For years, John Nelson anonymously posted blind items on the blog Crazy Days and Nights.
Then his identity was revealed.
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One afternoon nearly 20 years ago, a lawyer named John Robert Nelson began to lead a double life.
The alter ego he created led a more glamorous existence.
If his claims were to be believed, Enty was among the most connected guys in Hollywood.
He was friends with Leonardo DiCaprio.
He drank with Frank Sinatra.
A disclaimer said the site published conjecture and fiction in addition to accurately reported information.
It did not specify which anecdotes were which.
Then this past fall, his identity was revealed in an unusual legal dispute.
A fan and aspiring podcaster herself, Crose became his collaborator, then his lover.
Eventually, he pursued a restraining order against her, a decision that had unintended consequences.
And so the gossip blogger became the gossip.
Now he was looking into filing a defamation lawsuit on top of the restraining order.
Hed submitted thousands of text messages saved on his phone and computer to the FBIs Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Nelson proposed we meet on a Tuesday in February by some rose bushes at a park in Palm Desert.
He wouldnt give me his phone number.
Contrary to what he had written in his X bio, he was not 300 pounds or even overweight.
As one acquaintance put it, he has the vibe of a Florsheim shoe salesman.
That didnt bother Nelson.
People tend to forget what I look like, he told me.
I like it like that.
I dont need to be the center of attention.
It was an ordinary day in the desert, hot and dry.
Nelson drank from a bottle of orange Vitamin Water.
I never have abused anybody in my whole life, he told me.
On the contrary, Crose had been abusing him, he said.
Nearby, someone was on a lawn mower, cutting grass.
Can I tell you why?
The incentive for her is to ratchet it up.
That was something he knew a lot about.
To get new content, he said, youve just got to start making up stuff.
Nelson says he grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of two government workers.
His parents split up when he was 8.
The only memory he recounted of his parents was of them fighting before they got divorced.
I would wake up to them screaming at each other, he said.
His father lacked ambition, Nelson said.
He didnt really care about advancement or anything like that.
After the divorce, Nelson and his mother moved around.
He was fascinated by how different the musicians seemed from their public personae.
You go see this person youve admired, and theyre treating some staffer like crap, he said.
A few actors were hanging out with them backstage.
That was the first time that I saw them up close.
They looked completely different in real life, Nelson said.
Im watching people do all kinds of crazy drugs and injecting stuff.
This, he decided, was what he wanted to do.
I dont need to be out in front, he thought.
I like being in the nuts and bolts and seeing whats going on.
Working for a small firm in the middle of nowhere, he was bored and restless.
He told me the L.A. (Kennedy said she doesnt remember ever meeting him.)
Nelson launched the blog in November 2006.
Six months later, Nelson moved to L.A.
He thought he could get back into the music business, maybe manage some musicians.
Instead, he took a job at a small firm in Central L.A. where he handled probate law.
Eight years later, Enty reposted the item and wrote that the misbehaving star was Sean Connery.
According to public records, he had not yet lived in L.A.
When I brought this up with Nelson, he admitted that hed never worked for Connery.
(When I asked him to connect me with the friend, he declined.)
Obviously, as a lawyer, Im very big on the truth, Nelson told me.
The less I believe it, the more obscure and generalized I will make it.
But I dont just randomly make up stuff.
He might fudge an anecdote now and then, but the truth mattered.
The heart of whatever youre saying needs to be true.
Enty didnt always pretend to have witnessed the action with his own eyes.
Often, he would publish a tip without any framing.
Nelson told me that some of his best tips came from paparazzi and reporters.
That may be true.
A few months later, Beyonce showed up on the cover ofShape,a now-defunct fitness magazine.
While the story was never confirmed, major publications reported on the allegations and credited Crazy Days and Nights.
Five years in, in 2011, Nelson began to look into ways to profit from the site.
Money was tight, and L.A. wasnt cheap.
Panettiere, they added, was her little pet.
The post got 100 million page views.
On the heels of that success, Nelson wrote more and more about rumors of sexual transgressions.
He told me he had always been a champion of women and was primarily motivated by injustice.
When the Weinstein stories blew up, Enty reposted the blind with Weinstein and Saoirse Ronans names attached.
(Ronan has never been connected with Weinstein in any other reporting.)
Its not just about dirty laundry, she wrote.
The Ringer went so far as to contend that they had become industry watchdogs.
This argument, though, elided the thread of old-fashioned misogyny that ran through many of Nelsons posts.
He sometimes implied the women who slept with studio bosses were asking for it.
Me Too was a breakthrough moment for the blog.
In 2018, Nelson launched his Patreon and daily podcast.
