Who Is Enty Lawyer? The Story Behind Crazy Days and Nights

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One afternoon nearly 20 years ago, a lawyer named John Robert Nelson began to lead a double life. He was 37, working for a small firm in a small town on the coast of Northern California and earning so little that he had to get up at three every morning to deliver newspapers. The alter ego he created led a more glamorous existence. “Enty Lawyer,” as that persona was known, was the author of Crazy Days and Nights, a Hollywood-gossip blog that would go on to acquire cult status among devotees of celebrity dirt. In his first post, Nelson wrote that he’d started the blog because he was in a “unique position of being able to tell you what really goes on behind the scenes and what even the gossip magazines can’t find out.” In the short biography he posted on the site, he claimed he had represented big stars going through “arrests, divorces, breakups and hookups, new deals and cancellations.” He promised to dish about his clients as well as his own Hollywood adventures with the celebs and pseudo-celebs who populated his life. If his claims were to be believed, Enty was among the most connected guys in Hollywood. He was friends with Leonardo DiCaprio. He drank with Frank Sinatra. He’d picked up Katherine Heigl on the side of the highway at three in the morning when she ran out of gas and collected Quentin Tarantino off a bender in Krakow. A disclaimer said the site published “conjecture and fiction” in addition to “accurately reported information.” It did not specify which anecdotes were which.

It was a good time to launch a gossip blog. By the mid-aughts, the public had grown weary of the fawning celebrity coverage that mainstream entertainment outlets had been offering up for decades. Magazines often worked in collaboration with publicists to present ennobling portraits of the stars and the industry that made them, glossing over drug addictions and infidelities, sexual harassment and corruption. Meanwhile, a new cohort of gossip bloggers like Elaine Lui and Perez Hilton seemed to be stripping away the façade, and they were attracting huge followings on the internet. Enty was never as big as they were, in part because he wrote anonymously. But he offered something they didn’t. Writing in a unique style, hard-boiled and absurd, he trafficked primarily in blind items, entries written as puzzles that could each theoretically apply to at least two different celebrities — a clever way to both evade potential libel lawsuits and engage readers, who would guess the identities of the stories’ subjects in the comments section. This allowed him to be more salacious than Hilton or Lui. In 2016, a glowing Vanity Fair write-up declared him “the King of the Blind Item,” claiming Enty had become “a direct source for gossip that evades the normal channels of celebrity news and feeds directly into the Internet’s never-ending appetite for the juice.” What made him the king, according to Vanity Fair, was that unlike other gossip bloggers who might occasionally write a blind item, Enty revealed the identities of his subjects, albeit sometimes years later.

Nelson says he grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of two government workers. His parents split up when he was 8. He was reluctant to tell me much about his family (and the details he did share are impossible to corroborate). The only memory he recounted of his parents was of them fighting before they got divorced. “I would wake up to them screaming at each other,” he said. His mother was director of the national school-lunch program and later the national director of WIC, the nutrition program for women and children. His father lacked ambition, Nelson said. “He didn’t really care about advancement or anything like that.”

I met Cassandra Crose and her mother, Julie, a semi-retired accountant, in a pub near Crose’s apartment in Clearwater, Florida. Crose described herself as a hippie but was dressed soberly in a black T-shirt and black-rimmed glasses, her long dark hair tucked behind her ears. She riffled through a leather briefcase packed with court documents and removed a stack of papers. In his initial restraining order, Nelson wrote that he had attempted to break things off with Crose by blocking her, ignoring her, and telling her to stop contacting him. Crose said that wasn’t true. “He never tried to break up with me,” she said. “For someone who’s a fucking lawyer, you would think he would provide some actual evidence.”

At the park in the desert, Nelson invited me to imagine that I had done something embarrassing when I was younger: “Let’s say when you were 18, you decided you were going to make a porn or something like that. Maybe you make three or four of them and then you forget about it. You go to college, you have a life, you have a really good career, but one where somebody will fire you if they find out about this or it’ll ruin your reputation. And then you get together with somebody and you think, Oh, well, I can trust them, or whatever. And you tell them your story. Then a few weeks later, you go, ‘Really, I don’t want to be with this person.’ And the first thing they do is say, ‘Well, if you’re not with me, I’m going to tell the whole world your secret.’” That had been his life for the past year, he said. “From January 15, 2023, until now. Every single time I wouldn’t call her back, she would say, ‘I’m going to blow up your world.’”

The day after Crose received the stalking order, she and her friend Tiffany Busby, a nurse living in New Jersey, released the first episode of a podcast centered on the affair. Busby told listeners that Crose had been in a relationship with someone who was “diabolical” and, in Busby’s assessment, “incredibly famous.” They’d been planning to make a celebrity true-crime podcast called Drenched in Drama since the summer Crose first met Enty. All they needed was a subject. Now they had one.