In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Stars filed libel suits and the state of California prosecuted its publisher for obscenity. The lawsuits forced Confidential to end its scandalmongering, and it stopped printing its sleazy gossip in 1958. However, the magazine's legacy lives on in our culture's obsession with gossip and celebrity scandal. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.