From New York Magazine Insider to Digital Tabloid Machine: Maer Roshan, RadarOnline, and the Three Transformations of American Entertainment Media

RadarOnline, Maer Roshan, and the Transfer of Power in American Digital Tabloid Media: From Magazine Entrepreneurship and Billionaire Financing to the Dylan Howard–Mystify Era

1. The first point to establish is that RadarOnline’s founder and its present-day controller are not the same person.

The widely recognized founder, founding editor, and original creative force behind Radar is Maer Roshan. He launched Radar in 2003 as a magazine mixing politics, celebrity culture, media power, popular culture, and satire. RadarOnline emerged as the digital extension of that brand. Penske Media Corporation still identifies Roshan as the founder and CEO of Radar and lists Radar, TheFix.com, and Punch! among the publications he launched and edited.

Roshan, however, no longer owns or operates RadarOnline. After the print magazine closed in 2008, the digital asset changed hands and spent years inside American Media Inc. — later a360 Media — before being acquired in 2021 by a media operation led by Dylan Howard. Radar currently says its publishing entity is Radar Media Group LLC, an independent, privately held media company. In the United States it is published via Mystify Entertainment Network Inc., which Radar identifies as part of Mystify Group Pty. Ltd.

Radar’s own current biography of Dylan Howard identifies him as Chairman and CEO of Radar Media Group, Empire Media Group, and Pantheon Media Group. The 2021 acquisition announcement explicitly said the transaction restored “control and management” of Radar to Howard. On the evidence available, Howard is therefore the clearest current executive controller. However, the precise ultimate beneficial ownership percentages of Radar Media Group LLC, Mystify Entertainment Network, and Mystify Group Pty. Ltd. have not been publicly disclosed. Public information is limited / cannot currently be confirmed.

Radar is therefore not a simple story of a founder retaining his company. It is a story of Roshan creation → billionaire financing → repeated shutdowns and relaunches → failure of print but survival of the digital asset → AMI ownership → Dylan Howard’s digital-tabloid transformation → 2021 re-independence → integration into the Mystify network.

2. Radar’s founding date also requires a distinction between the brand and the dedicated website.

Radar itself now describes the organization as “founded in 2003,” reflecting the year in which the Radar brand and print magazine first appeared. It also describes 2008 as the point at which the brand became fully digital.

Historical accounts, however, generally treat 2003 as the launch of Radar magazine and 2005 as the emergence of RadarOnline.com as a dedicated website. Thus, saying simply that “RadarOnline.com was founded in 2003” merges the history of the broader brand with that of the website.

The most accurate formulation is therefore:

Radar brand: 2003.

RadarOnline digital operation: developed in the mid-2000s, with historical accounts commonly dating the dedicated site to 2005.

Print Radar: permanently ceased in 2008.

RadarOnline: became the surviving core of the brand after 2008 and remains active today.

3. In one sentence, Roshan’s place in the structure is this: he did not build Radar into a stable media empire; he created Radar’s media DNA.

His principal contribution was not durable ownership but the product concept: combining the intelligence and power reporting of a New York-style magazine, the irreverence later associated with outlets such as Gawker, the entertainment value of celebrity journalism, and the speed of early internet distribution.

Roshan has said that his career was shaped by being both a participant and an outsider in multiple worlds. Jewish Insider similarly described Radar as a publication that regularly challenged the establishment’s “sacred cows.”

Radar’s long commercial life, by contrast, was largely achieved after Roshan left, when the website became a digital traffic business. Roshan’s primary success was creating the editorial personality; his successors’ primary success was converting that personality into a durable digital asset.

4. Roshan’s family background is essential to understanding his editorial personality.

Public biographical sources generally place Roshan’s birth in Tehran, Iran, in 1967. Secondary biographies often give August 13, 1967, as the precise date, although Penske’s current official executive biography does not publish his birth date, so the exact date should not be treated as more firmly verified.

His father came from an Iranian/Persian Jewish family, while his mother was American and also came from a Jewish background. Roshan has repeatedly described the unusual perspective of growing up as a Jewish child in Tehran with an American mother.

During the Iranian Revolution in 1979, roughly 12-year-old Roshan left Iran with his mother and two younger brothers and moved into his maternal family’s orbit on Long Island, New York. His father remained behind, in part to deal with family property. Observer later reported that his father escaped Iran about seven years later in severely diminished condition and subsequently died of cancer; the Los Angeles Times records his death in 1991.

