The Long, Slow, Soft Launch of the Break-Up of Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom

In early 2016, singer Katy Perry began dating actor Orlando Bloom. The pair were engaged in February 2019 and had their daughter, Daisy, in August 2020. While the wedding was supposed to take place around this time, they delayed the ceremony, citing COVID-19 as the reason for doing so. After almost a decade together, however, it seems like the pair is over. No, they haven’t made an official announcement about it yet, but the groundwork has been thoroughly laid for it thanks to the hard-working sources feeding information to reputable tabloids (and not so reputable).

Bloom was notably not at the launch of the Blue Origin girlboss space flight, on which Perry was notoriously a passenger. It didn’t arouse much suspicion at the time since Bloom was working in Ireland on a Werner Herzog film. Schedule conflicts happen. She quickly moved on to her world tour for her reviled 143 album, so it wasn’t surprising not to see the pair together. But then, on June 9th, PEOPLE published a piece with exclusive sources telling them that the ‘stress’ over Perry’s professional troubles had caused ‘tension’ in her relationship with Bloom.

PEOPLE is seen as the most reliable celebrity tabloid for stars major and minor to get their story out there. If it’s in PEOPLE, you can usually assume it to be, if not 100% true, then a part of the narrative the star wants to craft for the public. Instagram is good for some things, but not letting the world know that you and your fiancé are having issues. Well, maybe that works if you’re happy to stir up the drama, but Perry, who’s in her so-called flop era, would hope to avoid that.

The sources kept coming from PEOPLE, with another story that said the relationship was basically over. It’s ‘pretty much done,’ apparently, after months of issues. That feels like Bloom and Perry setting up the inevitable Instagram post about how, despite the love they have for one another, they’ve decided to part ways and hope you’ll respect their privacy at this time. This is as close to a clean split narrative as you can get with major celebrities. Keep it drama-free, don’t take sides, center their love for their kid, and let everyone move on. Seems all nice and neat, right?

But then another source piped up, this time over on the Daily Mail. It doesn’t need to be said that this rag is decidedly less beloved and trustworthy than PEOPLE, who, at the very least, never had a headline that declared, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts.’ But the Fail is a giant content mill and one of the most-read sites online, especially for celebrity stories. They’re not without their own connections, especially if the people being discussed are British, as Bloom is. And they decided to take a side in the split, although it could be argued that it didn’t work out so well for them.

Their source decided to, a little late to the party, mock Perry’s girlboss space flight and claim that Bloom was against it the entire time. ‘He told her the whole thing looked ridiculous,’ claimed the source. ‘Imagine going to space — motherf*cking space — and your partner isn’t impressed. Of course she was hurt.’ The whole piece feels like it’s meant to take Perry’s side, as it also claims that Bloom was always the one who was closer to Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos, the evil billionaires behind Blue Origin. ‘She feels like it’s a ‘f*** you’ to her from him’ to go to the Bezos wedding without her, even though she is scheduled to be on tour during that time and was at all of Sanchez’s bachelorette party celebrations in Paris. ‘That’s difficult for her to accept,’ says the source.

This story was aggregated into a lot of other news stories and clickbait, most of which seemed to side with Bloom in his seeming mockery of Perry’s space jaunt. The piece isn’t angled to take his side, but the entire charade was so universally reviled that it’s been hard for people to side with someone who pals around with billionaires while the world burns and calls it feminism. This isn’t to give Bloom any credit, of course. He’s a woo-woo C-Lister who also eagerly pals around with Bezos. But if the pro-Perry source is trying to distance her from this rich people drama, it just isn’t working. If that piece was designed to make people pick a side, it didn’t make them eager to become Katycats.

Of course, it is the Daily Mail, a scum-sucking waste of space that thrives on misogyny and bad-faith misreadings of the most basic details. Maybe a pro-Perry source wanted to get the jump on the endless stream of stories that will follow a split announcement and thought a big audience that the Mail provided could only help. But when you see headlines like that of SheKnows, which just rehashes this story but under the title of ‘Orlando Bloom Reportedly Said What Everyone Else Was Thinking About Katy Perry’s Blue Origin Flight,’ it feels like the battle has been lost.

The thing is that Perry is currently very easy to root against. She voluntarily chose to work with an accused rapist in the hopes of resurrecting her flagging career, only to end up with the most critically reviled album in her discography. The girlboss space flight was so hilariously arrogant that it felt like a Reductress article come to life. As poptimism reached a new peak in 2025 with women like Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter, Perry felt painfully behind the times but desperate to be back on top.

But, as I wrote about with the strange finger pointing around her Vegas residency, it does feel like this slump, self-inflicted or otherwise, has become just another cheap excuse to dump on Perry for no dang reason. I have an issue with people’s personal struggles being rolled into their professional ones for the purposes of fandom drama. I didn’t like how people mocked Jennifer Lopez’s divorce from Ben Affleck as being part of her ‘flop era.’ This has a similar tone to me. Orlando Bloom isn’t leaving Katy Perry because he hated ‘Woman’s World’ and is morally opposed to her palling around with his own amoral friends. You don’t get to make a Bezos BFF into the ‘good’ side of this breakup. Frankly, I’d take listening to Perry sing 143 songs over attending Jeff Bezos’s wedding.

The tabloids still have a use for celebrities, even in the social media age. We know how powerful an old-school publication can be, even in a time when print is dying, in getting the message out to the masses. When you’re a celebrity, outsourcing your drama is one of the great privileges of fame. So, when we finally see that Bloom-Perry split, don’t say you were surprised.