The Best Press Her Reality Show Ever Got

InTouch Weekly timed it perfectly: right as Lindsay Lohan’s new reality series was launching on the OWN network, they published what they claimed was her actual handwritten list of Hollywood hookups—the physical document, pen on paper, the kind you apparently pass around at parties to impress close friends and then somehow lose track of.

Thirty-six names. The ones they were willing to print: Adam Levine, Zac Efron, Justin Timberlake, Joaquin Phoenix, Colin Farrell, Evan Peters, Wilmer Valderrama. The rest were redacted—allegedly because printing them would constitute something approaching a cultural emergency. Whether that’s the truth or just InTouch managing the drip for future issues is a question I’ll leave to people with more faith in celebrity gossip journalism than I have.

Here’s what people forget: there was a version of Lindsay Lohan who made this list entirely plausible. Before the mugshots, before the ankle monitor years, before she became a punchline and then a meme and then somehow a punchline again—there was the girl from Mean Girls and Freaky Friday, who was genuinely funny and magnetic and beautiful in a way that made the following decade feel like watching something expensive get broken slowly. That version of her could absolutely have worked her way through a substantial portion of Hollywood’s leading men. The surprise isn’t the list. The surprise is that anyone is surprised by the list.

What did she say about the leak? As far as anyone could tell, nothing. The reality show needed the attention. The list delivered it. She probably wasn’t complaining.