Roshan’s adolescence therefore combined revolution, migration, prolonged family separation, religious transition, and dramatic changes in social environment.

The available record is not sufficient to assign his original family a precise socioeconomic-class label. What can be said is that the family possessed international connections, American family ties, and educational resources while also suffering significant disruption from the revolution.

5. Religious schooling, his gay identity, and New York subculture created the insider-outsider perspective that later defined his journalism.

After arriving in the United States, Roshan entered a yeshiva, or Jewish religious school, on Long Island. He later recalled arriving as a 12-year-old Iranian immigrant with essentially no Hebrew. During high school in Queens, he studied the Talmud while spending weekends around Manhattan’s club culture.

It was an unusual combination: conservative religious institutions alongside 1980s gay and nightlife culture; Iranian immigrant identity alongside American mass media; outsider status alongside an intense desire to understand the cultural center.

Roshan later said he had always felt like an outsider wherever he was. That theme is visible not merely as later personal branding but throughout his migration history, religion, sexuality, and professional choices.

For his New York University application, when asked to identify two people he admired, he chose Truman Capote and Menachem Begin. The juxtaposition is revealing: Capote represented literature, celebrity society, gossip, social observation, and personality-driven writing, while Begin represented Jewish history, politics, and identity.

6. Roshan graduated from New York University; the precise degree and major are not clearly established in authoritative public sources.

Multiple reliable profiles confirm his graduation from NYU. The Los Angeles Times states that he entered journalism after graduating.

The public record does not consistently establish the exact degree title or academic major, so those details should not be invented.

More consequential than his formal major was his informal education in New York media, gay politics, the AIDS crisis, nightlife culture, and the golden age of magazines.

7. His first representative professional experience was local hard news, not celebrity journalism.

After NYU, Roshan went to Key West, Florida, and worked at the Key West Citizen, covering crime and the local Navy beat. Secondary professional histories generally place this around 1989.

This matters because although Roshan later became associated with clever, provocative celebrity and cultural magazines, his foundation included police reporting, crime, public records, and local news.

That strand later reappeared in Radar and RadarOnline through their heavy use of court documents, criminal cases, police material, lawsuits, anonymous sources, and celebrity private-life investigations. Radar’s current ethics code specifically addresses anonymous sourcing, court documents, mugshots, corrections, and public records.

8. QW was the first project in which Roshan demonstrated that he could create a distinctive media product rather than merely work inside one.

At the height of the AIDS crisis, Roshan returned to New York and helped launch and editorially lead the gay weekly QW. Rather than functioning only as a lifestyle publication, it combined gay politics, AIDS science and policy, celebrity, fashion, and New York culture. Early contributors and staff associated with the publication included future prominent writers such as David Rakoff and Andrew Solomon.

Strategically, QW established a formula Roshan would repeatedly use:

find an audience and cultural world that mainstream outlets under-cover;

combine serious public-policy material with personality, entertainment, and social scenes;

and select stories capable of escaping the publication’s original audience and becoming broader news.

That formula eventually led to Radar.

9. New York magazine was the stage at which Roshan moved from subcultural media entrepreneur into the mainstream magazine elite.

Kurt Andersen recruited Roshan to New York magazine in the mid-1990s. Penske’s official biography says he ultimately served for nearly seven years as Deputy Editor and oversaw the influential Intelligencer section.

The publication’s intellectual model was highly relevant to his later work: it treated power, celebrity, real estate, finance, media, politics, sex, fashion, and class as elements of a single metropolitan ecosystem.

Radar would later apply a similar method to a much larger arena — American power and popular culture as a whole.

10. Talk magazine exposed Roshan to larger pools of capital, national circulation, and elite celebrity networks.

Tina Brown subsequently hired Roshan as Editorial Director of Talk. Penske’s official biography credits Talk with double-digit circulation gains in Roshan’s first year, and Brown later offered unusually strong praise for his natural editorial abilities.

Talk was one of the emblematic large-budget magazine experiments of the Tina Brown/Harvey Weinstein era, but the publication never developed a sustainable economic model and closed in 2002.

For Roshan, Talk offered an important negative lesson: editorial prestige, celebrity access, deep-pocketed backing, lavish launches, and cultural attention do not automatically create healthy media economics.

Radar would later reproduce this problem in an even more dramatic form.

