In a dazzling downtown hotel suite with glittering views of the city, a glamorous woman drinks a glass of champagne and desperately tries to become better known to her assembled guests – while maintaining complete anonymity.
“Hello,” she says as various reporters arrive in the suite. “I’m Deux.”
It’s not her real name, of course, but for the woman who runs the pseudonymous Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi, standing in front of others in that room and open about her life as the leader of the cultural phenomenon is close to total exposure to chat as she will offer.
When the Instagram account Deuxmoi first launched as a fashion news and trends site over a decade ago, it had a modest following and eventually fell into obscurity. Then, in March 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, the account’s founder decided to update it while he was bored one night and made a random request: “DM me any celebrity stories (from first or second hand) that you would like to share and I will post.”
She assumed she would get some answers about D-listers. Instead, an article about a reader’s encounter with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill landed in her inbox, which she dutifully posted online. More stories followed: Her DMs were soon flooded with everything from banal celebrity sightings to detailed inside information about breakups, affairs and feuds.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.
Getty
Three months after the relaunch, Deuxmoi had 400,000 followers; Today it has over 2 million loyal fans, with information coming in from Manhattan to Melbourne. Meanwhile, the person behind the account did their best to remain unknown to the masses (so much so that at one point, based on my own background in celebrity journalism, more than one person asked me if I was Deuxmoi. To which I always answered: I don’t wish that).
Connoisseurs practically speak their own Deuxmoi language: from references to Carbone and Via Carota (restaurants known for their celebrity clientele and frequently appearing in Deuxmoi’s Instagram stories) to their devotion to the Sunday Spotted feature (in which a bevy of celebrity sightings takes place). from last week) to the constant requests from tipsters when a new article is submitted: “Anon pls.”
It’s essentially an inside joke — and an unnecessary one — since Deux Moi’s request for anonymity is never required: “I never reveal who sends me information,” says Deux. “I even delete the more interesting text threads and emails so that if I ever get hacked, people won’t know who is sending me stuff.”
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This sentence – Anon Pls. – helped spark what Deux, the Woman, hopes will be a precursor to Deuxmoi, the Report: offshoots of merchandise (sweatshirts and hoodies, often emblazoned with “Anon Pls”) to Anon Pls., the novel , published last year by Harper Collins and now available in paperback. The film was purchased by HBO to be made into an hour-long drama series. “The book is really a big blind item,” says Deux. “Everything in there has some loose connection to my reality.”
‘anon pls’ by Deuxmoi.
Deuxmoi
There are even more expansions – “Reveal Moi,” a report dedicated to reader guesses about Deuxmoi blind items; the podcasts Deux U and Deux Me After Dark; and a paid subscriber-only newsletter that offers more in-depth insider knowledge.
Deux says she keeps this running almost single-handedly, save for two administrative assistants — a task made somewhat easier by the fact that she essentially republishes information as it comes to her, with frequent disclaimers that posts “have not been independently verified.” and that the account “does not claim that the information posted is based on fact.” (She also has a pro bono attorney.)
However, she doesn’t want to continue acting alone as a real Gossip Girl.
“I want to separate myself from Deuxmoi – I want it to be a brand,” she says. “I don’t want to be Deuxmoi, or I don’t want Deuxmoi to just be me, I should say. That’s one of the reasons I want to remain anonymous because I don’t want this to ever be associated with me.”
Of course, that means one of the most courted media personalities in NYC right now can’t really enjoy the trappings of her fame. Booking dinner at Carbone as a “Deuxmoi” is not really an option.
But that’s just fine with Deux herself, who admits to sometimes being paranoid about celebrities finding out her identity. “I would have little panic attacks when friends would say, ‘Let’s go to this restaurant,’ if I knew certain celebrities would be there,” she recalls. “I was convinced they would figure it out somehow.”
There are other sources of stress: in addition to trying to expand her empire, there is also the everyday task of feeding the beast she created. “All these Sunday Spotteds almost kill me sometimes just looking through all these DMs, all this screenshotting and cutting and pasting. I do it all myself. And if I don’t post it right away, I’ll definitely hear about it.”
Taylor Swift and Chris Evans.
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
She hears about a lot of other things too, as celebrities with notoriously rabid fan bases occasionally express their frustrations through her inbox. She notes that Chris Evans and Taylor Swift have particularly strong followings, but her current battle concerns the army of Harry Styles worshipers who turned against her after she posted that Styles had shaved his head.
“Oh my God, my DMs were his lines just tearing me apart, like, ‘That’s not true, you’re wrong, take it back.’ They were relentless.” When a picture of a freshly shorn Style finally emerged, Deux felt vindicated but tired: “I thought, ‘Great, can you all leave me alone now?'”
That shouldn’t happen any time soon.
“Just the fact that I’ve been here for so long this evening, for so many hours, is something,” she says, taking another sip of champagne. “That means I get DMs saying, ‘Where are you?’ Why didn’t you post? Are you all right?’ I guess it’s time to get back to work.”
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