Included in Nikki Finke’s settlement with Jay Penske—the Variety and Women’s Wear Daily owner who acquired Deadline in 2009, with whom Finke entered arbitration in 2013—is a provision that she may not practice online journalism about the entertainment industry for around a decade, the New York Times reports.

The revelation comes in a piece on Finke’s return (again) to writing, with the launch of her new site, HollywoodDementia.com. Finke plans to charge readers between $1 and $3 to read fiction—written by her and other industry professionals—about Hollywood.

“There is a lot of truth in fiction,” Finke told the Times. “There are things I am going to be able to say in fiction that I can’t say in journalism right now.” Also, she declined to be photographed for the article, providing instead a new portrait she had taken recently, which can be seen here, if that is the sort of thing you are interested in.

“I would say that everyone is secretly full of trepidation about what Nikki’s new site will be like,” former Los Angeles Times film industry columnist Patrick Goldstein said. “Will it be literary short stories, or will it be fiction as a thin disguise for the truth?” People are, apparently, “scared of their own shadows.”

Earlier this month, on the now-defunct NikkiFinke.com, the ex-blogger wrote, “The stories which I and others write won’t depict any actual Hollywood person or event. But they will marry artifice with verisimilitude into original content creation.”


Image via Hollywood Dementia. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.