Chapter 17
Seventeen
Subject: I can explain
Look, sorry I hung up on you. She doesn’t want anyone to know and I respect that.
Literally No One, not even on tour, and that means please keep this to yourself.
I know what you’ll say but she’s right, it’s better to keep a low profile.
Honestly, it’s the only way she can be in an authentic relationship at this point—she’s trying to protect both of us.
No one bothers us in public. I don’t have any randos coming after my personal information.
Or yours!! You’d get mixed up in stuff too if people knew R and I were together.
And I know how weird this sounds but it just feels .
. . right. It’s a really good relationship, Ellie.
We didn’t mean for this to happen but in the end there was nothing we could do to stop it.
She’s brilliant. She’s an endless well of ideas.
When we play our music together, just the two of us, it’s like we’re speaking this language that no one else understands and nothing else in the world matters.
Sorry, I know it’s cheesy and you probably don’t want to hear it but that’s just the truth. It’s a feeling that defies words. I’ve tried to write about it and it all comes out wrong. She’s the lyrics genius anyway. I just bang on my guitar.
I didn’t want to keep it from you or fib but the privacy is very important to us.
It also helps R trust that I’m in it for her, not for the fame or money or anything else, which—how could I ever be when she’s in the picture?
This tour has been some of the happiest months of my life, Ellie. I’m serious.
I’ll talk to her, okay? You two could get to know each other better once the tour is over. You’ll love her, I promise.
—W
Mari
The smooth sailing never lasts for long, does it?
My first real challenge came near the end of the tour, when Ryan was beginning her shows in Helsinki. I’d gotten much closer with the marketing team and saw a lot less of Skip and Jas, but I still remember the chill that went down my neck when I passed Skip backstage at the Savoy Theatre.
He looked like he’d barely slept and pulled at his mouth as he went.
“Watch out,” he said. “Andre just told me that fucker’s back on his bullshit again.”
Hollywood Report Magazine, February 28, 2015
There’s two sides to every story. And when it comes to the high-profile lives of celebrities, the reality is that—all too often—we only hear one.
It’s the philosophy that our editors pondered when Justin William Ayers, of leaked-Diatribe notoriety, reached out to see whether Hollywood Report would be willing to share the scandal from his own perspective.
And when we agreed, we got more than we could have bargained for.
“It was a misunderstanding,” Ayers said. “I thought I was doing what Ryan wanted me to do.”
That course of action, he alleges, was to intentionally leak the three tracks that were made available to the public ahead of the album’s release.
“She’ll be after me for saying this, just watch,” he said, speaking with our team in the Hollywood Report’s sunny downtown offices. “But I want to come clean. I want to tell the truth.”
Ayers says that Holding invited him to her Malibu home to play the three tracks for him.
“I mean, that was when it first started getting a little weird,” Ayers said. “Because ‘Mine All Mine’ sounded awfully familiar.”
He brought our editors a shocking piece of evidence.
It was the draft of a poem he’d written for Holding back when they were childhood sweethearts in Hamilton, Massachusetts (see insert).
Scrawled on the back of his parents’ old water bill dated 2003 (Hollywood Report called the utility company to verify its legitimacy; “My parents used anything for scrap paper,” Ayers said), the draft makes for a compelling argument that Holding’s lyrics for the song may not be entirely her own.
“‘Your hummingbird heart, always moving, full of art’ is mine,” he said. “There’s no question about it. She took that line word for word.”
It was the first red flag, Ayers claims. “She showed me the songs, and I wasn’t too thrilled about hearing that,” he said.
“And then she tells me: I want you to leak them. I was like, what? But she said yeah, you know people at UCLA, right? We need to build as much hype as possible, and I think this is the way to go. You saw what that did for Helladonna’s album. ”
Ayers also produced emails sent to him directly from Holding’s personal account with the three tracks attached. While the Hollywood Report will not publicly produce them here, our team has verified their legitimacy.
At time of publication, Ryan Holding’s team at Madcap Records was unavailable for comment.
Justin
She wanted to play hardball. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have leaked the tracks, but maybe she shouldn’t have stolen my work and gaslit me about it. And got me fired from the film job I’d been working so, so hard to get.
