Strollerderby : ny post

Denise Richards Reality Show Canceled

Brett Singer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

It's official – you won't have Denise Richards to kick around anymore.

The E! channel has canceled the unwatchable "It's Complicated," which followed Richards as she tried raising her kids and a lot of pets… or something like that. I watched the first episode and found it mostly dull, but also somewhat depressing, since she had her young children on camera all the freakin' time. Remember that it was her ex-husband Charlie Sheen who wanted to keep the kids off of the show, but Denise took him to court and won. It's an old joke now, but when Charlie Sheen is the good parent, something is very, very wrong.

The reason for the cancellation isn't very complicated at all: nobody was watching. Page Six quotes "a source" who said, "The numbers started out pretty good - just over 1.5 million tuned in for the premiere episode…But the audience has dropped off." In other words, people would have been interested, but she just wasn't that interesting.

It's worth remembering that Denise Richards had a career as an actress for awhile. Granted, it was largely based on her looks, but she was considered one of the hotter young starlets around (think Megan Fox). Things were already on the decline career-wise when she married Sheen, so it would be easy to say that she is a victim of Hollywood ageism. But I have a feeling that some of the behavior she displayed on her reality show – the Post cites one "her confrontation with an editor for a magazine over how she [was] portrayed in the tabloid press" as a "low-light" for the series – was also her behavior in real life. That's just a guess, of course. Oh well. At least her kids won't have their lives on display anymore. Maybe she can do "Dancing with the Stars."

Source: NYPost

Image: LATimes.com

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No dinero for Dina

Brett Singer — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

What do you call a couple that spent $1 million on lawyers while getting divorced, and the result was that the wife got $100,000, plus $1,075 a month in child support?

You would call them the McGreeveys. (Well, not anymore, they're divorced.)

Yes, Mr. "I Am A Gay American" and the former first lady of the Garden State are finished with their contentious divorce proceeding. NYMag describes the courtroom drama as, "incredibly public, ugly, and drawn-out," which is kind of true, although it didn't quite have the legs of the Christie Brinkley / Peter "19 is legal, dammit!" Cook case.

What's fascinating to me is that Dina is getting almost nothing. She gets a one-time payment of $109,295 from Jimbo, which is half of their shared investments, so it kind of doesn't count in my book. $1,075 a month in child support is, if I may be so bold, bupkis.

So why no dinero for Dina? Jim don’t have no money. NYMag says, "since McGreevey argued that he only makes $48,000 per year while he is in seminary, the judge ruled him 'underemployed.'" So he's studying to be a priest. I guess his book didn't sell as well as people had hoped. Jim is living with a "super-wealthy financier" but those assets don't factor in. ("Jim's in love with a Jersey boy..." OK, don't go there.)

Judge Karen M. Cassidy said that both Jim and Dina, "clearly had agendas," and "their anger seemed to override any ability to testify credibly or to be reasonable." At least she went after both of them, unlike the judge in the YouTube cuckoo-wife case.

I have to wonder how angry you have to be at your spouse to spend $500,000 on attorney's fees - each - when you must have known that there was no pot of gold at the end of the divorce rainbow. Sure, Dina was married to a guy that was sleeping with, well, another guy, so she's mad. And Jim… well, he's mad at her for something, I guess. According to the New York Post, the couple will do some swapping of 401k plans and other relatively minor assets, like a $1500 checking account. She was only asking for $2500/month. So how do you rack up half a mil worth of legal bills? Fuzzy math, at best. They have a daughter together; hopefully they'll be able to deal with each other somewhat civilly.

image/source: NYMag

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What about his taste in women?

Brett Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Remember when Christie Brinkley and Peter "Hey, she was nineteen, that's legal, right?" Cook got divorced, and the judge said that Brinkley needed to "examine her taste in men"?

Well, apparently that doesn't go both ways. In the recent divorce of Shubert Organization honcho Philip Smith and Tricia Walsh-Smith, known to the tabloids as the "Youtube Divorce" because of Tricia's bizarre video rant, there's something I don't recall reading.

What is it? That Smith, 25 years older than his now-ex-wife, needed to examine his taste in women.

If you've never seen the original video, it's posted below. Tricia is, in my unprofessional psychiatric opinion, in desperate need of a good shrink and several thousand Zolofts (not all at once, of course). She makes Peter Cook look like a candidate for Husband of the Year – well, not quite, but you know what I mean. Still, I'm always intrigued when a woman who marries a schmuck somehow has questionable "taste", but a man who marries a loony-tunes just, you know, made a mistake. He didn't know she was crazy.

