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Kenny "I Defrauded Renee Zellweger And All I Got Was This Lousy Wedding Band" Chesney had long faded into gay cowboy obscurity, quickly eclipsed by the much hotter spurs-and-chaps action of Brokeback's Ennis and Jack. Today, thanks to a Southwest flight attendant and Fox 411's Roger Friedman, Chesney's been yanked back into our consciousness and been declared not homosexual by virtue of cougar-humping. In perhaps the strangest story we've ever heard, Friedman happened to be a passenger on the flight where a fortysomething stewardess lit this overshare shoe-bomb in front of her captive, pressured cabin audience:

Well, now, the jig is up for Kenny, thanks to Paula Jackson. The Southwest Airlines flight attendant, age 47, announced to a plane load of people last week that she had been Chesney’s lover for 10 years before he met and married Zellweger.


“I taught him everything he knows,” the charming Jackson told her passengers, one of whom was yours truly. “Renee should have called me, I would have told her, there’s no way he should be married.”

Jackson — who is a decade older than the singer — described Chesney as a capable lover who also had a full head of hair in the days she went with him. The lovely lass also has a terrific voice for country music, and showed it off on the plane several times.

Putting aside for a moment the unbelievable serendipity of such an astounding midair confession made in the presence of a gossip columnist, we have to wonder: If the flight attendant was going to risk being riddled with bullet holes by air marshals afraid that her little speech was merely a preamble to an announcement that she was hijacking the plane and taking everyone to Crazytown, couldn't she have been a little more effusive about Chesney's heterosexual powers? A description of the singer as merely "capable" and a nod to his hirsute past aren't enough to erase the feeling that hidden somewhere in the galley was a signed nondisclosure agreement from Chesney's exceedingly creative publicists and a bag full of tiny, empty bottles of Absolut.