Kris and Bruce Jenner have a lot to celebrate with the arrival of Kourtney Kardashian’s baby girl this week, but a new report says they are on the rocks. The couple’s 21-year marriage is “on the verge of collapse,” according to the National Enquirer, after Bruce caught Kris cozying up to Todd Waterman . Waterman, of course, is the woman she had an affair with while married to the late Robert Kardashian, and who she recently made contact with again. This was documented on the current season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians , but Kris appeared to have cut off contact. Not so, the Enquirer says. The 62-year-old Bruce was reportedly devastated when he walked in on her composing an email to her ex, then meeting him for a secret rendezvous. “She told no one, but she did go out with Todd, and it was an electrifying date,” said an insider with a gift for superlatives as well as Kris Jenner scoop. “Kris walked out of the restaurant where they’d met looking like the cat that ate the canary. It’s so obvious that she still carries a torch for him.” After being busted signing an “xoxo” to Waterman, Kris made excuses claiming she needed final closure, but Bruce wasn’t buying it and stormed out. “He believes, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater.’ He can believe that Kris has had the audacity to keep in contact with Todd,” explained the friend. “Cheating is a deal breaker for him, so their marriage is on the brink.” Bruce is still reeling from his wife’s tell-all memoir, Kris Jenner…And All Things Kardashian , in which detailed “wild crazy sex” with Todd Waterman. In a recent episode of the family’s hit E! reality show, Kris “bumped into” Todd, now a Hollywood animator, at a Los Angeles-area tennis club. She gave him a lengthy hug and swapped contact information … that much we all saw on TV. But sources say it’s actually worse than it looked. “Bruce would feel totally betrayed if he actually knew the length and breadth of Kris and Todd’s current relationship,” says the insider ominously. “They had continued to feverishly e-mail each other, flirt and text. I think Kris is covering up a lot of secrets and lies. Bruce’s feelings are still raw.” “I don’t think he can take much more, especially not after this, and will be wondering what else Kris has been up to behind his back.” [Photo: WENN.com]
Detroit Woman Fatally Shot From Gun Accidentally Triggered By Hug Wow. This is tragically sad. A woman celebrating the weekend before her 25th birthday was fatally shot Sunday when she hugged an off-duty police officer while dancing at a party, causing the officer’s service weapon to fire, according to police and her mother. Adaisha Miller would have turned 25 on Monday, according to her mother, Yolanda McNair. The shooting happened at an outdoor social gathering about 12:30 a.m., said police Sgt. Eren Stephens. It happened on the city’s west side. According to Stephens, the woman “embraced the officer from behind, causing the holstered weapon to accidently discharge.” The bullet punctured Miller’s lung and hit her heart, and she died at a hospital. Stephens said the Detroit officer will remain on administrative duties while authorities investigate the shooting and report their findings to the Wayne County prosecutor. The officer’s name was not released. “For this to happen to her, whether they want to call it freak accident or mistake in judgment, it should have never happened to my child, and there’s nothing I can do to get her back,” McNair told WDIV-TV. McNair said her daughter was out to mark her upcoming birthday. “All she wanted to do was enjoy the weekend for her birthday,” the mother said. “She had every right to enjoy turning 25 and look beyond that.” R.I.P. Source
SMH at this : A Swedish judge cleared a man charged with rape because the victim was a transgender woman with male genitalia. From The Local: A man who attempted to rape a woman has been cleared of the charges by a Swedish court after it turned out that the woman he tried to rape was actually a man. Prosecutors said the defendant was “brutally violent” in the “attempted rape”, tearing off the victim’s pants and grabbing at the victim’s crotch, according to The Local’s translation of Sweden’s Nerikes Allehanda newspaper. But because the victim had a penis, “The intended crime never had the possibility of being fulfilled,” Sjöstedt explained. The unnamed defendant was found guilty of assault. The ruling infuriated Hyper Vocal’s Cooper Fleishman: “More than anything, this case highlights the sheer absurdity of the double standard with which we treat male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Changing the verdict solely because of the victim’s genitalia is like switching a grand theft auto charge to petty theft because the car happened to be blue when the thief thought it was green.” Queerty’s Benji Douglas added, “In essence, the judge ruled that it’s not possible to rape trans women.” This guy should have been punished to the fullest extent of the law. Regardless of the physical limitation, this dude is a dirty violator and needs to be punished for committing a sex crime! Source
In a well-reasoned, intelligent, thoughtful statement this week, Anderson Cooper came out to the public this week as a happy, proud gay man. And Star Jones believes he did so for the ratings. Asked about Cooper’s announcement by Natalie Morales of The Today Show this morning, the irritating former View co-host said “I’m a little bit of a cynic” and added of Cooper: “He’s a daytime talk show host and when the rating slip in daytime, the hosts tend to tell you lots of things about them.” Jones then went on to cite Oprah Winfrey and her admission in the 1990s that she was pregnant at 14, hooked on drugs and once considered suicide. “There [are] times when you generate information for ratings,” Jones said, seeming to allege that Winfrey concocted those stories and Cooper had a motive beyond mere honesty for his public reveal. Seriously, could this woman suck any more if she tried? [Photos: WENN.com]
Star Jones Thinks Anderson Cooper Came Out For Publicity Anderson Cooper came out a few days ago and he’s been universally hailed for it. But, as always, there’s gotta be at least one hater in the house. And this time, that hater is none other than Star Jones. “When the ratings slip in daytime, the hosts tend to tell you lots of things about them.” “I’m a bit of a cynic,” she continues, citing Oprah as an example. “(She) said she smoked crack, Oprah said that she was pregnant at 14 and considered suicide.” “There are times that you generate information for ratings,” Jones concluded. SMH. Someone sit this woman down. Calling someone else a slore from your slore-y glass house is not what’s poppin’ Star. Go somewhere please. Far away.
