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.”
“Are you going to be able to prove that you didn’t send the emails?” I asked. I worded it very carefully; although Ryan and I had made up, I did feel very gun shy of criticizing her after she’d blown up at me in Seattle. She had that power over people, even if she didn’t realize it.
“It’s less about proving that Ididn’tsend the emails than proving that Ididwant the songs leaked. Justin has no evidence that I orchestrated the leaks. If he can’t produce any, it’s slander.”
“And then you get your payout,” I said.
She nodded. “My one-dollar payout.”
“Can you last that long?”
Ryan didn’t look at me. She said, “We’ll see.”
Jasmine
It was messy. I can’t lie. Skip and the legal team opted for a symbolic one-dollar payment even though we could’ve pressed for a lot more. But instead we were fighting an uphill battle to put the optics back in our favor and help the public to see that, actually, Ryan’s the victim here.
Justin had no proof. I mean, come on. It’s obvious looking back. But he had the element of surprise on us, and his sob story was a good one. He played it well:Poor me, Ryan broke my heart when I was just a boy and then she stole my song. I was just doing what she told me to do. I wanted to help her even though she’d hurt me.There was this whole down-home regular-Joe thing he had going on, like he was some starry-eyed kid who got swept up in big bad Hollywood drama.
It wasn’t until he got served that he really started turning nasty. And he got others involved too.
Teen StarMagazine, July 2015
Jwa Tells All!
“We loved each other,” Justin William Ayers said of his childhood sweetheart turned rival, Ryan Holding.
The young man from Massachusetts, who moved from the East to West Coast to pursue a film career, saw one dream crushed after another when his original script was heisted.
“Austin Proust stole my screenplay,” Justin said. “But Ryan stole my future.”
He had high hopes when he finally reconnected with superstar Ryan, with whom he’d grown up in their hometown of Hamilton, MA.
“I used to help her write songs back when we were in school. I mean, I was happy to lend her some of my ideas—I didn’t care that she wasn’t giving me credit. I was just glad to see her succeed.” Ryan told us his story with gleaming eyes that turned misty when he spoke of Ryan’s betrayal. “But ‘Mine All Mine’—that had a special verse. I don’t know, it was personal to me. And hearing that, hearing she didn’t even realize it was something I’d written for her, it made me understand how much free labor she’d gotten out of me over the years. I wondered if she’d been doing the same thing with other guys. Maybe she was using all of us—and that’s why she moved through us so quickly.”
Braden Petri, one of Ryan’s former flames, agreed. “Anything I did for Ryan was never enough. I felt likeshe was taking advantage of me. She was like a spider, spinning her little web until you were caught in her trap.”
“I mean, she used our whole relationship to write a song,” said Tyler Michaels, another victim of the Ryan revolving door. “That should tell you all you need to know.”
When Ryan asked Justin to leak her songs for her, he was shocked.
“It’s something the old Justin would have done for the old Ryan without a second thought,” he said. “I said, ‘Is that even legal?’ Ryan said, ‘Does it matter? I’ll sleep with you if you do it.’ And hey, come on ... I loved this girl. I’d been wanting to get with her since I was barely thirteen. And even though I trusted her, and I did what she asked, I had this little voice in my head, you know? It was telling me things weren’t right.”
Mere days after the leak, Ayers says he was on his way to Ryan’s house to finally make their relationship official—just as she had promised—when he received a call from Anaheim Studios, where he had been hired as a location scout.
“They fired me,” he said, “because Ryan had told them to. I was supposed to take the blame for the leak all along. I was her fall guy.”
“Ryan was the victim of a personal attack on her intellectual property,” said Ryan’s legal team whenTeen Starreached out for comment. “We intend to prosecute Mr. Ayers for his actions to the fullest extent of the law.”
No wonder she’s still single!
Mari
I toldTeen Starto use our PR statement. “Ryan is deeply pained by this difficult situation and only wishes to walk away with a verdict that is fair to all parties and a friendship that is still intact.” I told the lawyers not to talk to the press.
Did they listen? No.
