Elizabeth Holmes’ former assistant dishes on the scammer’s wild demands, and more from the column

Monday

Bloody infuriating

She may not have been a real genius, but she was a real A-hole. A former assistant to Elizabeth Holmes says the Theranos scammer was terrorizing her staff long before the world knew about her misdeeds. In a tell-all essay for Jane Pratt’s newsletter, Another Jane Pratt Thing, Aria Marinelli, who was one of the first employees of the faux medical tech firm, writes: “I had to work late during the holiday due to an emergency.” “Elizabeth urgently needed me to rearrange her travel home from Asia and I got a brief email asking me to help,” she says in the article, “I anxiously hopped online to make sure she wasn’t stranded overseas on a holiday.” But the “the actual emergency was the location of her first class seat.” “She was in the THIRD row of first class. She needed to be in seat 1A,” Marinelli writes, “I rearranged the trip at a (large) financial cost to the fledgling company.” Sounds like a bonafide Silicon Valley exec to us!

Nic’s hotel Halloween

Nicolas Cage said he’s “homeless” after his Malibu mansion nearly fell into a massive sinkhole in September. At LA Comic Con Saturday, the actor was asked about his Halloween plans. “I’m currently a little bit homeless,” he said. “Something happened to my house in Malibu. I’m just sort of living in hotels, so I don’t have normal trick-or-treaters.” He said he’d be taking his 4-year-old daughter, August, out trick-or-treating in Santa Monica and then watch “The Shining” after putting her to bed.

A case for Martha’s charity

The Dupont twins — onetime Andy Warhol favorites and former employees of Martha Stewart — want everyone to back off the domestic diva over her Halloween costume of a homeless person. Richard Dupont, who worked with Stewart in the 1970s at her first catering company, told Page Six that Stewart has always cared for the less fortunate. “I remember going quite often with her, catering events in the city, and she’d always drop off leftover food [to the homeless] — always! I remember that about her and I always liked that… We all followed her lead,” Richard told us. “Martha is a wonderful person. She’s always been good to me and it’s my duty to stand up for her because she did feed the homeless back then and she did care about the people who were homeless.” Robert Dupont defended Stewart online, declaring, “I know firsthand that Martha has spent years quietly and consistently showing deep empathy for the unhoused community in New York City for a long time,” echoing that she “made it a strict point to pack up all the extra, high quality food” after catering events and distributed the meals on the Bowery. Richard said that while the costume was shocking, “Martha meant no harm.”

The highest praise

Lin-Manuel Miranda was confident he wouldn’t shed tears on opening night of City Center’s performance of his first show, “In the Heights,”  because he’d already wept at the dress rehearsal. This lachrymose disclosure prompted PageSix.com’s Nicki Gostin to ask Miranda if he was a huge crybaby. “I’ll cry at the right commercials,” he confessed, adding it’s part of a writer’s job  “to shed a layer of skin so we can put ourselves in other people’s lives very different from us.” Miranda called the revival a “pinch-me moment, where you’re lucky enough that your work is being revived.”

He Israel-y in love

Mazel tov! The son of Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, got engaged in Israel. Alex Witkoff — who is the CEO of the family’s real estate company, Witkoff Group, which handles projects like the Faena Hotel in NYC — proposed to his girlfriend Batya overlooking the Western Wall in Jerusalem last week. Alex, who is on the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, posted the news on Instagram, drawing congratulations from former Oct. 7 hostages. He was previously married to Melissa Cuc. 

Sightings

ANJULA Acharia hosting Maneet Ahuja, Stephanie Horton, Huma Abedin and former CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi to toast the launch of hot restaurant Gymkhana’s line of groceries, Gymkhana Fine Foods… TRACY Morgan and Medallion Financial CEO Andrew Murstein catching up on Celebrity Row during a Knick game last week . . . CHRISTIAN Louboutin co-chairing with Pauline Eveillard and Marina Kellen French at the WMF’s Hadrian Gala at the Waldorf Astoria.