Mom Makes Kids Fight On Camera While Kids Scream For It To Stop Video posted to Facebook is causing outrage in many circles, and Missouri’s Department of Social Services may be investigating it. The images show a fist fight between two small children, with the mother of one of the kids egging them on, even offering instructions to the tiny combatants. “Got some action! Got some action!” the woman can be heard yelling as she shoots the video. “Y’all better ball up some fists!” The video was posted to Facebook on Sunday. An acquaintance of the mother in question alerted FOX 2. She asked not be identified, but spoke in an interview Tuesday. “It’s just sickening and I feel like there should be some kind of criminal action taken,” she told us. “I couldn’t even watch the whole video. I had to stop it and look again. It was sad.” She says the urging of the mother was as disturbing as the pictures themselves. FOX2 youtube
Kitty Litter Linked To Suicide in Women Kitty litter is some nasty isht. So nasty it can make women off themselves… Women infected with the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii are more likely to attempt suicide than non-infected women, new research finds. The reason for this connection, however, remains mysterious. T. gondii is a protozoa that prefers to infect cats, but can make its home in any warm-blooded animal. Humans can pick up the parasite from contact with cat feces, or by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables. Once ingested, T. gondii can make a home for itself inside the brain and muscle tissues, protected inside cysts that are resistant to attacks by the host’s immune system. Some studies have linked infection by this parasite with a variety of mental health and brain problems, including schizophrenia, neurosis and brain cancer. But scientists aren’t clear on whether the parasite contributes to these problems or is a mere side effect. Someone with schizophrenia, for example, might struggle to keep up good hygiene, meaning the mental disorder could increase the risk for infection. The new study linking suicide and T. gondii has the same limitation. Researchers can’t say for sure whether the parasite somehow drives people to suicide. But in women with infections, they found, the risk of an attempt is 1.5 times greater than in women without. “We can’t say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies,” lead researcher Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement. “We plan to continue our research into this possible connection.” T. gondii infection is likely not a random event, and it is conceivable that the results could be alternatively explained by people with psychiatric disturbances having a higher risk of becoming T. gondii infected prior to contact with the health system,” he said. If the parasite is found to be a cause, the next mystery to unravel will be how, Postolache said. It could be that the parasite acts directly on the brain in a way that promotes mental illness. Or perhaps it triggers the immune system to attack the brain somehow. Either way, he said, infection by T. gondii isn’t necessarily a mark of doom. For one thing, even with a 26 percent infection rate, the number of women in the study who attempted suicide was very small. For those who may be at risk, there may be treatments. “If we can identify a causal relationship, we may be able to predict those at increased risk for attempting suicide and find ways to intervene,” Postolache said. Gross. Let’s hope you cat lovers read this and teach your feline friends to use the toilet. SMH. Source
Blond And Very Busty Bandit Robs Gas Station Rocking Beanie Brandishing Knife! Crazy Aussie: She’s the suspect every red-blooded Australian policeman will be hot on the heels of. A buxom bandit is on the run after holding up a petrol station on Queensland’s Gold Coast in the early hours of this morning. However, it’s likely that she won’t evade capture for long. The curvaceous blonde, who is believed to be in her 20s, made a series of schoolgirl blunders. Perhaps believing her ample assets would divert attention, her biggest mistake – which even the most amateur hold-up artist might have thought of – was failing to hide her face. She did remember to wear a glove to stop her hands from leaving fingerprint traces on anything she touched – but she put it on the wrong hand. The gloved hand clutched a knife, which she then took away with her after the robbery. Her tan was also a giveaway – if police eventually arrest her a study of her breasts (presumably by a policewoman) would help them in their line of inquiry, so to speak. She made no attempt to hide her hair style, either. Unless she decides to cut off those long locks they will help police compare a suspect with the woman captured on the security cameras at the Arundel filling station. No one was hurt in the robbery. But while the mistakes of the bungling bandit might cause some amusement, police weren’t smiling today. ‘There were a number of serious threats to harm the attendant and she fled with a small amount of money,’ a spokesman for Queensland police told Channel Nine news. Police said the store employee fought back by throwing items from the shelves at the woman as she fled outside, where a man was waiting for her in a four wheel drive car. It sped off into the night, but the woman left behind so many clues to her identity that police are hoping for an early arrest.
