"As we go to press… we still haven't gotten our interview [with Linday Lohan]," Complex's August/September issue opines. What follows is the journalistic equivalent of battered wife syndrome, the magazine making excuses for the starlet who blew them off.

Complex shot their Lindsay Lohan cover in early May, before LiLo went to Cannes, was photographed beside something that looked suspiciously like cocaine, and began her slow procession to the jailhouse. It would have been a fantastic coup for the magazine if Lindsay had made good on the interview. (LiLo's last pre-jail interview! Would've been a must-read.) Unfortunately, Lindsay blew them off time and again, and eventually Complex replaced the interview with the most tragic celebrity write-around in recent memory:

As we go to press, it's late June—more than a month since we shot these pictures—and we still haven't gotten our interview. Emails have gone unanswered; the same for voicemails we left with her mom, Dina. The photographers' agent, who's known Lindsay for a long time, admitted to us that he hasn't had contact with her for weeks. When you don't have a publicist and your personal assistant resigns, it's a lot easier to disappear.

A ballsy move that could have worked, had Complex not bent over backwards defending Lindsay. ("It's you against the world right now; We'd disappear, too. But know this: whenever you're ready, we're ready. And we haven't given up on you." Guess they're angling for a post-jail interview.) They also have a listicle of reasons why Lindsay was right to blow them off, including the fictional tale of Michael Lohan tweeting about Lindsay being HIV-positive (debunked here) and the one about the Associated Press "announc[ing]" its LiLo obituary is ready (they never commented on it). To be fair, Complex was between a rock and a hard place: The best possible cover image at its most sought-after moment, but no written content to accompany it.

And that is the sad story of how Lindsay Lohan killed print media. [Complex]