How Dare Celebrities Cheat?

It is not good to go back on a covenant, even one implicitly made and foggy regarding what would constitute a violation. Few monogamous couples, that is, get down to the brass tacks of chalking the contours—or, rather, the borders—of their coupledom, including those inclined to discuss their transition to exclusivity. (Seemingly gone are the days of D.T.R., or “defining the relationship,” as people my age once called it, popularized by the forgotten MTV teen drama “Awkward”; also lost to the wayside, going “Facebook official.”) Coupling up, especially among the straights, tends to leave a lot unsaid. “What’s understood doesn’t have to be explained,” as extremely online loveaholics will claim, even in an age of relentless communication, where a nudge in the form of a “high five” on Peloton may be—and not incorrectly—construed as a flirtatious overture. (Several months ago, Peloton quietly added an option to block someone, years after female users complained of harassment on the app.) Sex with others seems an obvious no-no—yet there are those who would, if forced into a hypothetical during brunch, much rather their partner sow a wild oat or two with some faceless hookup than cheat with their heart and mind, known as an “emotional affair.” With so many ways of being in touch, there are just as many ways to repeatedly betray the trust of a partner who didn’t anticipate the intrusion into their relationship of, say, disappearing Snapchat messages. In that sense, infidelity can be a lot like pornography (which, incidentally, is considered by some to be cheating): you know it when you see it. Forget about ever knowing another person inside and out; in relationships, we can rarely be said to know ourselves.

Whatever uncertainty hounds our personal attachments may be sublimated into pronouncements on the goings on between couples we will never meet. Bold conjecture is the posture of celebrity gossip, now sourced from People and people with Instagram accounts alike. And nothing cranks the rumor mill like something so pedestrian as a tale of two-timing. Lately, tabloids, and the Internet, have been preoccupied with the reported breakup between the twenty-five-year-old pop singer Sabrina Carpenter and the thirty-two-year-old actor Barry Keoghan. Shortly after People shared the news (sort of)—“They are both young and career-focused, so they’ve decided to take a break,” an insider told the magazine earlier this month—word on the Internet was that Keoghan had cheated, possibly with a Los Angeles-based influencer. The influencer has since denied ever meeting Keoghan, but too late: the hounds—or Carpenters, the chosen moniker of the singer’s fans—had been roused. They have since got their licks in, going after Keoghan’s rough-hewn looks and rough upbringing as a child in foster care, and speculating on the parenting of his two-year-old son, who lives in Scotland. The general sentiment: how could he—a critically acclaimed Oscar nominee, it must be admitted—do this to her? Carpenter herself, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the gossip, as she is coming off the U.S. leg of her “Short n’ Sweet” tour (named for her Grammy-nominated album), and promoting a recent Netflix Christmas special. Not that this has kept fans from, as is their wont, reading between the promotional copy, frothed up further by every evidence of their golden girl’s success.

Celebrities have been chastised less for running people over. Keoghan soon deactivated his Instagram account and released a statement on X in which he addressed the “many lines being crossed”: in addition to “disgusting commentary” and “absolute lies” online, he mentions snoopers in the flesh. “Knocking on my grannies door. Sitting outside my baby boys house intimidating them. That’s crossing a line,” Keoghan wrote, with a plea for the peanut gallery—“Please be respectful to all.” One person on X, a podcaster, from the looks of it, responded that Keoghan “could’ve said sorry in here somewhere but ok.” Michael Cuby, an editor at large at Them, responded, “Who the hell would he be apologizing to?” Indeed, by what reasoning would Keoghan owe the public any contrition for the alleged circumstances of his alleged breakup? The journalists Joan Summers and Matthew Lawson, on their podcast, “Eating for Free,” remarked upon the strange tenor of this disappointment, as though onlookers may be counted among the injured party. “We don’t need an apology from him. He didn’t cheat on us, allegedly,” Summers said, with an emphasis on the “allegedly.”

