The Hollywood Gossip would like to issue the following retraction:
In a previous article, we wrote the following:
According to court documents obtained by Radar Online, Nicolas Cage’s ex-girlfriend, Vickie Park, accused Cage of assaulting her while “severely intoxicated” at the SLASH Film Festival in Vienna last month.
Cage has, in fact, not been accused of assault and we apologize for the error.
Jenelle Evans is not very happy with The Hollywood Gossip at the moment.
Yes, this The Hollywood Gossip.
The website you"re reading right now.
In a barrage of Tweets on October 5, the Teen Mom veteran took extreme issue with a story we ran earlier in the week in which we alleged that her son, Kaiser, was in the hospital following a medical procedure.
You can read that story HERE.
We had no ill intentions by writing the article. We were simply passing along information as we had received it and we wished her child nothing but the best in the process.
But scroll down to see what Jenelle had to say in response, along with why she dragged Briana DeJesus into her critique…
Gossip Girl alum Penn Badgley married Domino Kirke early last year, and now he’s starring in a new series.
Unfortunately, while doing press for this new show, he put his foot in his mouth in the worst way — appearing to make light of people who have been molested.
Penn has come forward and apologized.
Penn Badgley, who played Daniel Humphrey on the legendary CW series, Gossip Girl, is set to star in a new Lifetime series, You.
In this series, he will play a stalker. He was quick to connect that such a predatory fictional character relates to real life predators.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Penn Badgley says that he hopes that his show will help people have “necessary conversations” in the wake of #MeToo.
“I think it’s significant that a show like this is coming out now,” Penn says.
Clearly, he is not equating his show with #MeToo — just drawing an accurate connection.
This is where he begins to put his foot into his mouth, and it’s all about one word choice.
“I think as an actor you can become an object of desire,” Penn says. “Which is something women are already accustomed to more or less around the world.”
He is totally right about that, and it’s good that he acknowledges that this is already the case for countless women.
Then Penn says: “I mean, I don’t want to sound sensationalist, but I’ve literally been molested — just in the literal sense of the word — by many people in the moment. Because that’s what they do.”
Oh no!
Penn also gave a shoutout to Terry Crews as one of the men who came forward with a #MeToo story, but we’ll get to that in a second.
Penn very clearly means one of the literal definitions of molested — meaning to be bothered. He is speaking of people intruding into his life because of his fame.
Folks, especially when you’re discussing #MeToo but really at any time, use whichever word is most accurate and clear for the message that you are trying to convey.
Say that your privacy was violated or your personhood was disrespected or that you were objectified or simply that you were bothered.
Don’t say “molested” when you mean one of those things. Some people, actors included, have actually been molested — groped and worse.
Penn Badgley did not mean to make light of people who have actually been molested, and issued a clarification to Us Weekly.
“The point of my comment was not to confess a personal trauma,” Penn explains.
Penn continues: “I was speaking about the way emotional and physical boundaries are violated for someone in the public eye, who is seen as an object of desire.”
“Depending on so many factors, it can range from conscious abuse to something very unconscious,” he tries to clarify.
“And that is the point I was making, cautiously,” he says. “In the context of a conversation about fanaticism and cultural norms which support manipulative or abusive behavior.”
“These are the same norms which support predatory men, but not exclusively predatory men,” Penn concludes. “They affect, and infect, us all.”
That very cerebral clarification was great, but he could have avoided this entire situation by just making a better choice with his diction the first time around.
But we get it. And Penn is a good person, clearly. As we mentioned, his original interview included a shout-out to Terry Crews’ sexual assault and to the backlash that Crews is currently facing from powerful people in the entertainment industry.
Penn points out that men who have been groped or assaulted face challenges that are different than those that women face, because of societal standards.
“You’re led as a man, particularly, that when it happens you should feel great about it,” Penn says of men who have been sexually assaulted.
To be clear, he is not saying that men have it worse — simply that society treats men differently than it treats women over this issue.
In Crews’ case, people responded that he should have used violence against the predator.
That is a shameful piece of victim-blaming that ignores the consequences that Crews would have faced.
Many other men are simply told that they should be grateful.
“Particularly,” Penn notes. “When it comes from someone who’s feasibly an object of your desire as well.”
In other words, there are men who have been groped or even raped and, because the perpetrator was a woman or even a beautiful woman, they are told that they should feel flattered.
XOXO?
More like XOX… no way, right?!?
Blake Lively has created quite the stir online among a certain section of television viewers as a result of an Instagram photo she shared on Wednesday morning.
The picture features Lively as the passenger in a car that’s just passing the Brooklyn Bridge.
She’s staring out the window with a smirk on her face, eyebrows raised, hair a little out of place and just one word included as a caption:
Spotted.
