After inviting a then-unknown Lady Gaga to perform at a party he was hosting in Las Vegas in 2008, the two became very close. “We would spend hours talking on the phone almost every day. She asked me what I thought about various ideas; I told her, and I gave her ideas in return. The whole thing was intoxicating and exciting. She valued my opinions and talked to me like I was part of the team, like a close friend,” he writes, adding that he started calling her “wifey.” As they grew closer, he began using his blog to attack perceived competition of hers, going after Christina Aguilera particularly hard, even after she’d performed at his birthday party. “Looking back now, it’s one of the things I’m most ashamed of, and I can also see that Gaga was using me as a tool—not only against Christina but against her other rivals, too,” Perez writes. “She never explicitly asked me to write nasty things about people, but by moaning to me she made me feel like I, her best friend, should do something about it.”
By 2011, she’d become a genuine superstar, releasing her album Born This Way. He flew to Australia to interview her on camera for one in a series of specials he was producing. He writes, “We were still best friends—in my eyes, at least—so unlike everyone else who wanted to interview her, I didn’t have to send my questions to her publicist to scrutinize and approve in advance. Gaga and I assumed, like the good friends we were, that neither of us wanted to hurt the other.” Drinking and sitting in bed while they filmed the interview, Perez recalls Gaga getting a “slightly absent look in her eye” as she struggled to keep focus on him. I didn’t know any better, so I didn’t stop the interview, and continued to ask the questions I had prepared on the plane,” he continues. The first was about the controversy surrounding her song “Judas,” which he hoped she’d be able to dismiss as a non-event. “Gaga clearly didn’t share that view,” Perez writes, “because her eyes turned dark and she snapped at me, ‘What are you doing? Are you trying to make me look bad?'”
