,” and so on. Stills featuring Shakur were posted as “evidence” for “non-believers.” The tape itself was never made public.
On a Thursday evening not long ago, I met Blatt at Craig’s, a popular steakhouse in West Hollywood. Several paparazzi stood outside, fiddling with their cameras. Photographing celebrities going in and coming out was like fishing an overstocked pond.
Levin insists that his photographers are not paparazzi. On a recent episode of “TMZ Live,” he said, “There are a group of renegade photogs out there that are dangerous and act like criminals—where they run people off the road, where they chase people, where they go after people’s kids, where they incite people. And it’s terrible, and I’m the first one to say those guys should be dealt with very strongly, thrown in jail, when they do it.” Josh Levine, TMZ’s original photographer, questions this statement: “ ‘We don’t follow people or do car chases’? They had me do that all the time.” Levine recalled pursuing Britney Spears’s black Lexus through Beverly Hills. “She’d do U-turns on Beverly Boulevard to mess with us. I was on my motorcycle and there were, like, twenty-five other cars, all paps, weaving in and out of traffic, running red lights. It was a shit show. Harvey would yell if we didn’t get the shot.” Other photographers offered similar accounts. (TMZ said that its employees are expected to obey the law.)
Inside Craig’s, the bar area was crowded with women in stiletto heels and sleeveless furs. One woman held a Pomeranian under her arm. Blatt, who has thinning hair and a goatee, made small talk with the bartender and the cocktail waitress. “These are the people who call me with stuff,” he said. (In July, an employee at a hotel in Santa Barbara notified Blatt that Jerry Weintraub, the “Ocean’s Eleven” producer, had just been taken away in an ambulance. Blatt relayed the tip to TMZ, which confirmed the story and broke the news of Weintraub’s death.)
The host led us to a leather banquette near the bar. Scanning the menu, Blatt recalled coming to Craig’s one night with his fiancée, a model in the adult-entertainment business, and spotting Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, dining with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. (That night, a TMZ cameraman captured John at the door. “Why don’t you just fuck off!” John shouted.)
Blatt surveyed the room. “I’m a hustler,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been doing since I was born. I’ve had over a hundred and fifty jobs in my life-time. I’ve sold aluminum siding. I’ve sold cell phones. I’ve sold porn. But there’s nothing like selling celebrity fucking dirt. It’s recession-proof.”
He estimated that he had made more than a hundred and fifty deals with TMZ over the years, collecting, on average, more than thirty thousand dollars a year. At first, most of his earnings resulted from his connections in the porn industry, but he had begun diversifying. In February, 2012, after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton, Blatt drove there and checked into a room. He cultivated sources among the hotel employees. “I had a whole pocketful of hundreds,” he told me. “That’s what makes the world go round—cash.” He soon obtained photographs taken in Houston’s room, including one of her service cart, which had an open can of Heineken on it. Most valuable was a shot of the bathtub, still filled with water, where paramedics discovered Houston’s body. Blatt sold this to TMZ for about a thousand dollars. He recalls paying a member of the hotel staff about a hundred dollars to take the photo for him.
Two years later, Blatt learned that V. Stiviano, Donald Sterling’s mistress, was taping an interview with Barbara Walters at the Four Seasons, in Beverly Hills. He went to the hotel, drank several Martinis at the bar, and eventually snapped a cell-phone photo of Stiviano in the lobby, while paparazzi—who were prohibited from entering the hotel—waited outside. TMZ covered Blatt’s expenses for the day, and paid him a freelance-producer’s fee of around seven hundred and fifty dollars. “Five hundred here, five hundred there—it adds up,” he said.
More recently, a transgender sex worker from Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch, near Carson City, Nevada, contacted Blatt to inform him that one of her clients, the former basketball player Lamar Odom, had just collapsed at the brothel. She also sent Blatt text messages she had exchanged with Odom: “My manager said she would personally pick you up in a unmarked car back to a closed off room so no one will see you or know you’re here.” (Odom replied, “I’m ready for that car!!”)
The waitress at Craig’s placed a dish of jalapeño creamed corn on the table. Blatt waved his fork and declared, “This is off the hook.” Then, across the restaurant, he spotted Alexis and Jim Bellino, the co-stars of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Blatt said that he contacts TMZ whenever he sees someone famous. “If you see a dollar on the road, you pick it up,” he said. “If I call in now and say, ‘I’m with Alexis Bellino,’ and they give me fifty bucks, that’s fifty bucks that paid for my dinner.”
The Bellinos slid into the banquette beside ours. Blatt leaned over and introduced himself to Jim Bellino, who was wearing a gray sports coat over a white T-shirt picturing Ringo Starr. After Blatt commended Bellino for his performance on the show, he commented that he sometimes worked for Harvey Levin.
“We actually really appreciate Harvey,” Bellino said.