11. Radar emerged from the professional vacuum created by Talk’s collapse.

Observer’s long profile of Roshan describes a formative moment after Talk closed: American Media executive David Pecker asked whether Roshan had an idea for a new publication. Roshan then brought together former Talk colleagues including Chris Tennant and Drew Lee to develop a business plan and prototype; “Radar” initially functioned as something close to a working title.

Rather than simply surrendering the concept to a large publisher, Roshan chose to pursue it entrepreneurially.

From its inception Radar therefore contained an unusual contradiction:

the product was intensely editor-driven;

the business was highly dependent on outside wealthy financiers;

the editorial mission was to provoke powerful people;

yet its financiers themselves came from those same power circles.

That contradiction would define much of Radar’s print history.

12. The first 2003 Radar was a highly visible launch with a weak capital foundation.

Roshan launched Radar in 2003 with a mix of popular culture, politics, media power, celebrities, fashion, social hierarchy, and satirical personality journalism. It was neither a friendly People-style celebrity magazine nor a conventional supermarket tabloid such as the National Enquirer. It was closer to an attempt to fuse New York, Spy, Vanity Fair, and the emerging tone of the internet.

The first incarnation quickly encountered financing problems. Only a small number of test issues appeared before the company needed new long-term capital.

Radar therefore proved early that people would talk about the brand without proving that advertisers and readers could cover its long-term cost.

This became Roshan’s central entrepreneurial weakness: he was exceptionally capable of generating cultural heat but lacked a Hearst- or Condé Nast-style parent willing to subsidize the publication indefinitely.

13. The arrival of Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein was Radar’s first major capitalization event.

In 2004, real-estate and media billionaire Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News, and financier Jeffrey Epstein agreed to finance Radar’s revival. Poynter’s summary of contemporaneous New York Times reporting described the commitment as up to $25 million.

An important distinction is required: this figure represented a maximum financing commitment, not proof that the entire $25 million was ultimately deployed.

Later accounts cite different actual funding numbers, including $10 million and $25 million. Accounts differ / the final amount actually invested cannot currently be confirmed.

Contemporaneous reporting characterized Zuckerman and Epstein as the major equal financial partners, while Roshan retained a smaller equity interest.

Structurally, Roshan had therefore moved from fully independent founder toward the role of founding editor + minority owner + operator dependent upon external controlling capital.

14. Jeffrey Epstein’s role later became an unavoidable reputational shadow over Radar’s history, but hindsight must not be substituted for evidence.

There is no dispute that Epstein was an important early Radar financier. However, his investment preceded the period when the full extent of his later notorious sex crimes and legal history became broadly public.

The reliable sources reviewed do not establish that Roshan participated in Epstein’s crimes, and the financing relationship must not be used to imply such involvement.

In a 2019 Los Angeles Times interview, Roshan said he believed early reports about Epstein’s sexual behavior caused Zuckerman to withdraw support for Radar in 2005. That is Roshan’s retrospective assessment, not an independently established fact.

The 2005 version of Radar closed after only three issues.

The deeper significance of Epstein’s involvement is therefore not evidence connecting Radar to his crimes; it is that a publication whose identity was built partly around exposing elites was itself financially dependent on a tiny number of elite financiers.

15. The 2006–2008 incarnation came closest to proving Roshan’s editorial model.

Radar returned with new financial support involving Yusef Jackson and widely reported billionaire backer Ron Burkle. Contemporary accounts treated them as central to this third capitalization.

New York magazine later reported that Roshan had told a prospective employee that investors Jackson and Burkle had provided roughly $14 million initially, with contractual commitments for more. That figure came from Roshan’s reported representation rather than publicly audited accounts and therefore should not be treated as a confirmed final investment total.

Editorially, this iteration of Radar was substantially more mature, with a recognizable mixture of politics, celebrity, media, wealth, and scandal.

It also received a General Excellence nomination associated with the National Magazine Awards/ASME. The precise year is inconsistent: Radar today says 2007, while Observer’s 2008 contemporaneous report says 2008. Accounts differ.

16. Radar’s central structural paradox was that it used rich people’s money to investigate rich people.

Roshan repeatedly emphasized a willingness to target institutional “sacred cows,” while his financiers included Zuckerman, Epstein, Burkle, and other highly connected figures. Jewish Insider later highlighted exactly this contradiction: Radar began on Roshan’s living-room floor and positioned itself against establishment orthodoxies while receiving financing from Epstein and Zuckerman.

