For nearly two decades, John Nelson published blind items about the Hollywood elite on the gossip blog Crazy Days and Nights, posting under the moniker “Enty Lawyer.” Nobody knew who Enty Lawyer was except for his wife, his brother, and a handful of friends. Then, earlier this year, his identity was revealed in the middle of a highly unusual legal dispute. A woman he’d had an affair with, a Florida-based podcaster named Cassandra Crose, said he’d strung her along and abused her; he said he’d only stayed with her because she was constantly threatening to out him. This spring, both of them agreed to tellNew York’s Lila Shapiro their sides of the story. According to Nelson, Crose was lying in order to build her own brand: “Money. Content. The incentive for her is to ratchet it up. To get new content, you’ve just got to start making up stuff.” This, Lila wrote, was something he knew a lot about. The stories he told on his blog had often felt more like fan fiction than the observations of a true Hollywood insider. How much of anything he wrote had actually been true?

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