One area of celebrity life in which the public interest is particularly peaked is the difficult decision that two people make to file for a divorce. Every couple that decides to split faces difficult emotional and legal struggles. Add to this a media spotlight that scrutinizes every detail of the divorce proceedings and a public that determines the probable cause for the animosity and the guilty parties and you have what can quickly become an unbearable situation for the participants. Whether appropriate or not, there are countless high-profile celebrity divorces that have captivated our attention. Elizabeth Taylor was one of the frontrunners in achieving the media spotlight on her many divorces. More recently, we have gone through the sagas of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, and countless others. Just rectnly, Mel Gibson and his wife of twenty-eight years have announced that they will be getting a divorce. Web sites and talk shows are already buzzing about how this legal settlement will be the most expensive in celebrity divorce settlement history. There always seems to be a new celebrity relationship ending in a volatile fashion to satisfy our appetites for gossip.
What often gets lost in these stories is the fact that two very real people, with emotions and feelings, are caught up in the circumstances. There also may be innocent children involved who did not ask to be celebrities and now face the possibility of seeing their parents’ personal arguments splashed across the evening news. Child custody and divorce attorneys who work with celebrities must be aware of the heightened need for privacy concerning all documentation that is printed and every conversation that takes place within office walls. That is why it is so important to hire the right law firm.
The law firms that are representing each party in a celebrity divorce must be certain that confidentiality agreements are signed by all employees involved in the case, that shredders are handy and used often, and that computer files are secure from hackers and simply those in the office who have no business seeing sensitive material. We all know how much money certain publications are willing to pay for a single piece of paper that may reveal an unsavory detail about a public figure or Hollywood celebrity. And, once a celebrity divorce client leaves a divorce attorney’s office and heads into the courtroom, there are additional issues of privacy that must be addressed. A lawyer who is working as the best possible advocate for his client will petition the family law court to close the proceedings to the public or seal the paperwork associated with a celebrity case. If a complete sealing of the records is not permitted, efforts should be made at least to keep private the specific documents that could be damaging to a client’s reputation. Whether fair or not, the public will take very painful episodes that occurred between two people and use this information against a celebrity even if his ability to excel in his chosen field has no connection to the allegations. Even worse, the court of public opinion often will not wait to discover if the assertions made in filed court documents are true before rendering their own verdict.
With this greater need for privacy concerning celebrity divorces in mind, there is an additional component to consider beyond the standard confidentiality that exists between every attorney and client. The reality is that a celebrity’s public image or celebrity status is often crucial to his or her continued success on the ball field, stage, or in front of the camera. Beyond simply reaching the best divorce settlement or result possible for the client, an attorney who is representing a celebrity during a divorce must handle the client’s image and how information concerning the legal proceedings is being distributed to the media. The divorce lawyer representing the celebrity must suddenly adopt the additional role of public relations expert in maneuvering through this delicate environment.
An estranged spouse with a grudge or a former employee who was privy to family secrets can be very dangerous to a celebrity who has carefully created a perception for the world to see. On the other hand, personal assistants, agents, and managers who are happy with their celebrity employers and want to ensure that they continue to have success in their chosen fields are some of the best resources when building evidence in a divorce case. Who better to vouch for a celebrity client’s schedule and personal priorities than someone who helps to plan his every move? Divorce lawyers must know how to work with these important witnesses to establish a sense of trust and confidence and then assist these representatives in molding a positive image of the client to news and other media outlets. When working with a celebrity client, the divorce attorney role necessarily extends well beyond the courtroom or office setting.
Law firms representing celebrity clients should have extensive experience handling the sensitive issues that are specific to celebrity divorces and child custody cases. Such divorce lawyers must take extraordinary measures to maintain their clients’ privacy and work with them to craft that all-important good standing in the public eye. Law firms representing celebrity clients should share the primary commitment to protecting their high-profile clients. They should work as a legal team to ensure the uninterrupted protection that celebrities require. This holds true from the moment a celebrity is assisted with a discreet entrance into our offices, through the negotiations that take place between all involved parties, and even after a settlement has been reached and signed. When you combine this extra step with the dedication and aggressive representation that our provide to every client, regardless of whether or not his face is recognizable to the public, those who are experiencing the painful steps of the divorce process can have confidence that their case will be given thorough attention.
Celebrities and others with large marital estates (most are multi-million dollar estates) who have a great deal at stake, both professionally and financially, should make certain that the attorneys they are hiring to guide them through a difficult divorce are prepared to take those extra steps that are needed in these unique circumstances.
To learn more about the scope of our legal services in celebrity and child custody divorce cases, contact one of our knowledgeable experienced divorce attorneys at Bertolino LLP. Our law firm maintains offices in Austin, Houston and San Antonio. http://www.belolaw.com
By: Tony R. Bertolino
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Filed under Art And Entertainment by on Jan 24th, 2010. 
