Dolly wouldn’t want this drama

Obviously I didn’t know Dolly Parton. But I don’t think anyone had to have known or even met her to understand that what’s playing out in public is not what she would have wanted. And it’s such a dramatic departure from how things were handled in the immediate aftermath of her death.

As noted at the time, it seemed so well managed – nobody else broke the story that she had passed, the news came from her own social media accounts, communicated effectively in a video featuring her nephew Bryan Seaver who shared that Dolly was the one who decided that he be the family representative to tell people that she was gone. Bryan was her bodyguard, inheriting the job from his father, for 20 years.

But Bryan is now the drama. It was reported a few days ago that he was terminated and yesterday TMZ was all over the dispute, sharing documents with text messages in which Bryan makes all kinds of incriminating threats, allegedly with the intent to extort money from the estate, with big main character energy. At one point, in one of these text messages, he refers to himself as “the face of the biggest social media post in human history." He also calls himself “an international arms dealer and mercenary”. And in another text says that he would do a podcast and f-ck up Dolly’s brand deals and ruin her legacy if his demands aren’t met.

Bryan is claiming that he is being unfairly treated and that it’s the estate that has nefarious motives, not him. According to his version of events, his text messages are being deliberately misconstrued and he was writing out of grief and rage and his words weren’t meant to be taken seriously.

So this is a war between Dolly’s nephew and bodyguard, who was supposedly one of the last people to see her alive, someone we assumed she trusted, and her manager Danny Nozell, who worked closely with Dolly for decades to establish a blueprint for her businesses after her death, so as to preserve and even grow her legacy, also someone we assumed she trusted.

On the one hand, Bryan’s texts make him sound shady AF. On the other hand, for those of us who’ve followed celebrity news for long enough, celebrity managers can also be shady AF, and there are so many examples of managers and agents who’ve taken advantage of their clients – and there were so many people on the Dolly gravy train, it’s hard to know who to really believe in this situation.

All we can possibly know is that Dolly tried to prevent exactly this kind of f-cksh-t when she was alive. In an interview with Billboard in 2020, during which she and Danny Nozell were as forthcoming as possible about their plans for her after her death, she prophetically said that she was deeply involved in her own estate planning.

“I would not want to leave that mess to somebody else. A word to all the other artists out there: If you haven’t made those provisions, do that. You don’t want to leave that mess to your family for people to have to fight over. You need to take care of that yourself, even if it’s a pain in the ass — and it is.”

Everybody has always said that Dolly was always right… and she was even right about this, although we probably all wish it was the one time she should have been wrong.

Somehow, even though she worked so hard – to the point where it was “a pain in the ass” to settle her affairs gracefully, her example of grace and dignity clearly hasn’t been followed by at least one side of her entourage. This is so disappointing, but it’s also a reminder that money, at the level that Dolly was making and will keep making, is such a contaminant. Money can make monsters out of people. That’s another reason she was so special. She stayed pure despite her money and maybe she kept everyone around her as pure as they could be, until she couldn’t hold on any longer.