The Tea — May 10, 2026

Today's current is running in one direction: legal exposure. A pop star is suing one of the biggest electronics companies on the planet over a TV box, a royal biographer is detonating a book that publishes in eleven days, and a six-year law school arc just quietly collapsed on camera. The connective tissue isn't scandal — it's that nearly every story has an unwritten second act, and the lawyers are already in the room.

• "The Great Divide" (Noah Kahan): Performed on SNL Saturday alongside "Doors" — both from his new album The Great Divide.
• Entitled (Andrew Lownie): Royal biography excerpting in the Daily Mail this weekend ahead of its May 21 publication, alleging a years-long Ferguson–Combs arrangement.
• Encino listing, $6.49M (Selena Gomez): Six-bedroom, 11,500 sq ft house officially on the market post-marriage to Benny Blanco.
• Dua Lipa v. Samsung complaint (Central District of California): $15M filing alleging copyright, right-of-publicity, Lanham Act, and trademark violations over TV packaging.

Imagine finding out a trillion-dollar company has been using your face to sell appliances — and when you asked them to stop, they said no.

Dua Lipa filed Friday in the Central District of California, suing Samsung for $15 million over its alleged use of her likeness on TV packaging. Per Variety's reading of the complaint, Samsung began using her image on the cardboard packaging of its TVs last year. When Lipa became aware, she demanded they stop — the suit alleges Samsung was "dismissive and callous" and refused.

Here's what makes this more than the standard right-of-publicity dispute: Lipa owns the copyright to the photograph, which was taken backstage at the 2024 Austin City Limits Festival, per Yahoo News Canada. So this isn't just about her face — it's about her photo. The complaint also includes receipts from fans on X, with one quoted comment reading, "I wasn't even planning on buying a TV but I saw the box so I decided to get it." That's a plaintiff's lawyer dream: contemporaneous evidence that consumers attributed purchases to a perceived endorsement.

The complaint alleges copyright infringement, a California right-of-publicity violation, a federal Lanham Act claim, and trademark claims — a four-pronged attack, not a warning shot. Samsung has not yet publicly responded. Watch the next 72 hours: a quick settlement signals they know they're exposed; silence or a fight means discovery, where the internal emails about how that packaging decision got made become very interesting reading.

Six years. Four baby bar attempts. One full bar failure. And now, a pause.

TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian skipped the February 2026 California Bar exam and does not plan to sit for the July sitting either. California offers the bar only twice a year, so per Hola, that means she won't take it at all in 2026. Above the Law reports she may wait until 2027 to try again.

The detail being buried in the publicist-friendly framing: on an episode of The Kardashians, while studying for the exam, Kardashian told producers that if she failed she likely wouldn't try again — "I really want it, and if I don't pass, I don't think I would take it again. I wouldn't have the time for a few years, and then I'm older, and then my brain capacity is different." That's on camera, per Hola. Page Six (via Above the Law) reports Kardashian's schedule is packed and that she "has been heavily involved in filming and production for several projects so she decided it's best to skip this round."

The California Bar does not care about your filming schedule — and that's the whole point. The signal to watch: whether The Kardashians addresses this on screen. If they don't, that edit is the story.

This is the most "complicated feelings about an institution you built" story in television, and it's playing out in real time.

David Letterman, 79, will join Stephen Colbert, 61, on May 14, CBS announced — only his second Late Show appearance since handing over the desk in 2015, per The Daily Beast. The context: Colbert announced last July that CBS was canceling not just his iteration but the entire Late Show franchise as of May 2026. The decision was framed as "financial," but it landed amid Paramount Global's pending Skydance merger and Colbert's nightly Trump material — a coincidence industry figures noticed.

Letterman has been incandescent. To the New York Times, he said: "He was dumped because the people selling the network to Skydance said, 'Oh no, there's not going to be any trouble with that guy. We're going to take care of the show. We're just going to throw that into the deal. When will the ink on the check dry?' I'm just going to go on record as saying: They're lying. They're lying weasels."

The Late Show ends on May 21. The man who built the franchise in 1993 is coming back to watch it die, alongside Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and John Oliver in the final stretch. The signal to watch: whether Letterman says anything on camera that goes beyond what he's already told print. If he does, it dominates the finale week.

Damon served as the second-to-last host of season 51, with Noah Kahan as musical guest, per The Hollywood Reporter. The cold open, per Deadline, returned Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) and Kash Patel (Aziz Ansari) — this time joined by Damon reprising his 2018 Brett Kavanaugh, the three of them on a booze-filled night out. The bit leaned hard into Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation testimony about his drinking.

Rolling Stone flagged a "War Against Male Loneliness" bar sketch with Damon, Ansari, and Jost that drove a separate online conversation. Kahan performed "The Great Divide" and "Doors." It was, by SNL's variable late-season standards, a landing.

Your non-US story of the day, and it's historic.

Per Variety, actor-turned-politician Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar was sworn in as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on Sunday morning at Chennai's Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium, becoming the first to make the leap from Tamil cinema superstar to the state's top job in nearly six decades. Tamil Nadu has roughly 80 million people. This is not a small gig.

Vijay founded his political vehicle, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), and ran on anti-corruption and youth-focused platforms. The signal to watch: the first 100 days. Star power wins elections. Star power does not write a state budget.

We flagged this story Friday when it was just an excerpt. Today it's a conversation, and the details are not improving for anyone involved.

Royal biographer Andrew Lownie’s Entitled, excerpted in the Daily Mail, alleges that Sarah Ferguson had a years-long "friends with benefits" arrangement with Sean "Diddy" Combs, with sources telling Lownie the pair allegedly met through Ghislaine Maxwell at a New York party in 2002, per LADBible. The most explosive claim, per Unilad: that Ferguson took a 16-year-old Princess Eugenie to one of Combs's parties in 2006, with an unnamed royal staff source telling Lownie, "Sean's parties were wild. The fact that she brought Eugenie around was alarming." Eugenie announced her third pregnancy this week.

Both sides are denying. The Telegraph quotes Ferguson's representatives saying the claims are "absolute fabricated nonsense, blatantly untrue and yet another false allegation." Combs's representatives called the claims "ridiculous gossip," per Primetimer.

The clock: Entitled publishes May 21 — eleven days from now. Kensington Palace has not commented, and every day of silence is another day the excerpts breathe. The sourcing is unnamed associates and royal staff, so treat the specifics as unverified. But the simultaneous denials suggest at least some of it landed close enough to home to require a response.

Per Realtor.com, Gomez has listed her six-bedroom, 11,500-square-foot Encino home for $6.49 million following her marriage to producer Benny Blanco. Boring rich-people real estate on its surface — but a listing like this is also brand management, a clean punctuation mark between a single-life house and whatever comes next. It's not the sale that's the story; it's the timing.

A pop star suing a TV box, a 79-year-old calling his old network weasels on his way back through their front door, and a royal biographer setting an eleven-day fuse under Kensington Palace. Somewhere in Encino, a moving truck idles while a duchess refreshes her Google alerts and a future former law student decides her brain capacity is fine, actually.

Stay messy.

Forward this to the friend who already has opinions about the Samsung packaging.