Meet Kevin Blatt, the celebrity fixer who’s a master

Sex Tapes, Hush Money, and Hollywood’s Economy of Secrets

Meet Kevin Blatt, the celebrity fixer who’s a master at shepherding compromising material off the internet—or into the hands of the highest bidder.

WHEN GEORGIA REPORTED its first coronavirus case, Amber and Vinson had about three months of expenses saved. 

The couple met in high school in 2006, in a Yahoo chat room about hip hop. (Amber and Vinson have asked us to use their first names only.) She gave up a college scholarship and moved to Atlanta to be with him; he dropped out of college when she became pregnant. For more than a decade, he made sandwiches at Subway while she gave birth to two more kids and drifted through call center jobs. They were in love, but like most millennials they had little financial stability.

Then, in 2018, Amber landed a job at Public Storage. The gig involved overseeing auctions for the stuff left behind in unpaid storage units. Speculators could, if lucky, quadruple their money by flipping the contents. It got her thinking. As an employee, she wasn’t allowed to participate in the auctions, but since she and Vinson weren’t married, he was free to bid. 

The trick, the couple soon discovered, was to find the right buyer for each object you’d scored if you won an auction. Not everyone may see the value in film production lights or a particular brand of streetwear, but if you did some digging online, you might find someone who would pay a lot more than a pawn shop would. Amber and Vinson felt they’d found something they were good at. They talked about saving for a house—that is, until the pandemic hit, their car broke down, the auctions got canceled, and schools went virtual, meaning all three of their sons were home, 24/7. 

Two months into lockdown, Vinson was combing through stuff he’d bought in previous auctions and hadn’t sold yet. He found an old Blackberry and fired it up. There, he saw photos of an engagement ring, then a funeral, and then, was that a naked woman? He looked closer. Yes, it was a naked woman; it was a famous naked woman, strutting around, and giving a blow job to a famous naked man, in a series of short video clips.

He showed the videos to Amber, and she wondered if they might be worth something. But where would they find the right buyer?

Amber thought for a moment. The biggest celebrity sex tape she could remember was Paris Hilton’s. Hadn’t that home video turbocharged the socialite’s career and made millions of dollars? Who was behind that, anyway? A few Googles later, she had her answer: a man named Kevin Blatt, who called himself a “celebrity sex tape broker.” She squinted at the avatar on his Instagram profile. He looked like a villain in an action flick, staring into the camera over the top of his black Ray-Bans.

At 2:31 am on May 14, 2020, she DM'd him. 

“Hey Kevin I have a sex tape involving some celebrities who are no longer together but want some advice on making the most money.”

As the couple went to sleep that night, Amber assumed they were wasting their time. A big shot like Kevin Blatt was never going to write back. Maybe that Instagram account wasn’t actually his. She noticed it didn’t even have a blue checkmark.

That same afternoon, a reply appeared: “Can u send me a number to call you?”

A MOVIE STAR’S agent will never take a call from a stranger, but Kevin Blatt reads every message and follows up on every tip. You never know who might have the goods. Over the past two decades, Blatt has become a one-man clearinghouse for everything seedy in Hollywood—the fixer you call when you want to see whether the thing you have that could humiliate a famous person is worth anything. 

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“If they have something really bad, enough to jeopardize a sponsorship or a new TV show, we try to turn it into money,” Blatt tells me. “Everybody gets paid if they come to me and we do it the right way.”

Most of this content is never released; scandal is generally worth the most to a star trying to protect their reputation, so Blatt’s primary hustle is to offer it back to the person it might embarrass—in exchange for cash and silence. It’s often a video, but he has also facilitated arrangements for text-message screenshots, pill bottles, photographs, and even just access to a newsworthy person telling their story. He figures most of what people bring him, around 60 percent, is evidence of infidelity; 10 percent is about drug use; 10 percent exposes some closeted sexual behavior, a fetish, or a queer identity unknown to the public; and 20 percent is what Amber and Vinson had: images of prominent people naked or having sex.

Blatt is, in some ways, the Forrest Gump of 21st-century scandal, popping up over and over on the sidelines of new cultural lows and milestones in outrage.

Dirt in hand, Blatt serves as a bridge between the lawyers, the tabloids, the celebrities, and the people with something to sell—pocketing a percentage or a consulting fee from as many of those parties as possible. Each deal is unique, and he is often surprised by how a situation plays out, but his goal is to capitalize on clickability, leveraging either the story or a star’s dread about its potential for virality to make as much money as he can. 