Roshan was therefore less a conventional corporate manager than a founding editor constantly negotiating between capital dependency and editorial independence.

His greatest personal strength — willingness to offend important people — was also a major commercial vulnerability, because a loss-making magazine needed wealthy patrons who often belonged to precisely the social world Radar enjoyed provoking.

17. Print Radar died in 2008, but its most durable assets — the brand and website — survived.

In October 2008, Radar magazine ceased publication again. Contemporaneous coverage made clear that the magazine was closing while the website would continue.

American Media Inc., together with interests connected to Yusef Jackson’s Integrity Multimedia, then became involved in acquiring and operating the digital asset. Historical accounts generally treat this transaction as the boundary between the Roshan magazine era and the AMI digital-tabloid era.

Commercially, this may have been the single most important development in Radar’s history:

the demand for the brand had not necessarily failed; the expensive print-magazine cost structure had.

Once printing, paper, national physical distribution, returns, and the overhead of a large glossy-magazine operation were removed, Radar’s combination of exclusives, celebrity, scandal, power, and frequent updates became much more compatible with internet economics.

Roshan failed to build a durable magazine company but inadvertently created a web domain and media brand that would survive much longer than the magazine itself.

18. Under AMI, the product changed materially.

Roshan’s original Radar was closer to an intelligent, satirical, politically and culturally mixed general-interest magazine.

AMI-era RadarOnline moved much closer to rapid celebrity exclusives, private lives, legal records, leaked audio, reality television, crime, and entertainment scandal.

In practice, it entered the same broad celebrity-intelligence marketplace as TMZ, the National Enquirer, and Page Six.

Dylan Howard joined RadarOnline in 2010, later served as Editor in Chief, and rose into larger content-management positions within AMI. One of Radar’s most visible episodes under this model was its publication of disputed recordings involving Mel Gibson and Oksana Grigorieva, which rapidly became a subject of nationwide entertainment and mainstream news coverage.

The central Howard-era skill was therefore different from Roshan’s magazine packaging: obtaining proprietary material, turning a scoop into a sequence of updates, and amplifying it rapidly through digital distribution.

19. The crisis of 2020 created the opportunity for Howard’s eventual acquisition.

During the advertising disruption surrounding the pandemic, Radar was sharply reduced inside the AMI/a360 system and at one point became only sporadically active. The brand retained recognition while its parent was no longer willing to operate it at its previous level.

Howard had already left AMI. In 2021, his newly created Empire Media Group acquired RadarOnline and a group of other brands. The announcement said terms were not disclosed and explicitly described the transaction as restoring Radar’s control and management to Howard.

EMG recruited Ryan Naumann, formerly associated with TMZ and The Blast, as RadarOnline’s Editor in Chief and built a staff of about 40 across the broader organization. Radar’s current biography still identifies Naumann as Editor in Chief of RadarOnline.com / Vice President of News of Empire Media Group.

20. Radar after 2021 should not simply be described as “an Empire Media Group website,” because the disclosed structure has evolved.

The 2021 acquisition announcement itself specifically stated that RadarOnline was separately owned by Radar Media Group LLC. EMG was a central acquisition and operating platform, but Radar had a distinct ownership entity.

By 2026, Radar’s official About page states that:

Radar Media Group LLC is privately held;

RadarOnline is published by that company;

U.S. publication occurs through Mystify Entertainment Network Inc.;

Mystify Entertainment Network is part of Mystify Group Pty. Ltd.;

and Radar’s footer describes the site as “A Division of Mystify Entertainment Network Inc.”

At the same time, Radar’s own current biography continues to identify Dylan Howard as Chairman and CEO of Radar Media Group.

The most accurate present formulation is therefore:

RadarOnline’s brand/holding entity is Radar Media Group LLC;

U.S. publishing operations are integrated with Mystify Entertainment Network;

Dylan Howard is the clearest senior executive control figure;

the complete beneficial-ownership chain, Howard’s precise equity percentage, and the full equity relationship between Radar Media Group and Mystify Group are not publicly disclosed. Public information is limited / cannot currently be confirmed.

21. Radar’s business model has gone through at least four distinct phases.

The first was traditional magazine economics: advertising, newsstand sales, subscriptions, and investor capital, offset by the costs of editorial staff, photography, printing, paper, nationwide distribution, and unsold-copy returns. Radar never established a sufficiently stable advertising and circulation base to cover those costs and repeatedly required new capital.