An audience creates a celebrity. Many individuals have starred in movies or performed at concerts without gaining celebrity status. It is only when the world begins to sit up and take notice of an individual that true star status is obtained. This is how stars are born overnight. If people care about the comings and goings of an individual and the media picks up on this interest, news and tabloid coverage will increase. This creates a celebrity. If nobody cares about a singer’s shopping trips or political message, it is a safe bet that individual will not be stalked by paparazzi and won’t be gracing the covers of magazines. Simply, celebrities are selected.
Certain websites have constructed an algorithm to demonstrate the popularity of celebrities. This algorithm and the celebrity’s popularity equate to a market price, much like a stock price. Members of the site are able to buy and sell celebrities for their personal portfolios and if the celebrity increases in value – both popularity and price, the portfolio value increases. If a celebrity begins to lose value, he is undesirable and dumped.
There can be no clearer message about not only the value of celebrities, but also the ownership of celebrities. Just as celebrities in a portfolio can create a return for investors, those same investors take the time to research the celebrities in forums, news articles, and blogs. This research and drive for information increases the celebrity’s popularity and price. When a celebrity fails to generate news, or generates too much bad publicity, the public will simply lose interest, the celebrity loses value, and stardom begins to fade.
Celebrity obsession is certainly nothing new. If anything you would have figured we as a society would have become more accustomed to and quite bored with celebrities by now. As far back as you can go in history you will see that we have made celebrities almost royalty in the sense that not only does our society need to hear and see their every move and action of these celebrities but large corporations are aware of the fact that we trust the opinions and endorsement of these celebrities more then we trust our own. Turn on your television and you will be bombarded with celebrities selling you everything from fast food to weight loss pills. Can you believe the irony of all of this? We as a society support these celebrities to such and extent that they are now millionaires yet we now put them in a position to make even more money by us purchasing the products they promote.
Do we all really want to be celebrities? Well, the answer is yes and no. The fact of the matter is not many of us are talented enough to excel in sports or the entertainment world and a lot of us would not care to be bothered with the burdens that come with the lives of celebrities. However, each and every one of us, whether it is at work or in our homes, do contribute and would love to feel appreciated for what it is we do on a daily basis.
By: Jon Caldwell
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Filed under Art And Entertainment by on Jan 24th, 2010.
The latest gossip on celebrity scandals with the sometimes manipulated pictures of celebs are just mirrors of society. Celebrity scandals are created with the latest gossip and mixed with pictures of the celebs and topped with scandalous topics that fill the courts, bedrooms and hospital rehab centers around the world. Teen pregnancies hardly make the news. Real people have sex, do drugs, party, fight with their best friend, have an affair, fight for custody, divorce, get arrested in a bar fight, and enter rehab. Celebrity scandals exist in your neighborhood – but without the celebrities.
We look at Hollywood celebrities and pictures of celebs involved in the latest celebrity scandal, we hear the latest gossip surrounding the celebrities lives, and wonder why are these beautiful rich people succumbing to the problems of the real world. Maybe they’re people too. Real rich people. Rich people who should be role models – and who should have a clue that the world is watching them. But celebrities also suffer from being needy for attention, low self-esteem, obsessiveness, compulsiveness – and the effects of their environment. Just as a child raised around drugs is more likely to do drugs – a celebrity raised in Hollywood is more likely to “do as Hollywood does” – and that’s party. There’s no doubt that partying leads to loose inhibitions, addictions and celebrity scandals. And celebrity parties are great for finding the latest gossip and snapping some unsuspecting shots of pictures of celebs participating in questionable actions.
Celebrity scandals promote the celebrities. Celebrities don’t choose their problems – but they can turn their problems into a healthy and beneficial promotional tool. A drug scandal can turn around into an anti-drug campaign. An anorexic celebrity will sell more books on “how to heal thyself” than the teenage girl down the street. And that celebrity book might just save that anorexic teenager. The celebrity jailbird picking up trash because of a judge’s order can now become an environmental evangelist.
Not all celebrity scandals can be turned into a healthy promotional tool – but pictures of celebs plastered over celebrity websites, tabloids and entertainment channels keeps the celebrity in full view of the public’s eye – so the celebrity can’t be forgotten. Can anyone truly forget Brittney Spears while she’s in the news – even if they really want to?
Celebrity scandals powered by the latest gossip and unforgettable pictures of celebs are just pictures of reality television videotaping the inside lives of everyone in the local supermarket express lane. But celebrity scandals are safe. (And more fun.) We can talk bad about celebrities and nobody’s feelings will be hurt. We can pity the celebrities because we know how they feel. We can love them or **** them, but chances are we’ll never meet them. A celebrity scandal without our involvement and only our opinion makes celebrity scandals easy on the soul.
By: Lina Smith
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Read more on Celebrity Scandals are Reality Movies for Everyday People…
Filed under Art And Entertainment by on Nov 7th, 2009.
Celebrity Gossip is a great way to take a break from the more serious news that is found both locally and around the world. As a society we like to follow the actions of those celebrities we see in media. We talk about them. After all, do you really want to miss out seeing the next outrageous outfit that Paris Hilton is going to wear?