He was ticked off about health care and interested in peering behind the scenes of the electoral process.
Its not that I thought I could win, he said.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, only 12 people contributed to his effort.
I spoke with two of them.
One had given $400 but struggled to recall anything about his campaign.
I feel like there might have been a Taylor Swiftticket hookup?
The other donor said she had no memory of meeting Nelson or hearing his name.
When I read her the names of the other 11 donors, she realized she knew five of them.
They were all mothers of girls at her daughters elementary school.
Curiously, all of them had given $390.
I later texted her to ask if by any chance she recalled getting Taylor Swift tickets around that time.
Yes, that does jog my memory, she replied.
Her daughter had gone to the show with a group of girls from school.
It went as a campaign contribution?
Nelson told me he did offer Taylor Swift tickets to donors.
As a former concert promoter, he had ways of getting them for free.
But he said hed raised the money only to pay his campaign manager.
(He ended up coming in last in the race with 3.7 percent of the vote.)
Brian Pocrass, an attorney and producer, shared this view.
But Nelsons ORourke blind was of a different order.
ORourkes death in fact had been well documented.
Her parents had filed a medical-malpractice suit alleging that her doctors had failed to diagnose a long-standing small-bowel obstruction.
Still, Pocrass wanted to do his due diligence and attempt to understand where the story was coming from.
Pocrass tracked down the actress, who told him shed never seen or experienced anything described in the blind.
It was not an accident, he argued, thatRocky Roadwas ORourkes most obscure credit.
ORourkes family told him about the pain the blind had caused them.
Of course theyre angry.
Nelson took down the item in 2019 after learning ORourkes family was upset.
This prompted a realization: Okay, well, this can affect people.
She riffled through a leather briefcase packed with court documents and removed a stack of papers.
Crose said that wasnt true.
He never tried to break up with me, she said.
For someone whos a fucking lawyer, you would think he would provide some actual evidence.
Crose met Nelson in August 2022.
I dont have a lot of friends.
After recording it, Nelson praised her work and invited her to host more episodes with him.
Over the following months, they recorded podcasts aboutFull HouseandGrowing Pains.Their email exchanges took on a flirtatious tone.
After sharing his real name, he told her not to worry about signing an NDA.
So I just dont have people in my life.
Crose hadnt had great luck with men, she told me.
He is not a drug addict, she remembered thinking.
He doesnt have a criminal record.
Hes a respectable person.
Hes a lawyer.I didnt think someone like that would ever be interested in me.
Nelson was texting her dozens of times a day and calling her nearly every night.
He told her he was thinking about moving to Florida so they could be together.
He said he loved her, and she said she loved him too.
Their texts became sexts.
Nelson shared his fantasies of dominating and owning her.
(Give yourself over to me.
Life will be so much easier, he wrote.)
Hoping to learn how to c’mon him, Crose listened to a podcast about BDSM.
They talked about buying a house together, getting married, having kids.
In December, he visited for the first time.
Croses mother met him on that trip.
He looked older than in the pictures hed shared.
He said he was 47, Julie told me.
As they eventually learned, he was 54.
Julie found him standoffish and controlling.
At a restaurant, he told Crose to order a salmon salad.
When the order arrived with candied pork belly, he picked each bit of pork off the plate.
He didnt want her eating that, Julie recalled.
Everything here is so cheap.
And Im looking at her going, Hes moving here already?
Youre not the first person he cheated on me with.
You wont be the last, the woman wrote.
He will despise you too, at some point.
He doesnt even care about his own children.
Nelson had never mentioned any children.
He claimed his ex was in denial about the end of the marriage.
He texted her that he was buying a ticket to Florida.
Im going to move out there, even with you hating me, he wrote.
Im still going to keep all my promises.
At the pub, Crose told me she wasnt in a position to say no.
I wanted to believe him, she said.
It wasnt just the want, it was the needs, she said.
The kids had eight specialized-therapy sessions a week.
Someone had to take them while Crose was at work.
She needed the support, Julie said.
That visit lasted three and a half weeks.
He spent Christmas Eve with Croses extended family and cooked dinner every night.
He started paying for the appointments, too.
Then one day in January, he was acting weird, she recalled.
He texted her saying that he was at a bar and needed to buy a phone charger.
He didnt come back.
Over the next 24 hours, Crose sent him dozens of messages pleading with him to call her.
She told Nelson she loved him.
That seemed to do the trick.
He claimed hed returned to California because he felt guilty about abandoning his daughters.
Nelson said he would fly back to Florida later that month.
When he failed to show up, Crose brought up a series of messages his wife had sent her.
His wife had told her that he didnt know any celebrities and had never worked as an entertainment lawyer.
He just wants to feel special, shed written.
