The tabloid Ok! magazine tweeted a public apology to Katy Perry on Monday for erroneously “reporting” that the singer was pregnant and getting married to John Mayer.
The article, which was available on newsstands in late February, has been taken down and is not cached online, though a blurb of it remains. After it was published, multiple other gossip outlets decried it as fiction.
It alleged that Perry was two months pregnant and would be marrying John Mayer in April. As intrepid Jezebel reporter Jia Tolentino wrote at the time:
A source notes ominously: “They want to spend their lives together, and it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
Though these tweets mention the photos taken of Perry at her home as an issue almost unrelated to the factual nature of the story, a fuller retraction published on the OK! website make it clear that Perry and her team must have put immense pressure on the publication to apologize for it all, as publishing paparazzi photos of stars in a variety of locations—public or not—is pretty typical behavior for these types of magazines:
In the March 2, 2015 print edition of OK! Magazine, we wrongly stated that Katy Perry was pregnant, and that she was planning a wedding. We acknowledge that Ms. Perry is not pregnant, and she is not planning a wedding. We regret the mistake and sincerely apologize to Ms. Perry for publishing the error. We also apologize for including paparazzi photos of Ms. Perry that had been taken with a long lens while she was having a private function at her home.
After retweeting the tweets on her timeline, Perry sent out the following message:
This is the second large-scale retraction a tabloid has made recently; a few weeks ago, Us Weekly apologized to Kendall Jenner for publishing quotes in which she spoke about her father Bruce Jenner’s alleged transition for the first time. The apology about the long-lens photos comes after a campaign headed by celebrities, notably Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard and Halle Berry, over the publication of paparazzi photos of their children. While retractions are nothing new for tabloids, the ostentatious way both of these mainstays released theirs (contrast them, for instance, with those regularly put out by the Daily Mail) indicates the pressure celebrities are putting on magazines to make their admissions that they made something up get as much attention as the original stories did.
Image via Getty/Ok! Magazine
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