This overblown incident echoes another circulating scandal from this past year, starring another pop star, this time a titan in the industry, who is herself the blamed. During 2023, while filming Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked,” the entertainment media began reporting that Galinda and Boq, that is, Ariana Grande and the stage actor Ethan Slater, were an item. That both were at least legally married was dicey enough—Slater would file for divorce that summer; Grande shortly thereafter—but Slater was also a new father, with a recent social-media record of a wife and newborn. These bare facts, if they were facts, didn’t look great. Although commentary on social media has dutifully scolded Slater as the husband and father with free will, the greater share of judgment has, naturally, been directed toward the one we know—or, rather, the one who is famous—with online hecklers calling Grande a homewrecker in not so many words. Whatever lousy gender politics might be detected in the well-masticated story of a pop-lady seductress, caustic remarks were laundered by the honorable undertaking of defending a new mother. In interviews with tabloids, sources sympathetic to Slater’s wife confirmed the worst of the speculated time line and said that she was, in the parlance, “blindsided” by the affair. Aside from select intimations by Grande and Slater that there might be another side to the story, Grande has stuck to her work, first in a Grammy-nominated album, “Eternal Sunshine”—“no, I won’t hide / Underneath your own projections,” she sings on the lead single—and the release of the blockbuster that caused so much trouble, “Wicked.” Her success in these projects, especially the latter, bespeaks a wider market than mere tabloid chasers and also, since even critics of her personal life won’t begrudge the work, the fickleness of gossip. Perhaps some fans really did, as they claimed, swear off her music for good. But most wouldn’t hold it against her. So, then, what, really, was the fuss?

Cheating, even in the abstract, touches a nerve like no other form of transgression, laying bare a fundamental insecurity about relationships which, as celebrities demonstrate, no allotment of money, talent, or good looks can foreclose. This has thrown me back to what remains the definitive infidelity scandal of my lifetime—no, not that one—which coalesced around the 2005 film “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” I have a vague memory of being lectured on the ethical position of Team (Jennifer) Aniston by an old dance coach—a bottle blonde with a daughter my age, a beloved husband, and a finished basement. But although this kind of pearl-clutching made sense from a demographic we’re inclined to call “middle America,” it has been interesting to see such clamorous disapproval from the sort of person irreverent enough—and consider that a compliment—to follow the extracurricular activities of pop artists and their beaux. I suppose I did not realize we all venerated the family unit so. Don’t take me for heartless. I, too, believe that motherhood is criminally underappreciated and that men fail their women partners on a basis so regular it should never go without saying. And yet I fear that some people have confused their dismay for social critique. Remember 2021? When John Mulaney filed for divorce from a woman he’d claimed to adore and began dating someone else—as rumors of prior infidelity abounded—and his fans lost their minds? The reaction “seemed unusually frantic,” the writer Kayleigh Donaldson wrote at the time, on the entertainment Web site Pajiba. “Some cried that love was dead. Others lamented how Mulaney didn’t seem like that kind of guy. He just loved his wife so much. How could he do this to her? How could he do this to us?” Out of this, the Internet learned a new word for this “one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy”: “parasocial,” the invocation of which has itself become suspect. (“You are not any less guilty of the crime of being a parasocial freak just because you learned a new vocabulary word,” Sarah Hagi wrote on Gawker.) If we are past the notion that adult celebrities must be role models to our children, we haven’t stopped seeing them in our image. We are none of us exempt from parasociality, because celebrity, the publicness of a figure, relies upon delusion masquerading as recognition.

The people that hold such dominion over our imaginations deserve greater scrutiny than Joe Schmo, it’s true. But expressions of dismay are worth inspection, or at least a sense of proportion. Perhaps railing in the comments of an (alleged!) philanderer feels good enough for us to believe it enacts a tiny justice. For out there in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, the unchecked maltreatment from rich and famous men remains too much to bear. The protracted legal battle between Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt continues to surface detailed allegations of the latter’s domestic abuse, which he has denied, while he remains fawned over by the press; last week, the horrendous web surrounding Sean (Diddy) Combs added a new member in Jay-Z, who is accused of raping a thirteen-year-old. (Jay-Z has called the accusation “heinous in nature” in an over-all bizarre statement posted to X from the official Roc Nation account.) As others have noticed, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in the other direction, gaining speed since the misogynist circus that was Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard. Hollywood is dark and full of enough monsters without our having to resort to exaggeration. What to do when accountability has never felt more fictive? ♦