“They’ve never done anything slanty on you?” Blatt asked.
“No,” Bellino said. “Harvey gets it. You don’t burn bridges. We did a newscast with Harvey, and we even coöperated with the bus.” He went on, “It was convenient. We were going to be shopping in Beverly Hills, or whatever, so I said, ‘If the bus is coming by . . .’ ”
After a few more minutes of conversation, Bellino turned back to his table. He and Alexis finished their meal, then stepped outside, into a battery of camera flashes.
Last April, Levin gave a lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, titled “The New Journalistic Environment.” A few minutes after 7 p.m., he came onstage wearing a blue V-neck sweater, slip-on sneakers, and baggy stonewashed jeans.
In opening remarks, Sheila Sullivan, the acting executive director of the U.C.S.B. media center, which served as host for the event, described Levin’s reporting as “very powerful and impactful.” When she mentioned that Levin graduated from the University of Chicago, “one of the top five law schools in the nation,” Levin interjected, “Three.”
He spoke for thirty minutes, describing how TMZ had broken down the barriers once maintained by publicists. He discussed his plan to create another news show, and said he was in the midst of developing a game show. (The first episodes of the game show, “South of Wilshire,” recently aired.) He predicted the demise of cable television (and the Internet) and said that, in an age of digital disruption, media companies need to “evolve or we die.” At one point, he said, “When I first heard rap, I thought, That’s not gonna last. And it was really a stupid comment. . . . Ask me anything about rap now. Almost anything. Honestly, I go to a black barbershop now. I do. I’m into it.”
In a Q.-and-A. session after the talk, a student asked Levin how he had obtained the video of Solange attacking Jay Z in the elevator of the Standard. “I’m not gonna say,” Levin replied, emphasizing the importance of protecting sources.
Other hands went up. “I watch your show so much, read the Web site, like, all the time, so you’re just, like, my idol,” a young woman said. Levin replied, “Thank you. Wow. That’s sad.”
Another woman asked Levin what he thought went into making a successful journalist. “Good stories don’t come easy,” Levin said. “You get shut down all the time, and if somebody shuts the door you’ve got to find the way around the door.” He said that he told his staff, “Find twelve ways around the word ‘no.’ ” After Levin finished, students crowded around him, asking for autographs and selfies. As they dispersed, I stepped forward to introduce myself. Arms crossed, he expressed displeasure over the fact that I had contacted current and former TMZ employees, and referred me to his publicist.
A middle-aged woman at the talk encouraged Levin to dedicate more coverage to national politics. TMZ has, in fact, done so, though the results have been awkward. Last year, a TMZ photographer went up to Hillary Clinton, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and asked her, “Hillary, with the blunder on the e-mails—was that just a generalizational gap or can that be corrected?” Clinton smiled and walked past. In July, TMZ caught up with Bernie Sanders: “Senator, your campaign is almost like the ‘Passion of Christ’ movie. Senator, why do you think you are bringing out so many people?” (“We are touching a nerve,” Sanders replied.) With Donald Trump: “Donald, a lot of rappers always use your name in their lyrics.” (“That’s right. ’Cause they’re smart.”)
Levin once tried to set up a bureau in Washington, D.C. In early 2007, he sent Gillian Sheldon there on a scouting mission. He mapped out a new site, TMZDC, and interviewed several local gossip reporters, including Patrick Gavin, who produced a 2015 documentary about the White House Correspondents Dinner, titled “Nerd Prom,” and Anne Schroeder, who was working at Politico at the time. Both Gavin and Schroeder told me that they remained skeptical that TMZ could ever reproduce its tipster regime in Washington. Schroeder said, “It’s not like you could pay a staffer twenty bucks to get a schedule—they are government employees who can be prosecuted for leaks.”
In L.A., numerous officials have lost their jobs for allegedly giving information to TMZ. Two L.A.P.D. officers were reprimanded in 2009 for purportedly selling TMZ the photograph of Rihanna’s bruised face; one was later fired. In 2010, the Los Angeles County Superior Court dismissed its chief spokesman, Allan Parachini, for supposedly providing confidential information to TMZ. (Parachini, who now lives in Hawaii, denies the allegation.)
And in 2006, after Levin broke the story about Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department launched an investigation to identify Levin’s source. According to the Los Angeles Times, the sheriff’s department examined his cell-phone records and discovered two calls from the home of James Mee, the deputy who arrested Gibson, to Levin in the hours after Gibson’s arrest, and an additional eight calls from Levin to Mee’s home in the following days. (Mee declined to comment.)
During his 2010 talk at the University of Chicago, Levin discussed the legality of the Gibson story. “What we did, we did legally,” he said. “The issue is, did somebody else do something that might have gotten them in trouble?” Without naming Mee, he likened him to Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers to the Times and other publications. Then Levin seemed to catch himself, and he laughed. “Just on a slightly different level,” he added.
