4 Secrets From A Celeb Divorce Expert That Will Totally Blow Your Mind

Breaking up is hard to do. But, breaking up in the public eye? Stars often need an entire team for that — or at least one person who understands how to make the best of a celebrity split. Hollywood publicist Rob Shuter is, for better or worse, that guy. Shuter, who is also a host on VH1's The Gossip Table, was Jennifer Lopez's PR person during the original Bennifer breakup. Recently, he lent his insider expertise to help demystify the Ben Affleck Jennifer Garner divorce announcement over at The Cut — and, also shared some factoids about the celebrity divorce PR machine that a normal person might not know. Check out these four fascinating secrets: 1. The star machine is totally in cahoots ..."The hair and makeup people, they always seem to be the first to know," Shuter said. "Sometimes the publicist, the hair and makeup people, the car driver, the security — they'll have a little pact where they all tell each other what's going on." Sometimes, even before the celeb's significant other even finds out. 2. There's a clear protocol for how the public breakup begins ... "What happens when celebrities decide they are pulling the plug is that they'll call their PR teams and the two different publicists — hers and his — will get on a phone call and negotiate a statement. Often you know which outlets these people prefer because they're always the ones that get it first." Can someone please build a Facebook app that does this for us regular people ASAP, please? 3. Those sad post-breakup reality star photos? Totally staged ... "If you have a reality star who enjoys attention, you handle it very differently. You’ll stage photo ops. You’ll stage the paparazzi when they're walking down the street looking very sad, wearing black. Even Princess Diana was not above this. She went to the most romantic building in the world, the Taj Mahal, and cried on a bench by herself in front of the press. It's totally overt, to the point where you tell them the time to be there. 'She’ll be in Central Park, wearing black, sitting on a bench, and she’ll be there for ten minutes. Fine, see you at 12:01.'" 4. PR might be a dying art ... "Oh, publicists are terrified of Twitter. Publicists are absolutely terrified that celebrities have figured out that they don't need to pay eight, ten thousand dollars a month to put out a statement that they can just do themselves." Taylor Swift has clearly already figured it out — and the next generation of stars are so used to doing their own posting, they might not even hire PR to begin with.