As Gossip Girl fans know extremely well, this was the way in which the blogger at the center of that former CW smash would begin every post/voiceover.
Might Lively be implying something significant?
Might she be teasing an upcoming Gossip Girl reboot?!?
Don’t scoff. Just look around your television dial for reasons to believe this could actually be the case.
NBC has found success this season with a revival of Will & Grace. ABC is about to air a new version of American Idol.
Heck, not only is Roseanne set to return with the same cast… so is Murphy Brown, a sitcom that last aired an episode in 1998.
Would it really be that much of a stretch, in this TV environment, for The CW to green light another few seasons of Gossip Girl?
The series wrapped up in 2012 after 121 installments, but it remains a favorite on Netflix and on forums across the Internet.
Even if only a handful of cast members wanted to reprise their roles, it’s definitely the kind of program that could pull off a revamped series of storylines.
Just toss a bunch of wealthy attractive teenagers into the Upper East Side scene of New York City and see what happens, basically.
Lively portrayed Serena van der Woodsen on the show, the best friend of Leighton Meester’s Blair and occasional lover of Penn Badgley’s Dan.
She hasn’t appeared in many shows or movies since Gossip Girl went off the air, but we did enjoy her role in 2016’s The Shallows.
The gorgeous star has been busy, however.
She gave birth to a pair of kids and has been raising them well alongside husband Ryan Reynolds.
But Lively recently shared a photo of her impressive weight loss, which only helps propel the possibility that Gossip Girl really is coming back.
Why shed all that weight and then show it off, after all, if she were not coming back as Serena?!?
Shaun White’s sexual harassment accuser — his former bandmate Lena Zawaideh — is furious he referred to the case as “gossip” … and she’s carefully unloading on him, through her attorney, in a way to avoid violating the terms of her settlement.…
Shaun White says he’s “truly sorry” for referring to his sexual harassment case as “gossip” — saying, “It was a poor choice of words to describe such a sensitive subject in the world today.” The snowboarding legend appeared on the the “Today” show…
Liz Smith, a pioneer in the world of celebrity gossip and journalism, died of natural causes on Sunday, her literary agent has confirmed.
She was 94 years old.
Best known for her time as a columnist for The New York Post, Smith’s work was syndicated to nearly 70 newspapers and read by millions of people.
She passed away at her home in Manhattan, according to The New York Times.
Close to everyone from Tom Hanks to Madonna, Smith leveraged her connections over the years to break news and pass along juicy tidbits from Hollywood.
She was widely respected as a reporter, but always keenly aware of her place in the journalism universe.
“We mustn’t take ourselves too seriously in this world of gossip,” Smith said in 1987, adding of the profession she practically invented;
“When you look at it realistically, what I do is pretty insignificant. Still, I’m having a lot of fun.”
At one point, Smith was the highest-paid print journalist in there country, earning over $ 1 million per year.
She was trusted enough to snag exclusive interviews with stars from all industries, including Ivana Trump, who talked to Smith about her divorce from Donald Trump in 1990.
“They made headlines for three months,” Smith said in an interview with the Times about this sit-down.
“They made me famous all over the world. I didn’t deserve it. I printed what Ivana had told me.”
Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1923 and graduated from the University of Texas in 1949 with a degree in journalism.
A year later, she moved to the Big Apple to be closer to the action.
After bouncing from job to jobbed writing for nine New York newspapers in total, Smith established herself at Cosmopolitan and ended up with her own column at The New York Daily News in 1976.
By the 1990s, she began a syndicated daily column that ran in Newsday and the New York Post.
In 2000, Smith published her memoir, Natural Blonde.
She admitted to being bisexual in the book, despite having been married twice to men.
The memoir also featured stories about such stars as Julia Roberts, the Kennedy clan, Tom Cruise and Katharine Hepburn.
It became a New York Times best-seller.
“Gossip is news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress,” Smith once said.
Tweeted Al Roker, upon learning of her death:
“I was fortunate enough to work with the amazing Liz Smith.
“During my time at WNBC she was nothing short fabulous. Liz passed away at the age of 94 and with her, a piece New York.”
May she rest in peace.
Actor Ed Westwick is the latest Hollywood star to be accused of appalling acts of sexual assault.
In a Facebook post published last night, actress Kristina Cohen claims that Westwick–who is best known for his work on the 2007-2012 CW series Gossip Girl–raped her in 2014.
“The last month has been incredibly difficult,” Cohen begins.
“Like so many women I too have a story of sexual assault, and the outpouring of stories have been both triggering and emotionally exhausting.
“I was sexually assaulted three years ago. It was a dark time in my life. My mom was dying of cancer and I didn’t have the support system or time to process and deal with the aftermath of the rape.”
“I buried my pain and guilt to make space for the onslaught that came after my mom’s death, just three months later.”
