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Yesterday's report about the alleged "mixed-age grope" between Lindsay Lohan and fading action star/father stand-in Bruce Willis was a lock for a swift publicist denial. From Page Six:

The tattoo on her "lower back" — as her spokeswoman places it — doesn't say "La Bella Vista," it says, "La Bella Vita" (The Good Life). Flacks for both Lohan, 18, and Willis, 49, insist the two kept their hands to themselves Tuesday night when they met for the first time after the screening of his new actioner, "Hostage." Lohan's rep said: "She is not interested in Bruce Willis in any way but as the producer of her next film." Willis is producing "Just My Luck." His rep said the two talked about the movie and that their relationship is purely professional.

Note the highly advanced publicist move, lifted from the legal profession (the flack probably flunked out of law school, and needing to make a choice between Dumpster diving and celebrity image protection...well, you know how that coin flip turned out): impugning the reliability of the witness by noting a mistake in a reported detail. How could the eyewitness have seen any kind of stomach-churning, age-blind groping if they were only close enough to read a tattoo in a foreign language to within one letter of total accuracy?

Perhaps emboldened by his colleague's brazen gambit, Willis's rep then deemed the relationship "purely professional"—and by now, we all know just how professional Lohan's been on the set of that project.