A Los Angeles jury ruled Tuesday that soul singer James Brown did not sexually harass former employee Lisa Ross Agbalaya. However, the jury found that his company wrongfully fired Agbalaya, who was president of the West Coast branch of James Brown Enterprises. Agbalaya sued Brown for $1 million, claiming he pink-slipped her after she rebuffed his advances. Jurors are expected to begin deliberations today on how much to award Agbalaya.
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A CBS spokesperson confirms that Survivor: Africa producers committed a major gaffe during the second-to-last Immunity Challenge that may have altered the show's outcome — leading the network to pay three contestants as second-place winners. Here's the scoop: When asked which female player has no body piercings, Kim J. won by answering "Kelly." Turns out, when Lex answered "Lindsay," he also was right! As a result, CBS awarded $100,000 each to runner-ups Lex and Tom. The first and second-place winners — runner-up Kim J. and $1 million champ Ethan Zohn — will keep their winnings. "It was an honest mistake," the rep tells TV Guide Online, "and the producers feel horrible."
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A few weeks ago, Sally Field began taping The Court, her highly-anticipated legal drama debuting this spring on ABC. The series features her as rookie Supreme Court justice Kate Nolan — and boasts co-stars like Dynasty diva Diahann Carroll and Brian Cox as Field's fellow jurors! "I was in the midst of doing my little ER bubble when this came to me," she says. "I think everybody was surprised that I responded."
Smiles Field: "They just thought, 'Oh, we'll send [a script] to her. We'll never get her, but you know, why not?'" And voila! ER producer John Wells had snagged his Oscar-winning guest star for her own show. Since Field hasn't headli
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Star Trek icon William Shatner is breaking his silence for the first time about the tragic death of his third wife, Nerine, nearly three years ago. The 71-year-old actor — who found Nerine at the bottom of their swimming pool on Aug. 9, 1999 — confesses in an upcoming issue of TV Guide magazine that he was so devastated he contemplated suicide. "I came from the depths of despair," he tells TV Guide senior writer Mary Murphy. "I came from a strong feeling that life was not really good enough to stay with it. I would have been happy to die. I may very well have been thinking of, contemplating ways to help that along." Shatner goes on to discuss his strained relationship with members of the original Star Trek cast, revealing that he contacted them hoping to mend fences. "With the exception of read more
There must be romance in the water at Dawson's Creek! Both James Van Der Beek and Kerr Smith have gotten engaged to their actress girlfriends. Van Der Beek's fiancée is ex-Party of Fiver Heather McComb. Smith got engaged to Canadian thesp Harmoni Everett over the holidays. (May we suggest a Dawson's double wedding to boost the teen sudser's lackluster ratings?)
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If Doug Heffernan (Kevin James) lived his blue-collar, everyman existence in the real Queens, N.Y., and indeed worked for a parcel delivery service, we venture to guess that his life would have changed somewhat since Sept. 11. However, The King of Queens takes its comedy seriously, says co-creator and executive producer Michael Weithorn, and as a result, won't be tackling terrorism-related plots anytime soon.
"I always feel like for most comedy shows, there's an unspoken contract with the audience that this is a nicer world in a lot of ways than the [one] we live in," Weithorn says. "Even though a show may be based in reality in terms of the dynamics of the relationships, there are certain things that just don't happen in this universe."
"Really horrific things that have no comedic side or angle to them," he adds, "just aren't part
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As the star of Disney Channel's No. 1 show, Lizzie McGuire (airing Fridays at 7:30 pm/ET), Hilary Duff is busier than your average junior high schooler. She's currently working on a feature film version of Lizzie, and she just wrapped work on the Disney TV movie Cadet Kelly. And on top of that, the up-and-comer is still recovering from last week's episode of Lizzie — which featured her first on-camera kiss!
Duff tells TV Guide Online that she caught some teasing from the show's cast and crew while trying to smooch her TV crush. "It was awkward," she giggles, "because they were all making fun of me and I was like, 'I can't wait for this to be over!'"
While she's the same age as her quirky character on Lizzie, the actress admits: "My life is a lot different because I don't go to middle school and I don't really go through some of the problems Lizzie g
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Angela Bassett never dreamed she would play Rosa Parks — the civil rights activist who inspired the legendary 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott — when she sat next to her at 1994's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As the actress tells TV Guide Online: "I guess I was just so in awe of meeting her that I didn't have the vision to see down the road that far!"
To prepare for her role in The Rosa Parks Story — airing on Feb. 24 at 9 pm/ET on CBS — Bassett studied film footage and Parks's memoir, Quiet Strength. But she says the very private 89-year-old icon keeps parts of her life a mystery. "Some things you aren't able to find out about her," she explains, "and it wasn't really important. For example, she loved children so much, but never had [any] of her own. And she never shares in her autobiography why that is.
"I never asked," she adds. "[Pa
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"I cannot absorb living in a world where I have an Oscar for best actress and Denzel doesn't have one for best actor." — Julia Roberts, handicapping this year's best actor Oscar race (in which Washington is nominated for Training Day) in Newsweek. — Michael Ausiello with Daniel R. Coleridge
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