She Quit Hollywood. Now They Subscribe to Her in Secret
The Drey Dossier’s Audrey Henson worked at Verve before exposing the Ellisons, entertainment and billionaires
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Since late last year, Audrey Henson — better known as The Drey Dossier on Substack and TikTok — has been ringing alarm bells about Paramount Skydance’s aggressive play to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. In a video posted Dec. 7, two days after Netflix announced its intent to acquire the Warner Bros. streaming and studio assets for $82.7 billion, she argued that Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison — the billionaire backer behind Paramount Skydance — forced WBD into a sale process in order to accelerate the sale of CNN and gain control of the cable news network before the midterm elections. “Everybody’s focused on Netflix taking over Hollywood, and everyone thinks that Larry Ellison lost,” Henson says in the video. “But I don’t think he’s lost anything. I think he’s right on schedule.”
Just two days ago, she posted a follow-up laying out why she believed that a plan to sell CNN was already in motion, even as WBD continued to pursue a deal with Netflix. “While everybody’s focused on whether or not Ted Sarandos is going to keep movies in theaters or not, I’ve gotta be honest with you guys, I’m really freaking out about CNN,” she tells the camera.
So when Netflix announced yesterday that it was pulling out of the bidding for WBD, giving Paramount Skydance a clear shot to acquire the storied entertainment company, Henson’s theory gained some fuel. “Whatever was being quietly arranged in the background now has one fewer obstacle in its way,” she wrote on Substack, promising her more than 76,000 subscribers on the platform that she’d have more for them soon.
Less than two years ago, Henson was working as a coordinator at Verve Talent Agency and posting on TikTok as a hobby. Now, the 29-year-old is repped by UTA and Anonymous Content, and has a growing audience who tune in for her contrarian and provocative perspective about major news stories like the WBD sale.
The L.A.-based Henson, who studied journalism at New York’s Hunter College, describes her work as investigative reporting. She’s a fan of OSINT (open-source intelligence) methodology, which involves gathering and analyzing publicly available information, and she calls Dutch investigative journalism group Bellingcat an inspiration. Instead of interviewing and quoting sources, she digs into financial documents and news reports — all cited at the bottom of each Substack post — to support her claims.
Watching a Drey Dossier video, with Henson’s confessional delivery and tendency to ask open-ended questions, makes you feel like you’re being let in on a conspiracy that everyone else is ignoring. She often draws connections between seemingly unrelated facts to reach her conclusions, and she instructs her viewers to ask their own questions and draw their own inferences. She’s Candace Owens or Alex Jones in a younger, more progressive wrapping.
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‘Quiet, Rich Villains’
Henson is primarily concerned with what she calls the infrastructure of power and “the really quiet, rich villains in the shadows.”
Frequent targets of her videos include some very familiar names in the entertainment world.
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