From:
Sent:February 11, 2015, 6:03 a.m.
To:
Subject:I can explain
Look, sorry I hung up on you. She doesn’t want anyone to know and I respect that. LiterallyNo One, not even on tour, and that meanspleasekeep 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 speakingthis 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 ReportMagazine, 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-Diatribenotoriety, reached out to see whetherHollywood Reportwould 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 theHollywood 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 Reportcalled the utility company to verify its legitimacy; “My parents used anything for scrap paper,” Ayers said), the draftmakes 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 theHollywood Reportwill 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
