Series
The part the coverage skipped: what the record shows about the years after.
10 stories published.
Start here · Part 1
One of the most photographed marriages of the 2010s ended in a filing that took twenty-one months to finalise. The court record says what happened; almost everything else said about it does not appear in any document.
6 min read
Part 2
They met as children on a television show, dated through the peak of both careers, and broke up in 2002. What followed — a single, a video and two decades of coverage — is one of the clearest documented cases of a breakup being turned into product.
6 min read
Part 3
Carole Lombard raised over two million dollars in a single evening in Indianapolis, boarded a plane home, and was killed with her mother and twenty other people on a Nevada mountainside.
6 min read
Part 4
Tina Turner walked out of a Dallas hotel on 1 July 1976 hours before a show. In the divorce she gave up the royalties, the houses and the recording contracts, and kept the two words she performed under.
6 min read
Part 5
Cher filed for separation in 1974, married Gregg Allman four days after her divorce was final, and then returned to CBS to co-host a variety show with her ex-husband for another two years.
5 min read
Part 6
An actor hospitalised by his own make-up, an actress set alight by a special effect, and a sixteen-year-old lead who was already on studio-supplied medication. The documented aftermath of the most-watched film ever made.
6 min read
Part 7
On 27 March 2022 Will Smith walked onto the Academy Awards stage and struck Chris Rock during a live broadcast. Everything that followed — the win, the apology, the resignation, the ten-year ban — is on the record.
5 min read
Part 8
Slash walked out of Guns N' Roses in October 1996. Axl Rose kept the name, spent fourteen years making one album, and turned down his own Hall of Fame induction. The reunion tour grossed over half a billion dollars.
4 min read
Part 9
Star Trek was a ratings failure that ended in 1969. What happened to the people in the publicity photographs is stranger than the show: a NASA recruitment contract, an internment-camp childhood made public, and a ninety-year-old captain who actually went to space.
4 min read
Part 10
One photograph posted to Reddit in September 2012 turned a cat named Tardar Sauce into a trademark. Six years later, a jury in California awarded her owners $710,001 against a coffee company that went too far.
4 min read
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