In other Tricia Walsh-Smith news, she's leaving town because New York is "full of liars," thinks that Kathi Lee Gifford wants to have her killed (which is, to put it mildly, a tad inaccurate), and is just generally a great big pile of crazy. You can read it all on her very own web site.

Image: NYPost

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Patricia Duff's daughter wants an order of protection against her

Brett Singer — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Continuing with our theme of ugly high profile divorce cases, here's a real doozy: Patricia Duff and Revlon billionaire Ron Perelman's daughter is trying to get an order of protection against Duff. Perelman's lawyers are backing the request, with Adria Hillman citing "incredible amount of emotional abuse"; she also says that the girl "stated that she does not want to go back to her mother." Patricia Duff's attorney Yoni Levoritz says that Duff and daughter are having, "typical mother-and-teenager disagreements, noting that children of divorced parents often pit one against the other." Sure, but they don't usually ask for an order of protection, do they?

Interestingly, the New York Post has a photo of Duff entering the courthouse alone, but Perelman is with their daughter. So I guess we know which side she's on.

The couple has been divorced for some time now; Perelman has since married and divorced actress Ellen Barkin. Here's my favorite line from the article: "Perelman and Duff have each been married four times." If this kid winds up even somewhat well-adjusted, it'll be a miracle.

image: NYPost

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Denise Richards still trying to prove she's insane

Brett Singer — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It's Friday the 13th, which must be why I'm drawn to stories about weird, evil people today.

Denise Richards isn't in the same league and Josef Fritzl or Charles Manson, but she does seem to be trying to prove to the world that she's out of her gourd. Showbiz Spy reports that the former Mrs. Charlie Sheen is, "pleading with the star to stop publicly bashing her now he has re-married…'He loves to trash me in the press and discredit me and has tried to sabotage my show. I hope that now that he's married, he can move forward and be civil.'"

Now, we're not excusing Charlie Sheen, who has his own issues, to put it mildly. Back in May he claimed that Denise emailed him asking for a sperm donation. Denise's reply was, shall we say, something less than "civil": "I don't want Charlie's prostitute-tranny-infested sperm." Nice.

She also accused Chuck of exploiting, "our entire situation." Um, you have a reality show on E! that features your kids. Pot? Kettle? Neither one of them is winning parent of the year, but I think when you put your toddler-age children on a reality show you kind of lose the right to accuse your former husband for "exploiting the situation".

I have a wacky, wacky idea for Denise and Charlie. Yes, you hate each other. Yes, it's an ugly divorce. But you have kids. Stop talking to the media for awhile. SHUT-UP.

image: Page Six

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Firefighter's Wife: I Killed Him Because He Called Me Fat

Brett Singer — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Ah, the New York Post. Where would we be without you? This story isn't exactly "Headless Body in Topless Bar," but it's still quality tabloid fodder.

Here's the scoop: in December of 2007, Janet Redmond-Mercereau called 911 and reported that her husband, Staten Island Fire Marshall Douglas Mercereau, was dead. Two days later, the Post referred to her as "the elephant in the room" because of suspicions that she had murdered Douglas because of "humiliating fat jokes he made at her expense." On Saturday (3/22/08) she was charged with murder.

Now comes the defense. Her lawyer says that "her husband had been verbally abusive after she gained weight because of a thyroid condition." The prosecution says, "We believe [the abuse] not to be true."

I know it's just a quote and could be out of context. But let's say, just for a moment, that it was true. That her husband had called her "Fatty McFatso." That she was wearing a t-shirt from Guess and he said, "I don't know, 245? 260?" (That last line I swiped from a comedian whose name I can't remember.) If he did that, she can kill him?

Well, no. But Andrea Peyer has a column warning guys to "be careful" when they poke fun at the little woman for not being so little. Still, to me it seems like a pretty thin defense strategy. (Pun intended.)

It does seem that the accused is a tad, shall we say, unhinged. A The New York Times story says that she had an oak tree in their yard chopped down because Douglas' family compared him to it at the funeral. The Staten Island Advance quotes Janet as saying, "I feel like a model," to a photographer when he arrived at her home to get a photo. And The Post describes her as "winking" to her family at the arraignment.

For the record, Janet is listed at 5' 3" and 240 pounds. But I'm not saying a word about that. Just in case she's acquitted.