From there, Cohen goes into detail and identifies Westwick as her attacker:
“I was briefly dating a producer who was friends with the actor Ed Westwick,” she writes. “It was this producer who brought me up to Ed’s house where I met Ed for the first time. I wanted to leave when Ed suggested ‘we should all f-ck.’
“But the producer didn’t want to make Ed feel awkward by leaving. Ed insisted we stay for dinner. I said I was tired and wanted to leave, trying to get out of what was already an uncomfortable situation.
“Ed suggested I nap in the guest bedroom. The producer said we would stay for just another 20 more minutes to smooth everything over, and then we could leave.”
Cohen adds:
“So I went and laid down in the guest room where I eventually fell asleep, I was woken up abruptly by Ed on top of me, his fingers entering my body. I told him to stop, but he was strong.
“I fought him off as hard as I could but he grabbed my face in his hands, shaking me, telling me he wanted to f-ck me. I was paralyzed, terrified. I couldn’t speak, I could no longer move. He held me down and raped me.
“It was a nightmare, and the days following weren’t any better,” she writes.
From there Cohen tells a tale of systemic abuse and repression that’s all too familiar to so many women in Hollywood:
“The producer put the blame on me, telling me I was an active participant,” she writes.
“Telling me that I can’t say anything because Ed will have people come after me, destroy me, and that I could forget about an acting career. Saying there’s no way I can go around saying Ed ‘raped’ me and that I don’t want to be ‘that girl.’
“And for the longest time, I believed him. I didn’t want to be ‘that girl.’
Cohen says she was inspired to share her story not only by the dozens of women who come forward in recent weeks with allegations about Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men in Hollywood, but also by the adoration and respect that Westwick continues to receive from the public.
“I hope my coming forward will help others to know that they are not alone, that they are not to blame, and it is not their fault,” she writes.
“Just as the other women and men coming forward have helped me to realize the same. I hope that my stories and the stories of others help to reset and realign the toxic environments and power imbalances that have created these monsters.”
Westwick has yet to publicly respond to Cohen’s allegations.
We will have further updates on this story as more information becomes available.
I have never sought the spotlight.
So stated Jared Kushner after speaking in private to the Senate Intel Committee this week.
The son-in-law of Donald Trump, Kusher answered questions in this session about allegations that he colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 Presidential election, following the revelation that he met on a number of occasions with representatives from that foreign adversary.
In response to the charges, Kushner said simply afterward: "I did not collude."
He also uttered the above quote about the spotlight, which got our attention because… come on, Jared!
We all know you and wife Ivanka Trump appeared on a 2010 episode of the former CW smash Gossip Girl!
It"s true!
You can see for yourself via the screen capture below:
For their cameo, Kushner is presenting an award at a New York Observer party, while Trump is seen smiling in the background.
It actually aired on the couple"s one-year wedding anniversary, and Ivanka later quipped that she wasn"t sure you could refer to what she"s doing in the clip below as "acting, per se."
Ah, that classic Trump self-deprecation!
Check out the throwback video below and think back to a more innocent time… when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were simply appeared on teen TV shows, not threatening our national security.
This is not the first time Sinead O’Connor has behaved erratically, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening.
On June 23rd, Chicago police received a call from Dublin, Ireland authorities that the singer’s family had alerted them that O’Connor had threatened to kill herself.
According to TMZ, O’Connor told loved ones that she planned to jump off a Chicago-area bridge.
Though it’s not an “active search,” local police have been given the heads up to keep a lookout for the 49-year-old.
O’Connor refuted this report on her Facebook page on June 24th:
“Oh and by the way it’s bullshit I jumped off a bridge, some stupid bitch up at Swords Garda station decided she’d like to throw a bit of false and malicious gossip about is all).
“AM FAR TOO FUCKING HAPPY FOR THAT!!”
O’Connor sent another Facebook update a few hours later:
“Thought for the day Of The Baptist.. Sometimes the rage of a soul is equivalent to the size of that soul’s knowledge of and desire to revel in it’s glorious God given right to LIVE.
“Free as it was created in the beginning. When there was NOTHING BUT THE WORD.”
It was believed that cops thought they found O’Connor based on the description they were given, but it was not her.
People Magazine reports that the call from Dublin came in around 5:30 p..m local time.
Chicago Police department “issued an all-call radio message” to officers to be on the lookout for the singer.
“Sinead O’Connor called and said ‘I’m on a bridge in Chicago and I’m going to jump,” Irish law enforcement reportedly warned.
Police, however, wouldn’t confirm with the media if this call was for O’Connor.
Just last month, O’Connor was reported missing, and friends feared that she had taken her own life.
Last year, O’Connor wrote a suicide note on Facebook stating she’d overdosed, but was later found safe in Dublin.
