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2008: The Year in Celebrity Scandals
By Jonathan Weichsel
2008 will be remembered as a transitional year in the world of celebrity scandals. We can probably sum up 2008 by saying "Out with the old stupid celebrities, in with the new!" Sure, O.J. Simpson had another trial, but nobody paid any attention. Alco-maniac Mel Gibson refrained from any psychotic outbursts, reliable drunk David Hasselhoff wasn't caught eating anything off the floor, and Kiefer Southerland hasn't knocked over any Christmas trees since being let out of jail in January.
It is telling that the first celebrity scandal to be reported in this article comes not from a celebrity, but from a notorious celebrity-busting cop. Back in September Los Angeles police Chief William Bratton, speaking against a proposed anti-paparazzi law, said to a group of reporters, "If you notice, since Britney started wearing clothes and behaving, Paris is out of town not bothering anybody anymore, thank God, and evidently, Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don't seem to have much of an issue."
A very angry Lindsay Lohan fired back a few days later saying to a group of paparazzi, "Police chiefs shouldn't get involved in everyone else's business when it comes to their personal life. It's inappropriate." Lindsay recently confirmed that she is in fact in a relationship with Samantha Ronson, but we see her point about police chiefs. Still, it's funny that Lindsay Lohan would be telling a cop what's appropriate.
Oddly enough, some of the biggest celebrity scandals of the year came not from those crazy girls who choose to make names for themselves in the party circuit, but from Disney starlets. We can all remember back to early 2007, when nude pictures of the then eighteen year old High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens appeared on the net. Disney threatened to fire her from the next High School Musical film and replace her with Cheetah girl Adrianne Bailon, but Hudgens' boyfriend Zack Efron said that he would refuse to appear in the film if Hudgens was out. Well, Vanessa appeared in High School Musical three, and now she couldn't possibly be a bigger star.
In 2008 Adrienne Bailon tried to one-up Hudgens by hiring sleazy Hollywood publicist Jonathan Jaxson to leak her own nude photos onto the web and make it look like they were stolen. She concocted this whole story about how they were meant for her boyfriend, but hacked from her computer at an airport. She even hired a lawyer to file a phony lawsuit to make the whole thing seem legit.
Unfortunately, the plan backfired when Jaxson, thinking he was off camera, bragged to gossip reporters that he cooked up the ruse, and described in fairly good detail how he "pulled it off." The conspiracy wasn't a complete dud though. After seeing the photos, Hugh Hefner offered twenty-five year old Bailon one-hundred-thousand dollars to do a full nude spread in playboy magazine.
Of course, the most scandal prone Disney star of 2008 was Miley Cyrus. In a way, I feel sorry for the girl, who just celebrated her sweet sixteen. If you all remember, a few years ago there was this fad that swept the nation, where if your kid misbehaved, you would make him stand on the side of the freeway holding a sign saying what he did. For example, you might be driving down the freeway and see a teenager holding a sign that said, "I smoked pot," or, "I shoplifted," or something like that. People (and social workers) driving by who saw teenagers holding these signs determined that the parents were guilty of cruel and unusual punishment.
If forcing your kid to publicly apologize for bad behavior is considered poor parenting, then the Walt Disney Company must be the poorest parent out there. Lately it has seemed like every time Miley Cyrus does something that any ordinary teenage girl might do, she has to apologize, through the media, to the entire nation. She writes some nasty gossip about someone on her blog, Disney forces her to apologize. She stays out too late, and Disney forces her to apologize, etc, etc. Heck, Disney even forced her to publicly apologize for not wearing a seatbelt in a scene from a movie that they produced.
After all of this forced apologizing, it didn't come as much of a shock when in late May of 2008 she threatened to quit her Disney Channel hit Hannah Montana. It did, however, come as something of a shock when Disney had the gall to accuse her of being ungrateful. She has made Disney a lot of money, and has suffered a lot from Disney's mismanagement of her various scandals.
Who can count the number of times she apologized for a spread of artsy, not terribly risqué photos that appeared in Vanity Fair? So far she has apologized to US Weekly, TV Guide, and Billboard, just to rattle off a few publications. After all her apologizing, it is easy to forget that the Vanity Fair spread was not her first photo scandal of the year, but her third.
If 2008 was a year of sexy photo scandals, it was even more a year of celebrities attacking paparazzi. We can empathize with the celebrities here. The paparazzi are always there, usually uninvited and completely in their face. It must get annoying after awhile, and sometimes it must seem like the only way to deal with these paparazzi is to ram your car into a group of them, or throw a rock at one of their heads or something.
When Keanu Reaves took the stand in October of 2008 to deny hitting a member of the Paparazzi with his car back in 2007, he made a revealing blunder. When asked if he hit the guy, Reaves answered "No," and then explained that it was the paparazzi who hit his car when he tripped over his own feet while walking backwards. But, when asked if he made an effort to avoid hitting the Paparazzi Reaves answered, "He was in front of a starting car. It's common sense to me." In other words, Keanu said, in court, that it makes sense to him to hit someone who is in front of your car when you start it up.
Every once an awhile auteur Quentin Tarantino feels the need to remind the world that along with being a first-rate director, he is also a D-list celebrity. Like when he hit a member of the Paparazzi at Sundance 2008. Here's how it went down: Tarantino was leaving a Starbucks when he noticed a guy with a video camera filming him. Tarantino approached the man and with typical Tarantino sarcasm and asked the guy, "What's going on here?" When the guy didn't answer, Tarantino punched him right in the face. Ironically, because of the way the guy was holding the camera, the punch came at a really cool angle, almost like something out of Kill Bill or Grind House!
