Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
If you are very rich, you do not spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s rotting on your parents’ couch. You spend it on a yacht on St. Barts. Every year, the fabulously wealthy and their hangers-on descend on the Caribbean island to party on yachts, soak up the sun, and rub elbows with their fellow elites (or, as was the case with Alix Earle and Tom Brady this year, rub backs). Typically, the celebs and the billionaires leave the island shortly after New Year’s, but usually the United States hasn’t just executed a raid on Venezuela and captured its president, forcing the FAA to shut down airspace over the Caribbean.
Owing to the U.S. operation in Venezuela, a bunch of famous people were reportedly stuck on St. Barts all weekend. Vanity Fair posted that Wendi Murdoch was unable to leave on January 3, and if she couldn’t, then no one could.
Southern Charm’s Shep Rose also found himself stuck on the island after managing to briefly escape to St. Maarten. “We left the island on January 2, before the invasion of Nicaragua or whatever,” the Bravo star told the magazine. (When asked if he meant Venezuela, the reality star said he was “stuck in the Reagan administration.”) After getting grounded in St. Maarten, Rose and his friends wound up back on St. Barts. According to his Instagram Story, as of Monday he is currently in Anguilla and trying to figure out how to get back to Charleston.
Most notably, Leonardo DiCaprio had to appear at the Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala via video on Saturday night because he too was stranded on St. Barts. According to Vanity Fair, he was on “someone’s superyacht.” A few days earlier, he was photographed on Jeff Bezos’s superyacht. You can draw your own connections. Somehow DiCaprio managed to get back to Los Angeles by Sunday evening and was in the crowd at the Critics Choice Awards. He was rewarded for his odyssey by losing to Timothée Chalamet.
It seems that the destabilizing geopolitical reason for everyone’s stranding wasn’t really top of mind, at least not in a serious way. According to Vanity Fair, nightlife impresario Richie Akiva hosted a “Fuck Me! We Can’t Fly” party and AI investor Tom O’Regan threw a party with an invitation that read “Castaway Vibes & Tropical Beats!” While thousands of people scrambled to get home in time for work on Monday, the vibe among the upper crust on St. Barts was apparently very relaxed. Celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten said everyone was in good spirits, telling Vanity Fair, “There’s no shortage of caviar.”
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