“Listen, I’m sorry for saying to go fuck yourself.”
It was a rare expression of remorse from R.J. Cipriani, who was otherwise thumping his chest in the aftermath of the news on Wednesday that Jeff Shell is stepping down as president of Paramount Skydance. Over the course of the last month, the high-stakes gambler and self-styled corporate whistleblower had been waging legal battle with the studio executive, and Paramount’s announcement that Shell “had elected to transition from” his position “to focus on this lawsuit” looked like a kind of vindication.
“Most people that underestimate me have to find out very soon after that my information is bulletproof,” Cipriani tells me. “My intel is beyond reproach. And more importantly, I fear no one and nothing.”
In recent weeks, I had gotten used to such tough talk from Cipriani, who catapulted from fringe entertainment industry figure to ostensible Hollywood force with his lawsuit alleging that Shell had leaked confidential Paramount information to him. (Cipriani also claims that he provided crisis communications services to Shell in exchange for Shell helping him with a passion TV project that never materialized. Shell denies all of this and is countersuing for extortion and defamation, which Cipriani denies.) He is, in any estimation of his incessant string of larger-than-life tales, a difficult figure to take at his word. When he got the sense that I might not be—I had declined to provide him the contents of a forthcoming story about him—he launched into a spree of insults and expletives.
But Cipriani was in a chipper mood when we spoke on Wednesday, unfazed by Paramount’s conclusion in its statement announcing the news that “a complete and thorough review of the allegations” raised in Cipriani’s lawsuit against Shell demonstrated “that these allegations do not establish a securities law violation.” Shell “just felt that he could just ignore me,” Cipriani says. “And as a famous woman said in a movie called Fatal Attraction, ‘I will not be ignored.’”
“I live my life by movies,” he says. “What would this character do? That’s what I do.” He says he has been in talks with Bradley Cooper for the last couple of years about playing him in a movie—“he may be scared to death to play me now”—and claimed in a separate lawsuit in 2017 that his wife’s suitors, “all of whom accepted no for an answer,” included Leonardo DiCaprio, Axl Rose, John Stamos, and Jim Carrey. (Representatives for Cooper didn’t immediately return a request for comment.) Against all odds, the man who made such fanciful-sounding claims managed to spark a legitimate corporate drama at the highest levels of Hollywood. I suggested to him that it represented a kind of achievement, but Cipriani insists he wasn’t taking a victory lap.