In 2011, O’Connor fired off a series of suicidal tweets, prompting a visit from police.
On June 6, 2006, The Hollywood Gossip opened its Internet doors with a post about Lindsay Lohan walking away from a movie title Bill.
Yes, this website debuted back when Lindsay Lohan didn"t just have a career… she had a successful enough career where she could pick and choose her projects!
We"re old.
We"re also grateful.
It has been our pleasure to bring you the best, the worst and the everything-in-between from this very crazy world of celebrity gossip over the past decade.
How much has changed since The Hollywood Gossip went live way back in the day? Consider where things stood in June of 2006…
It was quite the week of celebrity gossip between the dates of April 10 and April 15.
MTV handed out more buckets of Golden Popcorn. The Duggars were back in the news. And so many babies were born!
For those that missed the main stories of the week, or for those who wish to relive what went down, click on the headlines in the gallery below…
The former Amy Duggar and husband Dillon King are adamantly denying that they are the “family source” leaking Duggar gossip online.
Yes, they actually stand accused of that following reports that Anna Duggar is pregnant, and critics say the evidence is pretty strong …
Amy, cousin to the 19 Kids & Counting clan, may seem an unlikely figure to be caught in the raging torrent of social media criticism.
All who use the Duggar name as a claim to fame are under fire lately, though, given the non-stop string of scandals dogging the family.
To wit, Dillon King went off on Facebook last weekend, strongly noting that marrying into the family “doesn’t mean I don’t have a job.”
He isn’t stopping there, either, mixing it up with fans grilling him on actions that seem to contradict his claims of not cashing in on fame.
The common theme: Why, if he doesn’t mean to capitalize on his wife’s last name, did he and Amy push for a TLC wedding special?
Moreover, why did he ask fans to lobby the network for that same thing, and why do they give interviews and comment publicly on anything?
King denies being affected by the cancelation of 19 Kids and Counting, yet still refers to himself as a “public figure” on his Facebook.
It may be a little bit of a leap, but Duggar observers have come to believe that the “source close to the family” must be Amy and Dillon.
The oft-cited and unnamed “source” has leaked various stories to the media over the past year, most notably that Anna Duggar is pregnant.
Supposedly. The rumor hit the web and spread like wildfire last week, and King was asked by fans whether he and Amy are behind it.
While the rest of the Duggars are radio silent, King denies that he and Amy are the source … but doesn’t deny that she’s knocked up.
He did, however, imply that they’ve been the leak for other tales from Duggar Nation when he said that his quotes are taken out of context.
Dillon didn’t say which quotes were taken out of context, exactly, but Amy and her man have not been shy about voicing their opinions.
Amy openly called Josh Duggar a fraud recently, while Dillon said Brad Paisley roasting Josh at the CMAs was the “best thing ever.”
These aren’t passing, one-off remarks, either. Amy also said Josh is “too selfish to even realize” how many people he hurt with his actions.
What do you think? Are they not-so-subtly selling out their famous relatives, while simultaneously benefiting from the Duggar brand?
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 6 Episode 5, Yolanda finally realized that everyone has been talking about Yolanda.
Of course, not everyone is saying the same things, so …
Picking up where last week left off, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 6 Episode 5 saw the strangest developments yet in this saga.
The long and short of it is that the debate over whether Yolanda Foster is faking Lyme Disease finally came to a head, but confusingly.
Eileen Davidson (accidentally, maybe) told Foster about Lisa Rinna questioning her last episode, when she blabbed to the other ladies.
Foster seemed either at peace with the drama – she knows Bravo exploits her and she loves it – or focused solely on an upcoming surgery.
Where it gets hard to piece together is that Foster first brought up the Taylor Armstrong / Rinna gossip from Lisa Vanderpump’s party.
Davidson, though, seemed to have misheard Foster’s question about what Taylor said to Rinna (who was not present at this moment).
Eileen instead began talking – at great, awkward length – about everything Rinna had brought up to the gang in the previous episode:
Yolanda’s illness, Munchausen’s syndrome, social media, etc. You name it. This was as cringe-inducing as it was awkward, people.
Not realizing that Foster wasn’t talking about that conversation, Kyle Richards and Vanderpump looked horrified, and for good reason.
Basically, Foster was unaware that peeps were talking about two separate events (both about her), and became more and more lost.
Richards and Vanderpump filled her in. Davidson posited that Rinna had just gotten caught up in relaying other people’s gossip. Okay.
So if you watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills online, everyone now knows what everyone else has been saying about Foster.
Except Lisa Rinna. As Eileen said, she should’ve kept her “big mouth shut.” It’s Rinna’s mess, and she “should be the one to clean it up.”
Will Yolanda force her to with an epic face-to-face confrontation? And will Kyle Richards be there to make facial expressions? Stay tuned.