Over the years, he’s helped suppress proof of a married rapper getting head at a club; a former boy-bander’s penchant for drugs and sex dungeons; an entertainer’s alphabetized collection of hardcore BDSM porn; and two professional athletes playing video games, staring at the screen, while one woman goes back and forth performing oral sex on both. Guitarist Dave Navarro once told New York magazine that he was grateful to Blatt for helping him keep a bondage tape off the internet.

Blatt's sense of what will horrify and titillate the masses has allowed him to survive successive trends in technology and media, while both the stars and the moral standards we accuse them of violating have changed. He got his start in the scammy, spammy days of the ’90s, when pornography dominated the web, until the explosion of the Paris Hilton tape taught him how to manipulate a star’s pain for his gain. He is, in some ways, the Forrest Gump of 21st-century scandal, popping up over and over on the sidelines of new cultural lows and milestones in outrage. When reality TV was ascendant, he tricked Dr. Phil into letting him on air by claiming he was bankrolling a show where male virgins would compete to be the first to have sex. In the heydey of celebrity gossip sites, Blatt helped Tila Tequila’s ex leak a pornographic video to Radar Online. The early social media star promptly sued him. (The case was settled several months later.) In the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein, when many women were coming forward with #MeToo stories, Blatt represented a woman who said she’d felt pressured to give a mogul a blow job after a photo shoot.

When he isn’t screening clients or strategizing with lawyers, Blatt swans around Los Angeles in his white BMW, getting stoned, playing golf, and befriending bellhops who might one day prove useful. He dresses like a mafioso, or a cheesy dad: tracksuits, polo shirts, flat caps. Journalist Kurt Loder once described him as “flamboyantly unsavory.” He loves diners and hip hop and saying just the right thing to a celebrity when he spots one in public—even a minor one—to show he recognizes them, he appreciates them, and he remembers they were wearing that exact jacket on Jimmy Kimmel last night, because it looked great then and it looks great now. He’s slick and ingratiating to everybody. It works. People like him. He’s friends with Oakland rapper Too $hort; they did a podcast together.

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Some of Blatt’s clients are just strangers looking for money, but many come from a star’s entourage or past. In 2017 it was a friend of Kevin Hart’s who came to Blatt with some videoclips of the comedian cheating on his wife. “This night he had over 10 women in his room,” Hart’s friend wrote in an email describing the tapes. “Of course his friends were there as well, but all 10 women wanted Kevin Hart.”

WHEN THE ECONOMY slumps, as it did during the Great Recession or as it has now during the pandemic, Blatt attracts more business. People look for valuables to sell off. Blatt’s first step is to vet the content. Footage of famous people fornicating is a legally complex commodity, to say the least, and Blatt has to navigate several potential hazards to avoid liability. He once felt compelled to flee to Mexico to evade possible charges of child pornography, after someone told him a video he’d acquired, allegedly of Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester, had been shot when she was a minor. (Eventually he figured out that the release date of a DVD in the background of the video proved the woman who appeared to be Meester was over 18.)

Last May he video-chatted with Amber, and she showed him what was on the Blackberry. Blatt thought the situation seemed promising. For starters, they had gotten the phone legally; if it had been stolen, or even found at a bar, the videos wouldn’t be worth as much. They might even bring charges of theft, especially if someone had filed a police report. It also helped that both celebrities in the Blackberry videos were visibly aware they were being recorded. If they had been shot with a hidden camera, use of the videos would violate their right to privacy—unless it was recorded in a public place.

Then Amber mentioned via DM that she’d been in contact with the famous man in the video, whose abandoned storage unit Vinson had acquired at auction—and she’d offered to sell the guy some of his stuff back.

“We told him 20,000,” she wrote. “He said we were crazy.”

Blatt balked. If he or a client names a price for a compromising video or image before the celeb does, asking for a specific amount in exchange for concealing the evidence, that’s extortion—a felony in both Georgia and California.

“Ah. So he already knows u have his stuff,” Blatt replied. “Does he know u have the sexy tape?”

“No he doesn’t know that.” 

“OK, good,” Blatt wrote. “Let’s not talk to anyone.”

This is the moment in a case when Blatt aims to resolve things without his own attorney. So he heads for the celeb’s rep. This can get dicey, but it can also mean he gets a bigger cut. He once flew to meet a billionaire's lawyer and his head of security, he says, to talk about some photographs of the tycoon with two sex workers. The lawyer took out a yellow legal pad, wrote “$50,000 cash now, $2,000 a month for ten years,” and passed it across his desk. Blatt thought of