“I’d have to talk people off cliffs,” Weakland said. (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. In 2009, for example, he took the call that led to TMZ’s breaking the news that Chris Brown had physically assaulted Rihanna. (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. 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 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. Many tipsters ask to be paid, and the site often complies.
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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.” More than a hundred tips arrive every day. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles, where TMZ is based, so a message was left on the tip line. 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.Īt 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. When the elevator arrived in the lobby, Palmer was lying unconscious, face down, on the floor.Īccording to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor. Palmer and Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, were arguing as the doors slid shut. 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. Photograph by Peter Bohler for The New Yorker TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization. Harvey Levin, TMZ’s founder, leaving an L.A.
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