Do You Remember: “A Low Vera” and Julia Roberts’ Petty Fight With Her Boyfriend’s Ex-Wife

When Julia Roberts wanted to marry her boyfriend, she let his estranged wife know who was in charge via a hand-painted tee.

Welcome to the next issue of Do You Remember. This is a new addition to the newsletter, wherein I dive into random celebrity moments that don’t fit the Gossip Reading Club formula but are too fascinating for me to bypass. When I think of weird A-List drama that lives rent-free in my mind, I always return to this surreal moment in gossip history. This is as close as I’ll ever get to fashion criticism!

It feels like, every couple of years ago, we get yet another Julia Roberts comeback. The one-time America's sweetheart works infrequently these days, yet every appearance she makes in a film or TV series inspires a lavish array of profiles, think-pieces, and general giddiness for a bygone era of stardom. We could argue for hours about whether or not the concept of the A-List is truly over in 2024 but it does feel fair to state that we don't have stars like Julia Roberts so much nowadays. Certainly, it’s easy to forget just how obscenely famous she was at her peak. In a recent interview where she lamented the Nepo Baby label, Emma Roberts talked about how she didn't want to be hugely famous because she'd seen how her aunt had been forced to deal with an all-consuming level of visibility. She’s not wrong (but she also needs to stop bringing up the nepo baby stuff already.)

For a time, the tabloids obsessed over few topics with the laser-like focus they saved for Roberts’ love life. There was a lot to cover: she dated Liam Neeson, Dylan McDermott and Matthew Perry. She reportedly ditched Kiefer Sutherland days before their wedding in favour of his best friend Jason Patric (she has since claimed the breakup happened long before that and was mutual.) She married Lyle Lovett, which nobody saw coming, then divorced him two years later. For the past 22 years, she's been married to Daniel Moder, a cameraman and cinematographer who she met on the set of the film The Mexican. They have three kids together and Roberts talks adoring of him in the few interviews she gives these days. It’s her fairy-tale ending, but it started like a soap opera, complete with one of the tackiest hand-made t-shirts in Hollywood history.