Will the Real ‘Devil Wears Prada’ Emily Please Stand Up?

For years now, we’ve known the real-life inspirations for a few of the biggest characters in The Devil Wears Prada: Miranda Priestly, of course, is based on former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, while Andy was based on the novel’s author, Lauren Weisberger, who worked as Wintour’s assistant in 1999. But who, pray tell, can we thank for the inspiration for Emily, Priestly’s first assistant, played by Emily Blunt? It sounds like we finally have an answer: On Tuesday, celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar said the character was based on her, and she’s not very happy about how she was portrayed. “I am Emily,” Fremar said on an episode of Vogue’s podcast, The Run-Through.

Fremar got her start as Wintour’s assistant in the late ’90s and has since become a celebrity stylist (her clients have included Charlize Theron, Nicola Peltz Beckham, and Kamala Harris). On the podcast, Fremar said she found out about Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada book from Wintour herself after she’d left her job in Wintour’s office and started working for the magazine’s fashion department. “I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me, and my heart sunk,” Fremar recalled. “I went into her office, and she said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger?’” Fremar said she told Wintour that Weisberger had been her junior assistant “for a short period of time,” and “she was like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.’”

Wintour had apparently received a galley of the book, which she let Fremar read. “It was actually quite mean, the galley,” Fremar said, suggesting the version she saw was much harsher than the book that eventually came out. “I think, obviously, an editor came in and really softened it.” Apparently, you can thank Fremar for one of Emily’s most iconic lines. “I definitely told her ‘a million girls would kill for the job,’” Fremar said. “That was definitely my line, because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily want to be there.”

It’s been over 20 years since the book came out, and Fremar says she hasn’t seen Weisberger since she left Vogue. It doesn’t sound like she’s dying to be reunited — she described the book as a “betrayal” and said she imagines seeing Weisberger again would be “very awkward.” “There’s nothing to be said,” Fremar added, explaining that their working relationship was less than friendly. “I probably was not very nice, and I probably was high-strung because I felt like I was having to do her job as well,” Fremar said. “So for me, that was really frustrating — I think she was probably just sitting there writing a book and not necessarily taking the job as seriously as I did.” Whether or not Weisberger ever actually walked in wearing Chanel boots remains a mystery.

Prior to Tuesday’s confirmation, Fremar had been speculated to be the inspiration for the character — back in 2006, Gawker used readers’ intel to identify Fremar as the subject of a “Page Six” blind item about who inspired Emily. Apparently, Fremar’s own styling client Julianne Moore believed it was her too — in 2013, Moore told The Hollywood Reporter that Fremar was “rumored to be Lauren Weisberger’s inspiration for the No. 1 assistant in The Devil Wears Prada.”

One person who definitely knew the truth: Emily Blunt, to whom Fremar apparently once revealed her secret identity at a dinner party. “​​I was like, ‘I just need to let you know, I’m Emily,’” Fremar recalled. “She was not that interested, to be honest. I thought I was gonna get this, like, huge reaction — like, no. It was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ So that was that.” What other secrets do you think Emily Blunt might know?