After that, I had nothing. I was working a busboy job in some sticky bar and grill while she was making millions off Diatribe.
I was clearing a table one night while they had the AMAs going on the TV in the corner, and I remember I spilled gravy or some shit all down my pants.
It looked like I had thrown up on myself.
And I’m sopping up that shit with napkins and getting wet, shredded napkin bits all over my clothes, and in the background Ryan is making this impassioned speech about being a woman in this industry.
Something in me just snapped. All those leaks did was make her album better. And my punishment was to go back to the trenches while she got to live her dream and rake in the cash? No. I knew that wasn’t right.
And you know what? I stand by what I said. I’m not convinced she didn’t want me to leak those songs. Why would she leave them right there when she knew I was upset?
Why did she leave me alone with them for so long?
Was that even her dad on the phone?
Skip
Everyone went about everything all wrong.
If that Justin bastard would have come to Madcap when he got his boxers in a twist about “Mine All Mine,” we would’ve given him a songwriting credit, whatever he wanted.
If Ryan had come to me before the leak, we could have fixed it together.
I mean, these things happen, it was a genuine accident.
Jas could tell you as well as anyone that it’s hard to know where exactly you’re pulling these lyrics from, and you can’t ever be 100 percent certain it’s not something you’ve heard before.
There are systems in place to mitigate that—we vet thoroughly before publishing.
Obviously a poem written by a horny thirteen-year-old on the back of—what was it, a bank statement?
—is not going to be in the ASCAP database.
So we need that communication wherever we can get it.
But Ryan was embarrassed, hoping it would all blow over.
And I’m not free of blame, either, not at all.
I should’ve gone through the proper legal channels right when the leak happened rather than going along with Ryan’s goddamn tit-for-tat revenge plan.
Momentary lapse in sanity on my part. That’s all I can say.
Once that article was out, though . . . the damage was already done. And Justin was veering firmly into libel.
We had no choice but to sue.
Online post samples compiled by Mari and the Madcap marketing team
rydeORdie_1990
justin is lying thru his teeth. u think u can trust anything he says???? ur probs a liar too!!!!
blazerunner_38
no star gets this big w/o stepping on the necks of other ppl. Sry not sry but Ryan has probably stolen from a lot of ppl over the course of her career. Time she finally gets hold accountable
junie_bug
Leave!!! Ryan!!! Alone!!! what has she ever done to u
WhenInTexasss
truly can’t believe Ryan did that to Justin.
super cruel, tbh. Like sure ur album got leaked but is that really so bad 4u?
? Oh no, you still got a ton of money while the person who inspired your song is doomed to poverty.
honestly srsly disappointed in ryan, idek if I can listen to her music anymore
sam_123984
it’s all a distraction. Look at the clues. when the idols fall its a sign of the new world order, Ryan’s been trying to tell us all along. justin knows what hes doing too
Mari
I mean, it was the best trial by fire that I could’ve asked for in my career.
We were doing damage control left and right, coordinating with the PR team.
They had her do that special Oprah interview, but I think it was a misstep; she came off looking more defensive than injured.
So they dialed down any live appearances after that.
And once the court case started, we couldn’t comment on it publicly at all.
Ryan was just . . . extremely angry. You could feel it radiating off of her like heat. In the rare moments when she and I would have free time together, she would spend all of it scrolling her phone, reading the awful posts.
“Stop,” I would tell her. “You have to put it down.”
And she would for five minutes or so before picking it up again and scrolling.
“They talk like they know me,” Ryan would say. “There are people defending or criticizing my character like we’re close personal friends when I’ve never even spoken to them in real life.”
I never knew what to say. She would spiral. I’d usually respond with some form of “Parasocial relationships are a bitch.”
“You know what they’d say if I talked about how hard this is?” Ryan said once. And she laughed. “They’d tell me to go cry into my money.”
Then she sighed and slumped down in her seat. We were having coffee on Madcap’s roof.
“I didn’t mean to take his line,” she said. “And I do feel bad about getting him fired.”