He makes up the blinds.
(Nelson said his wife was lying for make him unattractive to Crose.)
He returned for a visit at the beginning of February.
Nelson cooked dinosaur chicken nuggets for the kids.
Once again, Crose thought that hed returned indefinitely.
He left for California after only two days.
She said they never saw each other in person again.
But she also told him that she loved him more than anyone shed loved before.
At the pub, she turned her laptop around to show me months of Zoom invitations labeled fun time.
Every single night, hes literally masturbating in front of me, she said.
Afterward, theyd watch the classic romantic-comedy seriesThe Love Boattogether.
In March, Nelson said he was coming back to visit.
He sent her photographs from the Tampa airport but never showed.
He told her hed had to fly back home to deal with an emergency.
She later realized hed found those photos online; hed never been in Tampa at all.
Crose felt sorry for him and guilty for doubting him.
That summer, Crose asked Nelson for proof that he and his wife were really divorcing.
Nelson emailed Crose what he claimed was a page from the divorce filings.
They began to make plans for Crose and her three children to move in with him in California.
Nelson made a shared Google spreadsheet to help them stay organized.
Crose pulled her kids out of the specialized Medicaid therapy theyd spent years on a wait list to obtain.
She notified the childrens schools that they would be leaving in the middle of theyear.
The teachers arranged good-bye parties.
Relatives gathered at her grandfathers house to see her off.
She said good-bye to her grandfather knowing shed never see him alive again, Julie said.
The whole family is up there crying their eyes out.
I have been on the phone with AA for the past hour, he wrote.
The next day, he wrote that hed arrive that afternoon.
I love you, he said.
Thirty-two minutes later, there was a knock on Croses door.
An officer from the sheriffs department handed her a restraining order.
Maybe you make three or four of them and then you forget about it.
Then a few weeks later, you go, Really, I dont want to be with this person.
That had been his life for the past year, he said.
From January 15, 2023, until now.
Nelson said hed been feeling stressed and vulnerable when he first visited Crose.
They fought, leaving Nelson with no place to go.
One of his ex-wives told me later that Nelson was extremely passive and completely anti-confrontational.
(Nelson said this wasnt how he remembered it.)
It was on his second trip to Florida that Nelson began to feel hed made a mistake.
He was taken aback when he realized Crose had told her friends and family that he was Enty.
Mymomdidnt know, he said.
For two decades, perhaps just 20 people knew what he did for work.
Now that number was closer to 30.
That really freaked me out, he said.
He told me he barely remembered that three-and-a-half-week trip around Christmas.
He was in a fog, he said.
He felt Crose was keeping him a prisoner.
Nelson showed me a selection of texts Crose sent him over the course of that year.
I will literally show the entire world who you are.
(In fact, it continued through November.)
I asked if he had ever tried to simply break up with her.
All the time, he said.
What words had he used?
You cant actually say, I want to break up.
You cant actually do that, he said.
Because you literally get these texts every other day.
Blackmail doesnt have to be about money.
Hed doctored a document to look like a page from a divorce filing that did not exist.
(Crose shared many texts that indicate he did.)
Am I proud of it?
No, but at the same time, again, I didnt have a choice.
He claimed he was trying to stop her from abusing him.
Throughout this ordeal, Jenkins, who had sued him, did not know his identity.
It was only after the lawsuit settled, in June, that he resolved to end the relationship.
But it took a few more months before he acted.
In the park, he seemed astounded that Crose had taken him seriously.
Its just like,How can she believe that were going to be together?
She had no clue.
Would you take your three kids across the country and not know where you are going to live?
Theyd been planning to make a celebrity true-crime podcast calledDrenched in Dramasince the summer Crose first met Enty.
All they needed was a subject.
Now they had one.
In retrospect, Crose saw Nelson as psychologically and physically abusive.
Crose never consented, she told me, to being used by the man Enty turned out to be.
I can make you disappear if I want, and I am smart enough to get away with it.
(Nelson told me that hed never murdered anyone and had never said this to Crose.)
(As evidence, he showed text messages in which she said fucking die.)
Then she paused to ask me a question: Do we know if hes actually an attorney?
Because lets just say that the documents werent particularly well done.
In his daily life, Nelson is trying to carry on as if none of this ever happened.
He usually records a podcast or two every evening.
But most people in his social circle still dont know about his double life.
It can feel like the whole world must know about it, Nelson said.
But in reality, its a tiny sliver of the population that really cares enough, right?
A few cut ties with him.
But most ignored Croses pleas.
Recently, she proudly announced that she had received her first cease-and-desist letter.
You guys know that all of what I read is alleged, she said.
I dont claim that any of this is fact.
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