Gwyneth Paltrow’s partnership with Condé Nast was touted by the publisher’s artistic director Anna Wintour as a “something remarkable, a thoroughly modern take on how we live today”. The plan was for the publisher to make a regular Goop magazine, but it all fell apart when Condé Nast wanted to fact-check Goop articles, according to an interview with Paltrow in the New York Times Magazine.
Paltrow wanted to publish interviews with non-traditional healers and practitioners, as they do on the Goop website. She wasn’t especially concerned about checking whether what they said in their answers was medically correct or even scientifically possible. But Condé Nast insisted on claims being verified – when that became impossible, some health interviews were replaced with quickly pulled together travel pieces. The magazine closed after two issues and the partnership ended.
“I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules,” Paltrow told the Times, adding that they were a company that “do things in a very old-school way”.
She argued that they were interviewing experts and didn’t need to check what they were saying was scientifically accurate. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Elise Loehnen, Goop’s head of content, added that Goop was “just asking questions”.
But Goop has come under repeated criticism for sharing or offering unhelpful or even dangerous advice.
In one such instance, Goop interviewed “Dr” Linda Lancaster, a “naturopathic physician and homeopath” who is not a medical doctor, about parasites. Lancaster advised eating or drinking nothing but raw goat milk for eight days in order to rid the body of parasites. There is no scientific evidence that this method works – a number of small studies have even suggested it may introduce parasites, including one that examined a British family in which a farmer’s sons both got parasites from drinking unpasteurised goats milk.
In one article, Goop infamously wrote about a procedure called the “Mugworth V-Steam”, in which people pay a practitioner to steam their vagina. The site claims: “It is an energetic release – not just a steam douche – that balances female hormone levels. If you’re in LA, you have to do it,” although that was later changed to “you just might have to try it”. The process has been widely criticised by gynaecologists, who say it could not only upset the natural pH balance of the vagina but also lead to dangerous burns.
Although Goop only published two physical magazines before severing ties with Condé Nast, Paltrow reveals that they have now hired an in-house fact checker for their website, which she describes as a “necessary growing pain”. However, she also says it can be useful when these kinds of controversies over Goop claims emerge. The Times article describes her telling a group of business students that “cultural firestorms”, such as the one about vagina steaming, simply drive traffic to the site. “I can monetize those eyeballs,” she says.