Sunday

“City” resorting to coast

“In the City” is taking its drama south of the border. Page Six can reveal the new season of Bravo’s show filmed in Cancún this weekend, with a mix of familiar faces and fresh blood descending on the SLS Playa Mujeres resort. Among them is “Summer House” alum and “In the City” star Kyle Cooke, who’ll be spinning tracks at the Mexican resort’s adults-only Twiggy pool as part of its Halloween weekend extravaganza, “Taste of SLS.” The Chainsmokers and Bomba Estéreo are also set to take the main stage. Cooke’s DJ set comes amid his escalating drama with fellow co-stars West Wilson and estranged wife Amanda Batula, who recently announced she wouldn’t be returning for Season 2 of the Bravo spinoff. Cooke and Batula called in quits in January, and two months later it was revealed she was dating Wilson — Cooke’s close friend and the ex of her bestie, Ciara Miller. It seems the cameras are ready to capture every bit of the latest action: Page Six hears filming and lighting equipment have already been installed in some of the resort’s swankiest suites, complete with private hot tubs and personal butlers, ahead of the cast’s arrival. Talk about checking in for the drama.

It’s eww de parfum

Andy Warhol’s cheeky perfume is getting a second airing with the publication of a new book. It seems that the pop artist had quite the scents of humor, and when modern art matriarch Joan Kron asked him to make a perfume, he called it “You’re in” and insisted the liquid be yellow. (Say the name out loud and you’ll get the joke). Now Kron, 98, is spilling that and other stories from her adventures in the art world in memoir “The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art.” The book also recounts her collaborations with artists including Roy Lichtenstein (she commissioned him to make a billboard in 1967 and it was recently recreated for the Whitney museum’s Lichtenstein retrospective). Kron recently celebrated the book with more than 100 guests at LaVon Kellner’s art-filled loft, quipping “I’m just 15 months away from 100, so listen carefully.”

Love on his brain

A$AP Rocky got a bit bashful when PageSix.com’s Nicki Gostin suggested that he and his partner, Rihanna, were the most “glamorous” couple at the 2026 WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards. The “Praise the Lord” rapper said: “Thank you for the compliment,” adding, “You’re making me blush and turn red.” Rocky was on hand to introduce one of the night’s honorees, Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy — or, as he succinctly said onstage, “the man who made this fly-ass suit that I’ve got on right now.”

Industry “Horrors”

Cheyenne Jackson launched the Instagram account “One Job Away” to highlight actors at risk of losing their SAG-AFTRA health insurance, after he was at risk of losing his. The “AHS” alum told PageSix.com’s Nicki Gostin that “the biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that people have a lot of shame about not making the minimum.” Jackson, who has dozens of credits over a 20-plus-year career, says that he noticed things getting tougher after the COVID pandemic. “It’s a trickle-down effect because there are fewer jobs; there are more people vying for them. So, I audition for guest spots happily, and that’s the way it is right now.” The Broadway vet, who has been refreshingly honest about his sobriety and hair transplant, sees this project as being of service to fellow actors. “That’s what this is all about,” he said.

Ideas set in motion

Director Travis Knight is animated about stop-motion filmmaking. His new flick, “Wildwood,” took hundreds of artists seven years to shoot, on some days netting just a third of a second of footage. “In an age increasingly defined by speed, where moving images are conjured by a few keystrokes, where entire worlds materialize with a click of a mouse and imagination itself is automated, stop-motion promises something different,” Knight said at a Cinema Society screening. “Embedded in every frame is the humanity of those who made it.” Attendees included Lou Diamond Phillips, Edie Falco, Will Harrison, “Bel-Air” star Jabari Banks, “Adults” star Amita Rao, Maye Musk and Titus Welliver.

We hear…

THAT Melissa Etheridge will be honored at Audrey Gruss’ 20th HOPE Luncheon at the Plaza Nov. 10 . . . THAT Dean McDermott, the ex-husband of Tori Spelling, will speak about his addiction journey at Nancy Davis’ Cure Addiction Now gala at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Nov. 9 . . . THAT wildlife photographer Prince Hussain Aga Khan opened “Animal Voyage” at Isabelle Bscher’s Galerie Gmurzynska, where guests included Grace Hightower and the Opal Group’s Abe Wellington.