The second phase was a magazine-plus-website model. Roshan recognized early that a monthly magazine could not maintain a daily news rhythm, so the website became a mechanism for daily updates, agenda setting, and traffic back toward the print brand.

The third phase, after 2008, was an advertising-supported all-digital tabloid model: very low replication cost, frequent updates, search and social distribution, proprietary audio and images, court material, celebrity sources, and monetization of large volumes of page views.

The fourth is the Howard/Mystify-era multi-brand digital entertainment network. EMG’s 2021 strategic materials described ambitions spanning advertising, audio, e-commerce, long-form video, digital subscriptions, television, books, live events, branded content, and new advertising products.

These were capabilities and ambitions of the broader corporate ecosystem, not audited evidence that every revenue stream is material to Radar individually.

22. The easiest current monetization channel to verify remains advertising and traffic monetization.

Radar currently organizes coverage around celebrity news, pop culture, true crime, politics, reality television, royals, sports, investigations, and other high-frequency categories.

Its footer also explicitly states that compensation may be received from some product and service links, establishing the existence of affiliate/commerce monetization.

EMG also partnered with Kargo/Fabrik around digital infrastructure and ad monetization and emphasized integrated cross-brand sales to advertisers.

Radar Media Group is privately held, however, and does not disclose public-company-style financial statements.

Accordingly:

Current annual RadarOnline revenue: public information is limited.

Profitability: cannot currently be confirmed.

Revenue mix by advertising, commerce, licensing, or other channels: cannot currently be confirmed.

23. Radar’s actual corporate assets must be distinguished from Roshan’s personal “influence assets.”

The present Radar operating system clearly includes assets such as:

the RadarOnline brand and trademark;

the radaronline.com domain and more than two decades of accumulated content;

the Radar Media Group LLC corporate platform;

editorial capability in entertainment, courts, politics, celebrity, royals, reality television, and true crime;

search, social, newsletter, and external distribution channels;

and commercial infrastructure shared with the wider Mystify entertainment network.

Roshan’s position is fundamentally different. Public records do not show him controlling a personal media conglomerate that owns Radar, Los Angeles, or The Hollywood Reporter.

His principal assets are reputational and network assets: the founding of QW, senior roles at New York and Talk, founder status at Radar, The Fix, Punch!, Awesome Projects, FourTwoNine, Los Angeles, and now the top editorial position at The Hollywood Reporter. Penske’s official biography presents these as a continuous editor-entrepreneur career.

Roshan’s central capital is therefore editorial reputation, story judgment, talent networks, and access to cultural power — not current Radar equity.

24. Roshan’s post-Radar projects show that Radar was not an isolated accident.

During Radar’s later years, Roshan developed a serious alcohol problem. After the magazine folded, he went through treatment and eventually became sober. The Los Angeles Times reports that he then launched The Fix, a publication focused on addiction and recovery.

In 2011, Observer reported that he was simultaneously developing Punch, an iPad-oriented interactive publishing experiment with collaborators including DailyCandy creator Dany Levy, David Bennahum, and Pentagram designer Luke Hayman.

He later established the editorial and creative consultancy Awesome Projects, whose clients included Telepictures and Snapchat, and served as editor of FourTwoNine.

In 2019 he became Editor in Chief of Los Angeles Magazine, where he increased political, power, investigative, and fast digital coverage. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that daily web output had been expanded and that the publisher said traffic was about 60% higher year over year. Jewish Insider reported in 2021 that traffic had risen sharply under Roshan and that the publication was profitable. Those operating figures came from the publication and Roshan rather than publicly audited financial statements.

Roshan joined The Hollywood Reporter at the top editorial level in 2023. After Shirley Halperin left the co-editor role in 2025, Roshan became the sole Editor in Chief. As of 2026, THR’s masthead and Penske’s executive page continue to list him in that position.

His professional arc is therefore unusually coherent:

marginalized-community media entrepreneur → New York magazine elite → national celebrity-magazine executive → independent founder → entrepreneurial failure and personal crisis → digital publisher/consultant → city-magazine revitalizer → head of a central Hollywood trade publication.

25. Roshan’s most exceptional ability is not corporate operation but identifying stories that generate secondary circulation far beyond the original publication.

