Sad Jennifer Aniston
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2018
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Jennifer Aniston’s story had it all: Heartbreak, secrecy, sex, betrayal. But what it also had was a new kind of tabloid: Us Weekly and its copycats. Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie would have been a huge Hollywood scandal no matter when it happened, but it became an even bigger one because it was turbocharged by these tabloids. Almost 15 years later, the tabloid In Touch ran an issue with the headline “Brad Stuns Jen! Marry Me again!” What is going on? How is it still going on? Why is it still going on?
This is the last episode of Decoder Ring for 2018. See you in the new year.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:08.2 | In 2002, Mara Rhinstein, a young journalist who was working at teen people, |
| 0:14.0 | walked by a newsstand and noticed a magazine she hadn't paid much attention to before. |
| 0:18.7 | Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, mind you, this was still |
| 0:21.2 | the height of friends. And it was them on the cover and the headline was, will they ever have |
| 0:27.2 | babies? It was a May 27th, 2002 issue of Us Weekly. Us Weekly had recently made itself over from a |
| 0:34.6 | monthly magazine into a weekly one, a magazine that was devoted to |
| 0:38.3 | celebrities, but they didn't adore them. Us was funny and trashy and impertinent. It had the |
| 0:43.7 | point of view of your curious, shameless, celebrity-obsessed friend. And I remember walking by |
| 0:48.7 | that cover and just thinking it was so intrusive and it's none of our business. I was so high. I'm like, |
| 0:54.0 | I will never work |
| 0:55.0 | at a place like that. And then I wound up working at us. Mara was a senior writer and then deputy |
| 1:01.6 | editor at us for 15 years. She's still the magazine's movie critic. And she was there as it |
| 1:06.4 | became a genuine cultural and publishing phenomenon. First day I started at Us was July 30th of 2002. |
| 1:13.6 | That September, so not even two months, was the season premiere of Saturday Night Live hosted by Matt Damon. |
| 1:22.6 | In Matt Damon's monologue, he referenced an Us Weekly story. |
| 1:28.6 | It was right there on the cover of Us Weekly. |
| 1:31.2 | The breakup of Justin Timberlake and Brittany Spears and their subsequent angry danceoff. |
| 1:37.7 | And the second that Matt Damon said Us Weekly's name on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, I was like, oh my God, like people are reading |
| 1:46.8 | something that's in this office. And we all of a sudden, we all just felt important. And what we |
| 1:52.3 | were doing sort of made a difference in the celebrity world. And then I would tell people that I |
| 1:57.8 | worked at Us Weekly. And it was like, oh my God, oh my God, my |
... |
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