Mark Ebner.

Mark Ebner has spent forty years asking impolite questions of America's most photographed people, then publishing the answers — usually before the lawyers can finish their letters.

His first big break came in the mid-1980s at Spin magazine, profiling musicians and filing field reports from the Sunset Strip. By February 1996 he was on the cover of Spy with "Do You Want to Buy a Bridge?" — two weeks undercover inside the Cult of Scientology, documenting the Personality Test, the auditing rooms, the purification rundown, and the totalitarian mind control. The same year, his New Times Los Angeles investigation of dog-fighting, "Pit Bullies," won the Genesis Award. The Church is still mad. The Genesis trophy is still on the shelf.

The books followed. Ain't It Cool? (Warner, 2002), with Harry Knowles and Paul Cullum, was the first. Hollywood, Interrupted (Wiley, 2004) — co-written with the late Andrew Breitbart — was the manifesto: a New York Times bestseller and the title that gave this site its name. Six Degrees of Paris Hilton (Simon & Schuster, 2009) is the gnarliest Hollywood crime story ever published. We Have Your Husband (Berkley, 2011), with Jayne Garcia Valseca, was seven months in central Mexico negotiating with cartel kidnappers, told by the wife of the man in the box. Being Uncle Charlie (Random House Canada, 2013), with Bob Deasy, was two decades undercover in Canadian organized crime. Poison Candy (BenBella, 2014), with prosecutor Elizabeth Parker, was an inside account of the Dalia Dippolito murder-for-hire trial. Off the Deep End (HarperCollins, 2022), with Giancarlo Granda, was the Falwell / Liberty University tell-all. Deprogrammer (BenBella, March 2026), with Rick Alan Ross, is forty years of pulling people back out of cults.

He lives in Los Angeles. The tip line is open.