Former Los Angeles Times editor Norman Pearlstine characterized Roshan as an editor with strong story instincts and an appetite for accountability journalism. Gawker founder Nick Denton has offered similarly extravagant praise of Roshan’s magazine-editing abilities.

Tina Brown has likewise emphasized Roshan’s ability to make editorial impact even when Radar was chronically short of resources.

His core strengths can be summarized as:

identifying stories that many insiders partially know but no outlet has fully assembled;

finding a framing strong enough to provoke broader debate;

willingness to report on people who may belong to his own social, professional, or financing networks;

and an ability to place high culture, low culture, politics, celebrity, gay culture, finance, and gossip inside the same editorial worldview.

Those abilities failed to create a profitable print empire but helped shape a style of journalism that became increasingly characteristic of the digital-media era.

26. From a product-history perspective, Radar’s greatest success may be that repeated failure did not kill the brand.

Many magazine startups from the early 2000s disappeared completely after publication ceased. Radar did not. It shut down repeatedly in print but the name, positioning, and web property had enough standalone value to survive as a fully digital product from 2008 onward and remain active in 2026.

Radar currently claims historical peaks of as many as 25 million unique visitors and 140 million page views, as well as 24 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards and dozens of Los Angeles Press Club awards. Because the audience figures are self-reported by Radar and not accompanied by contemporaneous third-party audits, they should be understood as company-reported peak metrics, not independently verified current monthly audience figures.

Whatever the exact peak audience, the survival of a 2003 magazine brand into a digital publication more than two decades later is itself a major commercial outcome.

27. Radar’s clearest failure was not one bad story but the repeated breakdown of its print business model.

The first, second, and third print iterations all depended heavily on new capital, advertising conditions, shifting investors, and a costly magazine structure. Radar needed new funding after its 2003 experiment, the 2005 revival closed after only a few issues, and the 2006–2008 version ultimately failed despite another capitalization.

In entrepreneurial terms, Radar demonstrated that its:

editorial product-market fit was stronger than its financial product-market fit.

Media insiders talked about it, journalists wanted to work there, elite readers noticed it, and awards organizations recognized it — but those achievements never converted consistently into enough advertising, circulation, and long-term financial return.

Radar was therefore not a conventional business success as a print startup. It was, however, a successful creation of intellectual property that survived its original business model.

28. Jeffrey Epstein’s financing is one of the largest reputational issues in Radar’s history.

There is no dispute that Epstein was an important early financier of Radar.

Two boundaries are nevertheless essential.

First, the financing predated the period when the full scale of Epstein’s crimes became broadly public.

Second, the reliable public record reviewed here does not establish Roshan’s involvement in those crimes.

The reasonable governance criticism is therefore not that Roshan was involved in Epstein’s offenses. It is that Radar’s dependence on a small number of billionaires exposed a publication devoted to scrutinizing power to extreme investor-reputation and control risk.

That is a broader structural problem in media economics: aggressive journalism without a strong subscription, foundation, or scaled advertising base may become dependent on the same wealthy class it seeks to scrutinize.

29. Roshan’s own editorial record has also generated controversy.

He has consistently favored provocative, counterintuitive, or socially uncomfortable assignments. This can produce originality and debate but also criticism that framing has gone too far or has humanized subjects who should be treated more aggressively.

At Los Angeles Magazine, for example, Roshan published a lengthy profile of Proud Boys-associated figure Gavin McInnes that some critics accused of sanitizing or normalizing the far-right provocateur. Roshan himself acknowledged the degree of backlash.

Although this was not a Radar controversy, it illustrates the continuity in his method: he would rather publish something contentious than something frictionless.

30. AMI-era RadarOnline faced the more conventional legal risks of aggressive celebrity tabloid journalism.

In 2017, fitness personality Richard Simmons sued the National Enquirer, RadarOnline, and their corporate parent over allegedly false reports that he was transitioning genders. The core defamation claim was ultimately dismissed, with an important aspect of the court’s reasoning being that falsely identifying someone as transgender was not, by itself, inherently defamatory. Simmons was later ordered to pay a portion of defendants’ legal fees. Crucially, the dismissal did not amount to a judicial finding that Radar’s underlying reports were factually true; it primarily concerned what could constitute actionable defamation.

