Taylor Swift may be in a way better mood in 2023 than she was during her Reputation Era, but it’s still a truth universally acknowledged: Don’t mess with one of the wealthiest and most demonstrably litigious people in the contemporary music industry. This week, the anonymous person (or people) behind Deuxmoi, the infamous celebrity gossip account that posts anonymous tips, often without reliable substantiation, made the potentially fatal mistake of doing exactly that.
On Thursday, Deuxmoi was up to its usual tricks: Via an Instagram story, the gossip account insisted, as it’s done in the past, that Swift and ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn had, at one point, secretly tied the knot: they “DID have a ceremony in either 2020 or 2021 in the UK and it was described to me as ‘marriage’ by more than one person. It was NEVER made legal.”
“I have no reason to lie,” Deuxmoi, which at one point was believed to be run by two women, added. This statement in particular could come back to haunt them.
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Later that day, Tree Paine, the pop star’s publicist, made a rare move on behalf of her sole client: She tweeted from her personal account in Swift’s defense, calling out the gossip hounds with a screenshot of their post.
“Enough is enough with these fabricated lies about Taylor from Deuxmoi,” Paine, a favorite of the Swifties due her flame red hair and dogged loyalty, wrote. “There was NEVER a marriage or ceremony of ANY kind. This is an insane thing to post. It’s time for you to be held accountable for the pain and trauma you cause with posts like these.”
Predictable cheers of support for Paine’s pushback flooded the comments, but still more discerning readers pointed out the PR pro’s specific word choice, and what it might be foreshadowing.
“Using the words trauma and pain is so strategic bc you can’t sue unless there’s measurable damages,” one fan pointed out. “Calling something trauma makes it a measurable damage. It’s the first step of documentation before taking legal [action].”
Paine was making it perfectly clear just how badly Deuxmoi had fucked up, and then the gossip account went ahead and made it worse with a posted and deleted non-apology: “Well I make zero dollars from lying… can publicists say the same?” What seemed to be semi-joking acknowledgement from Deuxmoi that she indeed was making it all up? Strike one.
“Also, to relate something that is in reference to something that happened years ago to ‘pain and trauma’ after what just happened seems like a poor choice of words,” they added.
If, here, Deuxmoi is making a reference to the death of Ana Clara Benevides, the Swift fan who passed away after attending an Eras Tour concert in Brazil two weeks ago, it cannot be overstated: it’s a legitimately crazy move to provoke Swift so fresh in the aftermath of that trauma.
And finally, the nail in the coffin: “Either way, I apologize to Taylor,” Deuxmoi wrote. Apologizing, also known as admitting culpability? Also known as lawsuit no-no number one? The one word almost guaranteed to lose you your case, and potentially millions? Yeah.
Because, again—Swift is a pro at legal smackdowns, and she will not hesitate.
Years ago, she allegedly threatened the guy who taught her how to play guitar with a lawsuit, just because he purchased the domain name itaughttaylorswift.com.
She famously won her landmark sexual assault trial, winning a symbolic $1, after countersuing against a former Denver radio DJ who accused her of erroneously costing him his job.
And when it comes to the under-fire gossip account, Deuxmoi’s extremely iffy-at-best sourcing has brought negative attention to the account before.
“I’m not pregnant,” Hayley Bieber wrote on Instagram in 2020, tagging Us Weekly. “So please stop writing false stories from your ‘sources.’” The Us Weekly source, of course, was Deuxmoi.
While maintaining the anonymity of all its gossip sources in its posts has protected the account to an extent, in 2021, defamation lawyer Neville Johnson told Vanity Fair that as long as @deuxmoi “says something snarky or editorializes”—like, say, “Well I make zero dollars from lying… can publicists say the same?”—the account would have legal liability were a true dustup to occur.
Johnson added to VF in the same interview, however, that he thought that getting into a legal battle with @deuxmoi wouldn’t be worth the trouble: Who has deep enough pockets, or the time?
Maybe the same person who decided to go to painstaking lengths to re-record and re-release six of her 10 chart-topping studio albums; partially in a quest to own her master recordings, but also partially as a way to financially punish her former collaborators?
“My bleakest moments running this account are not actually the horrifying personal messages, the legal risks, or the wild-goose chase that is discerning whether a tip is true or false,” Deuxmoi told Cosmopolitan earlier this year. “It’s the strain on my social life.” Is that calculus about to change?