Do you feel a twinge of guilt about buying a gossipy celebrity magazine? Don’t. Tell yourself instead that you are merely honoring a respectable ancestral survival mechanism by engaging in celebrity gossip. This reveals lots about our culture. Celebrity gossip helps us tackle our social anxieties (what if we started breaking the rules like some Celebrity) and celebrity gossip tells us something about our dreams (only if I were to be rich and careless like Angelina).
Celebrity Gossip and our past.
Humans as a species live in groups, so it is essential for individuals to learn what other members of the tribe are up to and what this means. In our modern world with its instant communications celebrities make up part of that group. We feel we know them even if we have not even met them in real life. This drives us to engage in gossip about the celebrities. This begs the question :
Did celebrity gossip just start recently or has celebrity gossip been around for a long time?
Long ago reputations were important, we are talking, middle ages here, even more so than they are today. Women needed their husband to uphold their reputation – if a woman felt she was losing their husband, she would vocally accuse her competitor of trying to take him away by calling her a *****. You could even be punished for gossiping!
The punishment was various – but included a scold’s bridle, a metal band that fitted over the head and had a 3.5 inch protrusion which was inserted in the mouth and lay flat against the tongue. One sure way of making sure they did no more scolding.
Going back further. “If primate intelligence originally evolved to solve complex social problems, such as keeping track of shifting coalitions or countering against deception, then it’s possible that present-day human intelligence carries a legacy of this history”. So it seems that even in history mankind has been engaging in different forms of celebrity gossip.
Celebrity Gossip Today.
As we get to the point where we have less and less friends in common, the only way we can engage relationships and communication is to try to find people who are known to both of us – celebrities, public figures, sports stars, and media figures of all kinds. This allows us to gossip about a common theme – the well known celebrity. Now that communities include virtual ones, we engage in virtual celebrity gossip by e-mail, text or Internet. Most of the time this is for pure entertainment and the forming of social bonds. This need-to-know what happed to so and so could explain the enduring popularity of soap operas and other gossipy media. This human need for celebrity gossip was shown in Scotland in a recent human group experiment.
An interesting discovery about Celebrity Gossip
Scottish Psychologists devised a mind test similar to the game known as “Chinese whispers”,
They gave 10 volunteers four different texts to read, and then asked them to write down what they could remember. Their efforts were then passed to another set of volunteers as passages for them to learn, and the process was repeated four times.
The final version of the texts were then compared against the original – and the psychologists found that “celebrity gossip-like” information, involving deception and infidelity and the interactions of other people, was most easily remembered and relayed with the most accuracy.
However, the volunteers were hardly able to recall purely descriptive information about individuals or their surroundings. These results suggest that humans attach a high importance to personal and social data. Just the type of data we find when we engage in celebrity gossip. Could this information be used in the future to educate our children? Who knows but finding out about other people’s private lives and interactions is a key for human survival. We must also remember that celebrity gossip does have a serious side to it.
Celebrity Gossip and work
It’s all to do with being a human being. You simply will not survive unless you can gossip about the people you know, for a lot of us that means celebrities. We just love to exchange information about them and find out more about them. This need also comes to the fore at work.
In any organization, you’ve got a boss that’s one person you need to know about – their idiosyncrasies, their peculiarities and their relationships. As a result most office gossip is focused upwards – it’s looking up the hierarchy. This is another reason why we gossip about celebrities so much as they appear to be above us in the human hierarchy.
Celebrity Gossip and Public Relations
Some businesses use this information to great effect. In the Public Relations business it’s important to control the flow of information and when that information is released to the public. Public Relations companies need to know when and where to show the public important information about their clients who are incidentally often celebrities that they may be representing. Most importantly is where people gossip about celebrities.
To find out where this gossip takes place, one enterprising PR company compiled a top ten list of the places that people are most likely to engage in celebrity gossip…
Top 10 places to engage in gossip.
1. Restaurants
2. On the train or Tube
3. Friends telling friends
4. On our mobiles voice and text
5. At Meetings
6. In crowded bars
7. With the cabdriver
8. With their coach or personal trainer
9. Supermarket queues
10. Unisex toilets.
Do you see how those same PR companies use this information to target us. All those strange advertisements we see about upcoming celebrity events in train stations and on tube escalators, it gets us talking.
What if there was no gossip?
What would happen if we stopped gossiping about people? Just imagine if all celebrity gossip, were to stop tomorrow, what would we talk about? Who would we talk about?
Without celebrities or people we see as above us it would be an imperfect world – the most obvious reason is that about 80% of talk that occurs now, simply wouldn’t happen. That’s about how much of our conversation is celebrity gossip. Imagine no celebrities to gossip about! Society would break down, because the information we get from other people is fundamental to managing our relationships with them. We need to know who the friends, fools and the scoundrels are.
So to sum up we need to talk and to talk means to gossip. Celebrity gossip is a great way to take a break from the more serious news that is found around us. As a society we like to engage in celebrity gossip and follow the actions of those celebrities we see in the media light. It helps us bond. Celebrity gossip is here to stay. Just imagine seeing the next outrageous outfit that Paris Hilton is going to wear on the front of a magazine! Would you ignore it? Or talk about it?
By: Silveral
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Filed under Art And Entertainment by on Oct 20th, 2009.