Michigan state rep. Cindy Gamrat on Friday held her first press conference since being caught in an affair with her fellow representative, Todd Courser—despite Courser’s incredibly bizarre attempt to cover it up by implicating himself in a gay sex scandal. Gamrat announced that, pending the results of an investigation, she will not resign.
Prosecutors say a well-known gay porn actor tried to extort millions out of a wealthy, secretive businessman, only to end up in jail on felony charges.
Three members of a Michigan family have been indicted for allegedly extorting a retired software executive to the tune of nearly $3 million over four years. Prosecutors say the man at the center of the conspiracy was threatening to reveal that his stripper daughter and her teenage cousin had been involved in a paid threesome with the millionaire victim.
An anonymous group of hackers — not to be confused with the hacking group Anonymous — claims it's sitting on a treasure trove of Mitt Romney's unreleased tax returns freshly lifted from the PricewaterhouseCoopers offices in Franklin, Tennessee, and say they will make them available to the public at the end of this month unless they receive a million dollars in unmarked Bitcoins.
When Univision got wind of a story about Marco Rubio's family that the senator didn't want broadcast, the network offered to kill it in exchange for an interview.
How's this for a bizarre blackmail setup: A 30-year-old man was arrested for allegedly tricking another man into committing statutory rape against a 16-year-old girl and filming the incident.
Cindy Crawford is in the midst of a horrifying extortion case, Chris Brown gets heckled, Daniel Radcliffe "laughs his head off" when he's high. Friday's gossip ranges from the depths of depravity to the pleasantly banal.
John Travolta's rep is knocking down reports that he is contemplating leaving Scientology. Of course, Scientology can be a tough habit to kick if you are, say, a closeted gay man who was forced to privately confess in auditing sessions.
A Swiss man has confessed to extorting $10 million from Susanne Klatten, a billionaire German heiress to the BMW fortune, in a bizarre revenge attempt for her family's involvement with the Nazi regime.
A former Scientologist named Peter Letterese is suing Tom Cruise and his favorite religion for $265 million. According to Fishbowl LA, Letterese's charges include allegations that "Cruise and Scientology bribed and improperly influenced a federal judge, a Florida state judge and a federal bankruptcy trustee to tie up his original law suit in bankruptcy court." Those are serious charges, and there's no word of proof, so you might be excused for thinking Letterese is a wacko. Then again, there was that earlier incident when Scientologists tried to convince Letterese's wife that he was gay, allegedly: Back in July, Paul Barressi, a private investigator who works for Tom Cruise, gave the Daily News court papers of Letterese's allegations, including this:
Remember those pictures of boxing champ Oscar de la Hoya wearing fishnets and stilettos that surfaced last fall? And he said that they were fakes, but everybody was like "Ha, yea, right. Of course you say that, trannie boy." Well, turns out they were really fake! I'll be darned. Oscar's reputation will never fully recover, but it must be said: this was great Photoshop work:
Radar has named David Armstrong Jones, Viscount Linley (12th in line to the throne!), as the victim of England's new tabloid blackmail obsession. Apparently, two dudes wanted £50,000 (that is three million U.S. dollars, give or take) for a videotape in which Linley's assistant talks about having sex with him and does coke from an envelope with Linley's name on it. (Um, weak!) The most hilarious part of the whole thing is how the Daily Mail can't name Linley, due to a judge's order, but basically finds 200 ways to say "JUST GOOGLE IT ALREADY." Bonus Wikipedia-provided fun fact: "At the age of three, his prominent ears were pinned back surgically."