In 2016, Michael Jackson’s nephews Taj, Taryll, and TJ Jackson filed an approximately $100 million libel suit concerning RadarOnline stories that they said falsely suggested Michael Jackson had sexually abused them or compensated them to remain silent. The filing was reported by several major outlets. The ultimate disposition: public information is limited / cannot currently be confirmed.

Such cases expose the economic tradeoff built into Radar’s model: the more a publication relies on exclusive accusations, anonymous sourcing, private-life reporting, and judicial material to drive attention, the greater its exposure to defamation and privacy litigation.

31. The Charlie Sheen episode demonstrated a different tension: the protection of confidential journalistic material.

In 2016, during a criminal investigation involving Charlie Sheen, Los Angeles authorities sought an audio recording and related materials held by National Enquirer/RadarOnline. The publications refused simply to surrender the recording and invoked legal protections associated with journalists and shield laws. Reuters reported that the outlets declined to produce the audio and noted that Reuters could not independently authenticate the voice on the recording.

The episode should not be simplified as Radar “breaking the law.” Its significance is that Radar had become a publication capable of possessing original evidentiary material that law-enforcement authorities themselves wanted to obtain.

That is one of the most controversial but potentially newsworthy characteristics of aggressive tabloid journalism: its sourcing techniques may disturb more conventional institutions, but they can also produce genuinely original evidence.

32. Radar’s long FOIA fight with the FBI over Jeffrey Epstein records is one of the most significant examples of its investigative work beyond ordinary celebrity gossip.

Radar Online LLC and journalist James Robertson sued the FBI in 2017 seeking records connected to the earlier federal investigation of Epstein. That lawsuit predates the Miami Herald’s landmark 2018 Epstein reporting.

In June 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the FBI, accepting law-enforcement-related FOIA exemptions supporting continued withholding of the records. The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy maintains an official summary of the ruling.

Radar appealed.

On January 28, 2026, the Second Circuit heard oral argument. Courthouse News reported that the panel discussed the possibility of remanding the case for reconsideration in light of the new Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The litigation illustrates a frequently overlooked aspect of Radar’s identity: beyond celebrity relationships and reality television, it has at times used FOIA litigation, courts, and public records as genuine investigative tools.

33. Radar today publishes a formal ethics framework, although publication of a policy does not itself resolve criticism of every reporting practice.

Radar’s current ethics code says, among other things, that:

anonymous sources should be used sparingly and their identities must be known to the Editor in Chief;

accuracy should take precedence over mere speed;

plagiarism is prohibited;

material originating with other outlets should receive clear attribution;

errors should be corrected promptly;

court documents and mugshots may be used where editorially appropriate;

accurate historical stories generally will not be removed merely because a subject requests removal;

staff should not accept gifts capable of compromising coverage;

and conflicts of interest should be disclosed to editorial management.

This shows that the contemporary organization wants to present itself as a digital newsroom with codified standards rather than an unstructured gossip blog.

The policy is nevertheless the company’s own normative statement and cannot independently establish that every published article complies perfectly with those standards.

34. Roshan’s current real-world position is substantially more important than the label “founder of an old gossip website” suggests.

As of September 2026, Roshan is Editor in Chief of The Hollywood Reporter. THR’s current masthead and Penske’s executive biography both confirm the role.

He therefore occupies a senior editorial position inside one of the central trade publications serving the global film and television industry.

His greatest career success was not becoming a billionaire through Radar. It was using projects such as Radar to build an unusually scarce personal reputation: an editor capable of repositioning legacy publications, generating conversation, recruiting talent, crossing the boundary between serious reporting and entertainment culture, and making relatively small newsrooms appear more influential than their size.

Roshan’s current personal wealth, net worth, equity in Awesome Projects, and private investments are not sufficiently disclosed in public sources / cannot currently be confirmed.

35. Dylan Howard represents a second and very different form of power in the Radar story.

Howard did not found Radar, but he became one of the central figures in turning it into a modern digital celebrity/tabloid operation. He first managed Radar inside AMI, rose into broader roles involving the National Enquirer and other properties, and then reacquired Radar through his own corporate network in 2021.

Howard’s years at AMI and the National Enquirer were themselves controversial, particularly around the company’s celebrity and political reporting practices and the broader “catch-and-kill” controversies associated with the organization. Coverage of Howard’s 2021 Radar acquisition explicitly noted that contentious AMI background.

Contemporary Radar therefore cannot be treated as a pure continuation of Roshan’s editorial culture.

