There was no shortage of celebrity scandal and excitement this year: Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck called it quits, Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater went public after an alleged affair, and Blake Lively’s entire PR apparatus fell apart during her promotional tour for It Ends With Us. Oh, and Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman had an alleged affair that allegedly broke up both of their marriages, Justin Timberlake got a DWI, Justin and Hailey Bieber had a baby named Jack Blues Bieber, and Selena Gomez got engaged to one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive (Benny Blanco).
It was all a lot to keep track of, so it’s understandable if you missed some of the smaller dramas percolating under the radar. Let’s catch up on some of the best “small gossip” of 2024.
Josh Radnor got married in spectacular fashion
At the top of the year, Josh Radnor of How I Met Your Mother fame hard-launched his new wife in a “Vows” column in the New York Times. Reporter Katherine Rosman was on-site as Radnor, 49, and his beloved, a psychologist named Jordana Jacobs, 36, got married upstate in the middle of a snowstorm on the third anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol. “We decided we would rebrand January 6,” Radnor told the Times. And the story only gets better from there. I urge you to read it in full, but here are some highlights you may have missed: The couple met for the first time doing mushrooms at a “sound-meditation retreat,” got engaged in Joshua Tree, and couldn’t find one friend to say something flattering about their union. My favorite quote, from a pal they deputized to speak to the Times about them: “They are in a perpetual ‘college-dorm-go-deep’ mode that most adults abandon after graduation.”
Celebs: They are not like us. And that’s why we love them!
Reese Witherspoon got a new German boyfriend
When Reese Witherspoon got divorced from her second husband, the former CAA agent Jim Toth, in 2023, she kept the details quiet. There were no tabloid stories about affairs or money problems or anything of the sort. Even the details about the divorce settlement were bland: They had a prenup, they kept separate bank accounts during their marriage (smart!), and they split everything else up “to the mutual satisfaction of the parties.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that Witherspoon, 48, debuted a new boyfriend this year in the most low-key fashion possible (for a celebrity, anyway). In case you missed it: She is now dating Oliver Haarmann, a German financier and a founding partner of Searchlight Capital. They went public in July on a dinner date in the West Village and were later spotted at the same heliport in August. Now you know!
Joshua Jackson and Lupita Nyong’o broke up
Joshua Jackson has had one of the most dramatic romantic lives over the past few years, and no one seems to call him on it. First, he got divorced from Jodie Turner-Smith, the mother of his young child, in the fall of 2023. Just a few days after they split, he was spotted with Lupita Nyong’o, and the two quickly became a couple; they confirmed their relationship with a strange pap stroll in Joshua Tree at the end of last year. But Jackson’s relationship with Nyong’o was not to last either: He was spotted with model Nastassja Roberts in New York in September, and Nyong’o was forced to confirm she was single in an October interview with Harper’s Bazaar U.K. Who will Jackson date next? I’m worried for them already.
Chris Pine’s mystery girlfriend gained a legible identity
Chris Pine has one of my favorite dating histories of any celebrity. He has had relationships with not one but two reality stars: Audrina Patridge (of The Hills) and Vail Bloom (of Vanderpump Rules). He has dated a host of under-the-radar models and a few major actresses, like Zoë Kravitz, Olivia Munn, and Annabelle Wallis. But he never, ever talks about his girlfriends in the press. He took his quest for privacy to new heights this year as he embarked on a relationship with a woman with no name. Pine has had a “mystery girlfriend” — a.k.a. someone unidentifiable to the tabloids — since the end of the summer. They’ve been photographed on a yacht in Sardinia, at dinner in Portofino, and here and there around Los Angeles over the past year-plus. Only this month was her name finally revealed: Keana Sky Wenger. According to Just Jared, she’s a 29-year-old former hostess at Saffy’s in L.A. But perhaps that’s just a cover and she is actually a CIA agent assigned to protect Pine in an international scheme we could not even begin to understand.
Related