It’s easy to dismiss the films of Tyler Perry , undisputed king of a niche multi-media empire of his own making, as broad, caricature-laden comedy populated by what Spike Lee famously labeled “coonery buffoonery.” But beneath the be-wigged, slapstick-y heft of Perry’s most famous character, Madea, and her often violent crusades in the name of family values — as seen in Friday’s Madea’s Witness Protection , the sassy grandmother’s seventh big-screen outing — lies a fount of subversive discussions of race, class, and self-examination. The only question is: Is Tyler Perry aware of it? Perry, who dons the Madea dress once more in Witness Protection (grudgingly so, he tells Movieline — more on his mixed feelings about Madea below), wrote and directed the comedy after hitting upon an idea over dinner: What if Bernie Madoff had to move in with Madea as punishment for his fiscal crimes? Eugene Levy stars as a Wall Street accountant who agrees to testify against mobsters involved in a Ponzi scheme, only to be ushered, along with his family, into protective custody – Madea’s house, to be more precise. It’s there, in this fish out of water set-up, that Perry plumbs more thoughtful ground. Economic responsibility is a theme, as Perry draws a direct line between the privileged suits that run the world’s financial institutions and the working class plebes whose life savings are often at stake. Race and class divides become blurred as Levy’s Jewish-American family finds common ground, and perhaps even stronger ties, with their equally uncomfortable hosts (Perry as both Madea and her cranky brother, Uncle Joe). There’s just one thing about all the considered socio-cultural conversations seeded in the subtext of Witness Protection : Perry admits that he didn’t set out with any conscious agenda other than making himself laugh. “I just thought, ‘This is funny,’” he told Movieline, adding “What’s so great is that these thoughts that you’re raising for me, I will be thinking about.” Read on as Tyler Perry talks with Movieline about his Madea character, why he is eager to retire her – if his audience will allow it — what he has to say to his critics, and why he jumped at the chance to play the lead in his forthcoming mainstream crossover pic, Alex Cross . Especially compared to the more melodramatic tone of Big Happy Family , Madea’s Witness Protection is different in terms of its themes and characters — what sort of ground did you want to explore this time around? I was actually having dinner with a friend and they said, “You know what would be great punishment for Bernie Madoff? If he had to move in with Madea.” So I took that thought and ran with it, just the thought of it made me laugh so hard. I said, “Let me write this — and who can I get to play it?” I thought of Eugene Levy. So the whole tone of this movie is about, if everything was taken away from you and you had to be forced to live a very simple life and focus on what is real, which is his family, how much would you change? Another interesting new element, especially given your oeuvre of primarily African-American characters, is that this is a story about what might be considered “white people problems” — these are rich, country-clubbing suburbanites who are probably at the farthest remove from Madea’s world. [Laughs] Yes, right. And the story seems to be saying that one group’s problems are really everyone’s problems, certainly economically speaking — Eugene Levy’s character is involved in a financial scam that inadvertently has stolen money from Romeo’s church, for example. Sure. There’s also a plot thread that suggests Eugene’s character might be half-black, which interestingly brought that point home even more — aligning the black and Jewish cultural experiences together, in a sense. How much were these unifying themes present for you in the process of making the film? [Laughs] You’re trying to make it seem like I’m so smart! And that I did not even think about. I just thought, “This is funny — this is funny if they think Uncle Joe and [Eugene Levy’s mother] had a one-night stand and he thinks he’s his son.” I wasn’t even thinking at all about any of that. Well, go ahead and run with it! Be my guest. I will! You delve into economic awareness and the avoidance of victimhood, with many of your characters dealing with the repercussions of these Wall Street scandals trickling down into their lives. One of the elements I admire in the Madea character is that she seems to be a proponent of personal responsibility, throughout the films. Wow, again — I wasn’t thinking that either! What’s so great is that these thoughts that you’re raising for me, I will be thinking about. All I was doing was writing a simple story, I didn’t get into the subconscious of it. For me, after Colored Girls and Alex Cross and Good Deeds I wanted to do something where I just laughed. Even with Madea’s Big Happy Family , where one of the characters had cancer, I just wanted to do something where nobody’s sick, we’re all going to just laugh and have a good time, and remember why family is important. I heard that Madea might be ringing the NASDAQ bell … [Laughs] That I’d like to see! I don’t know who’s going to be playing Madea, but I’m going to be busy that day. There are moments in Witness Protection that almost have a guerrilla-style Borat feel — the scenes with Madea in New York City, discovering different parts of her posh hotel in particular. There’s a real improvised feel to them. And there’s an outtake at the end involving Madea phoning down to the concierge to inquire about the bidet that’s pretty hilarious. Yeah, but you know what the thing about that