Kanye West attacked not one, but three members of the Paparazzi in 2008, in two separate incidents. The first incident was at LAX in September. Kanye rushed two Paparazzi who were photographing him as he was going through the metal detector. Kanye turned around, jumped out of line, pounded the two guys, grabbed both their cameras, and smashed them against the ground. West was arrested on the spot. The attack was captured on video, and spread around the web.
The second incident happened around 2:20 AM outside a nightclub called Tup-tup in Newcastle, England. As Kanye was leaving the club, he saw a member of the Paparazzi named Terry Blackburn. West rushed the man without any provocation, and started hitting him in the face with his own camera. Blackburn's face was left all cut up and bruised. Blackburn called the police, and West was later arrested. Reports stated that West was prepared to issue a written apology to Blackburn, but his lawyers advised him against it.
Not all celebrities have to resort to attacking the paparazzi. It is shocking to hear, but some celebrities still actually have fans, and some of these fans are loyal enough to attack the paparazzi for them. Case in point: when Matthew McConaughey was surfing in Malibu in June of 2008, a group of Paparazzi started photographing him. Some other surfers told the paparazzi to stop. When the paparazzi kept on photographing him, the surfers all ganged up and started beating the men with their surfboards. The surfers wound up throwing a video camera into the pacific, and a member of the paparazzi wound up with a broken nose. Now those are some dedicated fans! As with pretty much everything that happened in 2008, you can find a video of it online.
These violence prone celebrities could probably learn a thing or two from the trying-real-hard-to-reform Britney Spears. Instead of physically attacking her Paparazzi, she decided in 2008 to dedicate a part of her personal webpage to making fun of the clan's members. Sometimes there are better ways to solve your differences than using violence.
Also, don't get the idea that it is only the celebrities who are attacking the paparazzi. Sometimes it happens the other way around. In November of 2008, Jessica Simpson was enjoying a night out on the town with her hairstylist and good friend Ken Paves. As the two were leaving Madeo's restaurant, a swarm of Paparazzi attacked them both. Ken tried to protect her, but he got hit in the eye with a camera, and blood started trickling down his face. The two managed to get to a car, and she brought him to a hospital, where the two spent the rest of their evening. This story is a perfect illustration of why some celebrities feel the need to get violent when confronted by members of the paparazzi.
In March of 2008 the United Nations held a panel in London to discuss the negative effects on society of celebrity drug use. Complaints were made by world leaders that when celebrities get off easy for drug crimes, it undermines the people's faith in the criminal justice system. Health advocates complained that seeing celebrities using drugs makes the people blasé about drug use, and some easily impressionable people might take up recreational drugs because their favorite celebrities use them.
There were many celebrities discussed at the United Nations panel; Paul McCartney, Kate Moss, etc. But not one celebrity was given as much discussion time as Amy Winehouse. A good half the panel time was spent discussing her drug addiction, and with good cause; her drug use boarders on the prolific. But the funny thing is, Amy Winehouse is not a good candidate to prove the United Nation's point. Nobody is going to look at Amy Winehouse and decide to take up crack. Seeing her image everywhere is not going to cause anybody to become blasé about drug use. If anything, it will turn the already blasé into concerned citizens.
Amy Winehouse is a pop culture tragedy. This is a young girl who is a very talented singer, perhaps the most talented and gifted of her generation, and she doesn't seem able to get her stuff together enough to play a live gig, let alone go into a studio and record something.
There is a lot that could be written about Amy Winehouse. There is her crack addiction, the self mutilation and cutting, and the many embarrassing public appearances. You will not read about these things here, because they would depress you, and the purpose of this article is not to make you feel bad, but to entertain.
The frustrating thing about Amy Winehouse is that she doesn't seem to want to get better. Case in point: early in 2008 she was photographed smoking a cigarette outside of her doctor's office, immediately after being told that she has early signs of what could lead to emphysema. If that isn't tempting fate, I don't know what is.
Usually it is the celebrity who makes the scandal, but sometimes it is the scandal that makes the celebrity. Take for example Ashley Alexander Dupre. One day she was just an ordinary high priced call-girl, and the next she was involved in the take-down of a powerful New York Governor.
Along with working as a call girl, Ashley was also an aspiring recording artist. Like all aspiring recording artists she had a MySpace page with a few pictures of herself and a few demos she recorded on it. Before the world discovered that Governor Spitzer had paid her for sex, it was just one of over a billion MySpace pages, wallowing in internet obscurity. But just a few days after the scandal broke, millions of people had heard her songs, including top music producers. Now that the scandal is a few months behind her she is going all over giving television interviews. If she wants to, she will most certainly be able to turn her notoriety into a successful recording career in 2009 or 2010.
The question now on everybody's minds is, "What will 2009 bring us by way of celebrity scandals?" The future is not an easy thing to predict, but in this case there are criteria that can be used to come up with something somewhat accurate.
The reason we are so obsessed with celebrity scandals is that they give us a chance to live dangerous, glamorous lives vicariously through others. Perhaps you want to walk around hitting people, or to drive around ramming people with your car. Or maybe you dream of having revealing pictures of yourself spread all over the internet, television, and magazines for all to see and look at. Maybe you fantasize about using your body to bring down a powerful official. Maybe you want to try crack.
You can not do these things. You have a life, a job, and a reputation that you need to uphold. So, you open up a magazine, turn on the television, or go online, and you live your fantasies of danger and glamour in the safety of your own home.
So, as for the question, what will 2009 bring us in the way of celebrity scandals? The answer is: Whatever you secretly desire.