Spend enough time building puzzles out of documented public events and a pattern becomes impossible to ignore: celebrity scandals are remarkably similar in shape. Not in content - in structure. The same seven stages, in roughly the same order, at roughly the same tempo.
This is useful for two reasons. It makes blind items easier to solve, because knowing which stage a story describes narrows the timeline enormously. And it makes the news easier to read, because you can tell what you are actually looking at.
Something happens. At this point it is not a scandal - it is an event with witnesses. The defining feature is that nobody yet knows whether it will matter. Most incidents involving famous people evaporate here.
The story surfaces, and for a period - hours or weeks - the public knows something the subject has not addressed. This is where blind items live. The gap between "circulating" and "confirmed" is the entire habitat of the format, and it is the most valuable window in gossip media because attention is high and accountability is zero.
A representative issues something. Its length is inversely proportional to how good the news is. Denial, acknowledgment, or the peculiar third option that acknowledges an emotional reality while conceding no facts.
This is the first moment the story becomes checkable, and for our purposes it is the first moment a case can even be considered - because a statement, unlike a rumour, is on the record.
Coverage stops being about the event and starts being about the coverage. Reaction pieces, explainers, jokes, and the reliable genre of article about how everyone is talking about the thing. Volume peaks here, and accuracy typically bottoms out, because most of what is published now is commentary on commentary.
This is the stage that determines everything, and the one people forget. A court rules. A governing body suspends someone. A sponsor withdraws. Or nothing happens at all and the story simply stops.
Almost every case in this game comes from stage five, and that is not incidental. A conviction, a stripped title, a formal ruling - these are the moments a story stops being narrative and becomes record. Everything before this point is contested; this is where something becomes true in a way that can be cited.
Attention collapses faster than it arrived. The subject goes quiet. The story is replaced by an unrelated one, usually within days. Nothing has been resolved for anyone involved - it has simply stopped being interesting, which is not the same thing.
Years later, one detail survives: an image, a phrase, a number. Not the ruling, not the context, not the outcome. A single compressed fragment that stands in for the entire event.
This is the stage the whole game runs on. A blind item works because the artefact is instantly recognisable while the surrounding facts are hazy - so a well-written case can describe the documented event precisely and still be hard, because most people remember the fragment rather than the story.
When you read a case, ask which stage it describes. If it mentions a fine, a ban, or a ruling, you are at stage five - which means the event is old enough to have been fully processed, and it was serious enough to generate a formal outcome. That is a much smaller set of events than "things famous people did."
If a case describes a moment rather than a consequence, you are being handed the artefact directly, and the question is which stage-five event it belongs to.
The uncomfortable observation is that stages two and four - maximum attention, minimum verification - dominate what anyone actually reads. Stage five, where things get established, generates a fraction of the coverage. And stage seven, the fragment that survives, is chosen by what was memorable rather than what was true.
That gap is the reason this game only uses stage five. Not because it is more interesting, but because it is the only stage that is settled. The rest is a story in progress being narrated by people with no obligation to be right.
Today's edition is here, and the reasoning behind the sourcing rule is in our editorial standards.