Leonardo DiCaprio may have recently signed on to star on Martin Scorsese’s film about murderous hotelier H.H. Holmes, but even before that he’s been trapped inside another twisting labyrinth of his own design: the distorted, maddening hall of mirrors that is getting Rihanna pregnant. Whether or not one has impregnated Rihanna is an existential uncertainty that has long plagued our greatest philosophers, and therefore best left to the French—specifically, the editors of French gossip magazine Oops, who pondered deeply, then offered the theory that Rihanna is indeed pregnant, that DiCaprio is the father, and that the child is unwanted (like all of God’s children). But the actor has disputed that theory, leading to our current Socratic dialogue over the indefinable nature of Rihanna’s pregnancy, as well as Oops having to pay DiCaprio $8,800 in damages.
Oops, whose very name conveys the great cosmic mistake that is life, published the article in May under the headline, “Rihanna Pregnant With Leonardo’s Baby: He Doesn’t Want The Baby,” using the mellifluous poetry that is the hallmark of its homeland. According to Gossip Cop, DiCaprio saw the article while in France to have sex with models in front of the Cannes Film Festival, and instructed his legal team to sue. Of course, Jacques Derrida demonstrated that “meaning” is always differential, and that any text therefore contains endless possibilities for interpretation: Rihanna is and isn’t pregnant; Leonardo DiCaprio did and didn’t get her pregnant; he does and doesn’t want the baby. All are possible, contradictory, and irreconcilable meanings that are inextricably linked. Still, only one of them means Oops has to give Leonardo DiCaprio $8,800.
Acknowledging this intractable, unanswerable question of whether Rihanna “is pregnant” when viewed through the obfuscating complexity of semiotics, Oops owner Fredric Truskolaski told Gossip Cop, “We didn’t know. We thought she might be. We were not sure, of course.” Of course not. Who can be? Consider that even if we were to crawl inside Rihanna’s uterus in search of a definitive answer, would we not then be impregnating Rihanna? Would she not also be pregnant with us? Would Leonardo DiCaprio want to be our daddy? In the chaos of our existence in an indifferent universe, no one can say. Best to print every conceivable answer, then hope a famous actor doesn’t see it and feel like suing someone.
In response to having to pay DiCaprio damages for violating France’s right to privacy laws, as well as his right to exist in the great undefined, Truskolaski called DiCaprio a “pervert” who “almost systematically goes out with Aryan-type girls, always blonde hair,” and said he sued Oops because “he could not stand the fact that our magazine was saying he was having a baby with a black girl”—Truskolaski’s vindictive words illustrating the cruel, confusing maelstrom in which we all must live and talk shit about celebrities.