Talk show host Jimmy Fallon has reportedly stepped back from plans to start a pasta sauce brand, after his long-time friend and partner in the venture, former Sony Music Entertainment CEO Tommy Mottola, was found to appear more than 600 times in the Epstein Files. This is reality, and that is a thing that happened within it: Jimmy Fallon isn’t selling spaghetti sauce anymore because his (extremely powerful and influential) pasta buddy was also friends with the world’s most notorious pedophile.
This is per THR, which notes that Fallon and Mottola’s pasta sauce line was in the “early development phase,” with plans to possibly launch in 2027. But, no more: The fact that Mottola—whose current Mottola Media Group is a well-known producer in theater, television, and music—appears in the recently released files so many times, and as recently as the summer of 2018, has caused the venture to be killed. (Moments like this sometimes produce absolutely fascinating sentences; in this case, we have THR‘s “Representatives for both Fallon and Mottola declined to speak on the record with The Hollywood Reporter regarding the status of their sauce brand.”)
And it’s not that we’re fixated on Jimmy Fallon’s tomato sauce specifically—although, if we’re being honest, we are kind of stuck trying to figure out what the name would have been. But it’s simply been interesting to see the ways various public figures have been reacting in the wake of their various power broker buddies, associates, or employers being revealed to have been sending little “Hey, thinking of you” emails to Epstein more than a decade after he was first registered as a sex offender. Chappell Roan, for instance, recently made headlines when she announced that she was no longer being represented by the talent agency run by Casey Wasserman, who appears more than 80 times in the Files. (Wasserman is now reportedly selling the agency—although he apparently intends to stay on the board of Los Angeles’ 2028 Olympic Games Committee.)
All of which is happening in a strange kind of slow motion: The sheer volume of the Epstein Files had made them impossible to process simultaneously, instead causing these odd little (and so far, very minor) consequences to shake out; a pasta sauce there, an apology from the executive producer of Bones there. It’s not clear yet how the reaction to the Files, both in the world generally, and Hollywood—where Epstein was clearly pretty aggressive about cultivating friendships—specifically, will end up shaking out: Whether it’s all just going to be smashed pasta sauces and notes on people’s Wikipedia pages, or something more robust.