Crazy Days and Nights purports to know which of your favorite stars murder prostitutes, support the KKK, rape children or even commit war crimes.
The decade-old gossip site was created by a self-described 400-pound alcoholic entertainment lawyer who lives in his parents’ basement, a caricature, for sure, meant to mask his true identity, which he works to keep hidden. “Enty” is what he’s called by his readers.
In addition to pap photos of celebs, there were, early on, a few often-sprawling and bacchanalian blind items each week, which proved to be the most popular part of the blog. After a remarkably lousy site redesign a couple years ago, the original blogger seemed to morph into many, and instead of a handful of blind items on Fridays, the army of Entys began churning out almost too many to digest.
What’s stunning about the whole enterprise is that it doesn’t rest solely on the latest tea about bed-hopping Real Housewives (though there’s plenty of that) but also includes rumors about current and bygone Hollywood heavyweights committing felonies and escaping punishment due to their fame and power. More shocking yet is that during orgies of reveals, names are named, even if they’re connected to what are potentially the most litigious allegations. And the blind identities that go undisclosed are usually quickly divined by the crowdsourcing of a regular group of commenters.
It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as hogwash, some genuine stories about small affairs interspersed with fan fiction about A-listers and others perpetrating heinous acts, especially because the posts are composed with the almost unreadable grammar and syntax of a child repeating third grade for the fourth time. Except sometimes the items are prescient, even eerily so.
One in 2014 suggested a celebrity linked to a famous entertainer had perhaps committed suicide, the body waiting to be discovered. Four days later, an assistant found the lifeless form of fashion designer and Mick Jagger significant other L’Wren Scott, who had killed herself. That’s not to say most of the rumors prove true but enough do to make one wonder about the others.
The main question: How the fuck has this site, which goes a million miles beyond anything Gawker ever dared run with, not been sued into the ground?
In a smart Vanity Fair piece, Mehera Bonner writes about CDAN and explains why Enty operates essentially with impunity. An excerpt:
For the last decade, as these little guessing games have grown in importance to the tabloid economy, the best place to find them has been a bare-bones Web site named Crazy Days and Nights.
Enty, the anonymous, self-described entertainment lawyer who runs the site, has been a direct source for gossip that evades the normal channels of celebrity news and feeds directly into the Internet’s never-ending appetite for the juice. He claims to be well-connected and dishes with abandon. But his primacy in the field is largely due to the one feature of his publishing ethos that completely distinguishes him from his rivals: He names names. Loyal readers know that when a major event in Hollywood happens—or sometimes even before—Enty will start revealing any blind items he previously posted about it. It’s one thing to run a blind item: the New York Post has a history of publishing blinds in Page Six; Ted Casablanca wrote them as part of his E! Online column, “The Awful Truth”; and Elaine “Lainey” Luiwrites them on her site, LaineyGossip.com. It’s a whole other beast to reveal that blind. And Crazy Days and Nights is all about the reveal.
“A lot of times people think that blind items—because you’re not naming names and most blind items never have any reveals—have some kind of ‘shadiness’ to them. So when it leads to validation, it’s nice,” Enty told Vanity Fair recently. “It used to be that I’d wait until [a couple] had split before I’d reveal, but it’s so much better now, where I’ll just reveal it before it happens if I’m 100 percent sure. That way when it does happen, it looks even better. And I’ve noticed over the last nine months or so that if I reveal an item like that, invariably a few weeks later the couple calls it quits. I like these little tiny victories, even if only loyal readers know.”•