Roshan created Radar’s original personality; Howard helped construct its modern digital commercial machine.

36. As of 2026, RadarOnline’s real position in the media ecosystem can be understood on three levels.

First, it is no longer Roshan’s startup. It is a privately held digital media asset operated through the Radar Media Group/Mystify network.

Second, it is not a conventional prestige-journalism institution. Its competitive strengths remain concentrated in celebrity, exclusives, reality television, royals, crime, political scandal, court documents, and rapid news cycles. Its present section architecture reflects that positioning.

Third, it cannot accurately be dismissed as a site that merely rewrites gossip from elsewhere. Historical scoops such as the Gibson recordings, original material in the Charlie Sheen investigation, and the nearly decade-long Epstein FOIA litigation demonstrate that parts of the organization perform genuine original reporting and document acquisition.

The best description is therefore neither “serious newspaper” nor “pure gossip blog,” but a distinctly American form of investigative tabloid / celebrity intelligence outlet: commercially dependent on attention, but willing to use sources, lawsuits, public records, and private-life material that many traditional organizations may avoid.

37. The full chronology makes Radar’s underlying logic especially clear.

1967: Maer Roshan is born in Tehran.

1979: During the Iranian Revolution, he leaves Iran with his mother and brothers and relocates to the New York area.

Late 1980s: After NYU, he begins in local journalism at the Key West Citizen.

Early 1990s: He helps create and editorially lead QW during the peak of the AIDS crisis.

Around 1994: He joins New York magazine and rises within the New York magazine establishment.

Late 1990s–2002: He becomes a senior editor at Tina Brown’s Talk, learning the economics and politics of a large national magazine; Talk subsequently closes.

2002–2003: Roshan develops and launches Radar.

2004: Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein agree to provide major financing.

2005: The revived Radar closes again after only a few issues.

2006–2008: New backing involving Yusef Jackson and Ron Burkle supports a third Radar incarnation.

2008: The print magazine closes permanently; the digital asset enters the AMI/Integrity structure.

2010: Dylan Howard joins RadarOnline and later becomes a central editorial executive.

2010s: RadarOnline consolidates a digital model based on celebrity exclusives, recordings, litigation, crime, and large-scale traffic.

2017: Radar Online LLC is already litigating under FOIA for FBI records concerning Epstein.

2020: Radar is severely reduced under the AMI/a360 structure.

2021: Dylan Howard/Empire Media Group acquires Radar rights; Ryan Naumann becomes Editor in Chief; Radar Media Group LLC is identified as Radar’s separate ownership entity.

2023–2025: Roshan joins The Hollywood Reporter and subsequently becomes its sole Editor in Chief.

2026: Radar identifies Radar Media Group LLC as its privately held publishing company, with U.S. operations via Mystify Entertainment Network Inc.; Howard remains Chairman/CEO of Radar Media Group, Naumann remains listed as RadarOnline Editor in Chief, and Roshan — now entirely separate from Radar ownership — leads The Hollywood Reporter.

38. Ultimately, Radar’s history is a conversion among three different forms of media capital.

The first is Maer Roshan’s editorial capital: identity, taste, story judgment, talent networks, social access, and willingness to provoke.

The second is the financial capital of Zuckerman, Epstein, Burkle, Jackson, and other outside backers: it repeatedly resurrected Radar but never solved the structural economics of the print magazine.

The third is the digital attention capital of AMI, Dylan Howard, Radar Media Group, and Mystify: rather than proving Radar through an expensive monthly magazine, these operators converted the name into a lower-cost, high-frequency, multi-platform celebrity-news intellectual property asset.

So, where does Maer Roshan actually stand in the real world? He is Radar’s originator and intellectual architect, not its present owner. His ultimate professional success lies in becoming one of the most prominent magazine and entertainment-media editors in the United States rather than in building a media conglomerate he personally continues to control.

And what is RadarOnline today? It is a privately held digital entertainment-news asset that has become separated from founder ownership, passed through repeated restructurings, and is now operated within the Radar Media Group/Mystify system, with Dylan Howard occupying a clearly documented senior control position.

The central irony is what makes Radar especially instructive: the founder’s print company failed, but the editorial language he created survived; the magazine died, but the brand lived; Roshan lost control of the asset yet ultimately moved upward into a more powerful mainstream editorial position; and the executives who came later did not invent Radar but turned it into a machine much better suited to the economics of the internet.