GEST KEEPS GABBING

Liza Minnelli's ex David Gest is busy inserting foot-in-mouth again. After telling tonight's Extra that he's kicked his addiction to painkillers, he attempts to defend his claim that Liza physically beat him during their marriage. "People say to me, 'Why didn't you walk out of the room?'" Gest says. "Well, if she would have jumped from a window with two bottles of vodka in her, they would have said, 'Ah, he killed her.' A real man doesn't leave somebody who he loves alone. You just take it." When asked about his friend Jacko's well-being as the child-molestation trial draws near, Gest predicts, "If he is convicted — which I hope he's not — he'll kill himself. How could someone like Michael Jackson survive in jail?" Such a ray of sunshine that guy is!

TV GuideNews July 13, 2004 at 1:00 a.m. PT