is? I’ve never seen Borat , but thinking about my mother and the first time she went to a really nice hotel, or the first time she had to go through an airport. So a lot of those things didn’t take me going very far to imagine or to create, because it is very much what is close to, or what has happened to, my own family. Have you ever considered doing the Madea character as a sort of faux documentary along the lines of what Sacha Baron Cohen has done with Borat — just putting her out into the world to capture the way people react to her? The only problem with that is, I would have to be in costume out in the world, and that won’t work for me. [Laughs] If I take Madea off the stage or have to put her in a room, I’m telling you… I am so uncomfortable in that costume. I can barely look at myself, I certainly don’t want other people looking at me. Really? Oh, yeah. You’ve voiced a similar sentiment before about the character and the costume — it seems like she may not be your favorite character to play, but you keep coming back to playing Madea because your audience loves her. Absolutely. One hundred percent. It is definitely about the audience and it’s also about the amount of joy she brings to people, and the amount of people that she keeps employed. So absolutely, that’s what it’s about. But I would be pretty good with passing it on. What’s behind your mixed feelings about Madea? Is it as simple as being uncomfortable in the costume? The costume is so difficult to wear. It’s so tight. I’m sweating, it’s hot, with the wig — it’s all just a pain. Everybody on staff on the crew knows that once I get into costume, they’ve got to be hustling, moving lights, because I don’t want to have it on — I’m ready to take it off. And Joe is worse! Joe is like being wrapped like a mummy all around your face. That’s right. At least Joe doesn’t usually move around much, he seems to mostly just sit in his easy chair. That’s why! I’m like, listen — I’m not about to sweat this stuff off and have them put it back on for another 6-8 hours a day. I’m not doing that! Do you have a shelf life in mind for Madea, or do you think you’ll draw a line at playing her after a certain point? Well, you know what, it really is about the audience. As long as they want to see it I think it would be unfair for me to do anything but deliver. But whenever they stop coming, then Madea will retire to an island. You’ve received criticism over the years for the Madea films in particular. What is your response to those who accuse these works of perpetuating certain stereotypes? You know what, I’ve stopped trying to defend that stuff. I don’t even deal with it anymore. I like to let the audience speak for themselves. We all know what we like, we all know what we like and how we like it and what we want to see, and I think that it’s awful that we as black people – and this is where most of the criticism comes from, it comes from within our own culture — that we are so ashamed about certain parts of our society, about our own culture, that we want to act like it doesn’t exist. But this woman exists. I still know her. She is still in my neighborhood. She was my mother and my aunt. She didn’t go to an Ivy League school, and she took care of the whole family. So it’s not a stereotype, it is a part of our culture that we all need to embrace. I do have a critic friend who watched the film and took issue with Madea’s violent streak — her tendency to threaten corporal punishment to those who don’t act reasonable in her eyes. That says more about your friend than it does about the character. That’s what I think. I’d like to discuss what we might call Madea’s history lessons in this film — there is a scene in which Doris Roberts struggles with the difference between using the term “Negro” instead of “Negro spirituals.” The other characters, who are white, are horrified by this, but then Madea comes in and tells them they’re all being too uptight about it, before firmly but gently correcting her. Are you by proxy telling your audience that maybe we’re too uptight when it comes to discussing these sensitive racial and historical issues? [Laughs] Let me tell you something, you are so deep into this movie, you are reading things that I never even thought about or imagined. Because in that scene, what I’m thinking is, this woman has dementia. She’s trying to say “Negro spirituals” but she keeps saying “Negroes.” I’m thinking it’s a hysterical joke because I laughed my ass off when I wrote it, and I laughed my ass off when she did it, and when Madea corrects her — because everybody’s panicked that she’s saying “Negroes” and they don’t understand that she’s trying to say “Negro spirituals” — it’s like, calm down, get an understanding of what she’s saying before everybody jumps off the handle. I feel like that taps into a larger discussion of your films, even, and the idea that you’re working within a very specific niche. But looking to what you have coming up next, you’re starring in Alex Cross , an action thriller adapted from James Patterson’s novel. Did you see this as an opportunity to cross over from your established niche into a wider mainstream audience? No, I never do things to think about crossing over. The thing that appealed to me was that I always liked James Patterson’s books and I liked the franchise and the character itself. When it came to me out of all of the things that I’m offered — I’m offered quite a bit — that was the most intriguing. I thought, “Wow – this is a character that I like,” and I wanted to do it. That’s what that’s about. Madea’s Witness Protection is in theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
