It’s been quite a week for President Donald John Trump.
Following a whistleblower report that he strong-armed Ukranian president President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into investigating business deals involving the son of political rival Joe Biden, Trump will soon be the subject of congressional impeachment hearings.
But hey, you can read about that stuff anywhere.
You come to The Hollywood Gossip for political; scandals involving prostitutes and bodily fluids.
So get into guilty pleasure mode, because we’re about to shower you with gossip gold.
Talk of the Trump "pee tape" dates back to 2017 when Buzzfeed published the controversial Steele dossier, a collection of intelligence which included a claim that the Russian government was in possession of a video that showed Trump cavorting with sex workers at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow back in 2013.
And according to the dossier, the Donald made some unusual requests of his companions for the evening.
Upon learning that Barack and Michelle Obama had previously stayed in the hotel’s presidential suite, Trump (allegedly) requested that the women perform a "golden shower show" and urinate on the bed for his entertainment.
Because this was a hotel room in Moscow occupied by a famously erratic billionaire and two hookers, the place was under heavy video surveillance.
And that’s how the (alleged) pee tape came to be. Allegedly.
For some, the tale of the tape seemed to good to be true.
But as the months turned into years, and the media moved on to the innumerable Trump scandals that have consumed our attention since, public interest in the pee tape never quit piddled out (sorry).
This was due largely to the fact that new information about the world’s most famous fetish porn continued to trickle in (sorry again).
The steady stream (ya know, we’re just gonna stop apologizing) included a CNN report which confirmed that Trump spent an evening in the company of some young devotchkas during his time in Moscow.
“President Donald Trump’s long-time confidant Keith Schiller privately testified that he rejected a Russian offer to send five women to then private-citizen Trump’s hotel room during their 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, according to multiple sources from both political parties with direct knowledge of the testimony," the outlet claimed.
Then, in January of this year, there came what seemed to be a major break in the case, as the pee tape — or grainy footage purporting to be the pee tape — appeared on a website called — what else? — pisstape.org.
Of course, so-called "deep fake" videos are a common occurrence on the internet these days, and many took the fact that the tape didn’t garner any intention from the mainstream media as evidence of its fraudulence.
Still, many who viewed the footage were left wondering — is this the evidence of a bizarre presidential scandal that they had been waiting for? 2019’s answer to answer to the Zapruder film, but with a pair of tinkling vaginas instead of a second gunman?
Now, in the sort of investigative opus that restores your faith in modern journalism, Ashley Feinberg of Slate has gathered all of the pee tape intel in one place with the goal of answering the question — is this really footage of the President of the United States giddily watching two Russian hookers wet the bed that he’s supposed to sleep in later?
The answer, sadly, is probably not.
Feinberg analyzes everything from the cuff links worn by the Trump-like star of the tape to the molding in the hotel room, and she determines that while the video is almost certainly a fake — it’s still worthy of fascination.
After all, whoever made this thing put a lot of effort into it — seemingly going so far as to film it in the Ritz-Carlton’s actual presidential suite — a room that rents for $18,000 a night.
So who made the tape? And who was their intended audience? And why has this footage been almost universally ignored by the media?
We may never know for sure, but one thing is for certain — something about this situation stinks like a soggy mattress.
