Bonnie Fuller was axed last month from her job as editorial chief of American Media. But the company gave her $2.4 million in fiscal year 08, which is 50% more than even CEO David Pecker got. And AMI, which is facing some serious financial challenges of its own, was planning a $2 million severance package for her if she left by the end of March (since she didn't, they haven't revealed her actual severance—but it's surely in that ballpark). Fuller's rich, but she's still a well-known neurotic about money issues, dating back to her own mother's rough period of being broke after a divorce. Understandable—but it doesn't really give one the right to start yelling at the good people from the freaking Make-A-Wish foundation, as Fuller once famously did when she thought they were being too stingy:

It's Anna Wintour's 20th anniversary as editor of Vogue, and the be-bobbed one has certainly earned her title as one of the most feared figures in fashion. But it's worth remembering that she hasn't had a smooth ride. In fact, Wintour was beset by a salacious—and probably false—sex scandal rumor as soon as she took her job. Here, from the pages of Jerry Oppenheimer's biography Front Row, is the story of the alleged Wintour love connection with her boss, Si Newhouse—and how Wintour's reaction became a rare and fleeting moment of feminist pride inside Conde Nast:

Despite tons of tabloid speculation that Madonna and director Guy Ritchie are divorcing-she's been seen around NYC without her wedding ring or her husband!-Ritchie's mother is having none of it. Lady Amber Leighton is telling the gossips to STFU and declaring that the terror couple is just dandy. "It is absolute rubbish, worse than that. Guy will be furious at me talking to you, but I feel I can't just let these reports go unanswered as they make me so angry and they are hurtful intrusions into their private lives."

Chris Kattan, who played that apple-eating monkey-type thing on Saturday Night Live is marrying model Sunshine Tutt in Yosemite Valley, CA, today. "'Originally I was going to do something very special,' Kattan told People about the engagement. 'I tried to get Bono of U2 to serenade her. That didn't happen. Then I asked Justin Timberlake. No answer. After hundreds of phone calls and text messages, I finally ended up asking one of the members of the Hanson group. He didn't want to get involved.'"

If one attention-obsessed, desperate mother isn't enough, the Lohan brood is in luck. A Florence, Montana, woman named Kristi Kaufman, 44, has just announced that she had a secret love child with Lindsay Lohan's dad 13 years ago. The newest Lohan, Ashley, is presumably ready for her own Disney show and movies and all the shame and scandal that naturally accompany such misadventures. Update: It's true!

Is this the end of Amy Sacco? We're going to say it is. The onetime NYC nightlife queen's restaurant Bette in Chelsea—formerly considered a complement to her club Bungalow 8, a food-and-fun empire that would never be destroyed—is closed. No big to-do; just a lock on the door, and the end of an era. What happened?

Social-twit Paris Hilton talks exactly like we thought she would! In US Weekly, D-list celebrity and comedian Kathy Griffin explains how she had to translate Paris's words to Jenny McCarthy, who had "couldn't understand a word she said." Paris told Jenny, "Hi, bitch! Comes to my party? Publicist? Bye, bitch!" Translation:

Chaunce Hayden (pictured: his back tat), the editor of marginal gossip rag Steppin' Out, was named in a $10 million lawsuit yesterday for being the source who provided Page Six with a false item about a sex tape featuring Bam Margera and the fiancee of radio shock jock Opie. The Post already tried to pin all the blame for the mistake on Hayden (which is rather ungallant, whether accurate or not). And Page Six editor Richard Johnson even told Hayden he would never use another item from him again. But Chaunce has his own story, which can be summed up as: I just said this was a rumored sex tape, jerks. And I didn't start the rumor. It was some dude named, uh... Ben!:

"Fiona Shackleton, the divorce lawyer who ensured that Sir Paul McCartney retained all but £24.3 million of his £825 million fortune, has been lined up by the 49-year-old pop star. Madonna, whose fortune is estimated at £300 million, is understood to be seeking legal advice on a possible divorce from her husband of seven years, the film director Guy Ritchie." [Times of London]

Remember when Page Six published a story in April about a purported sex tape featuring Bam Margera and the fiancee of radio shock jock Opie? And Opie immediately denied it, and then the Post admitted it probably wasn't true, and blamed it on a bad source? Well Opie is not the type to let them off that easy—his fiancee has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Post, Page Six editor Richard Johnson, and the source, Steppin' Out editor Chaunce Hayden. It's a bottom-of-the-barrel multimillion-dollar legal slapfight! Highlights of the lawsuit:

Ouch: After starlet Scarlett Johnasson, clearly crushing hard, gushed to Politico earlier this month about her lengthy email dialog with Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate felt obliged to set the record straight about his connection with ScarJo. What's their status? In A Relationship? It's Complicated? Actually, they are JUST FRIENDS OMG WTF, Obama told reporters on his plane:

There was an interesting line in Wednesday's front-page Wall Street Journal story on alleged Italian con man Rafaello Follieri. Follieri, you'll recall, has been accused, among other things, of squandering $50 million from a partnership involving supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and former President Bill Clinton, in part on lavish personal luxuries. The Burkle-Clinton swindle is at the heart of the criminal case that got Follieri arrested this week. And yet, the Journal said, Follieri and the partnership "recently settled the [parallel] civil case on undisclosed terms, and Mr. Follieri has begun spending time again with Mr. Burkle, say people familiar with the matter." Wow, Follieri blew millions of dollars of money entrusted to Burkle by his best buddy Clinton, and yet suddenly all was forgiven? I don't suppose Burkle was doing any surreptitious recording during his buddy-buddy time with Rafaello, like he did with Post gossip Jared Paul Stern?

Good news fusspots: The internet has brought everyone a new thing to get offended about! Editor and blogger Maud Newton (pictured) was today shaken up that someone arrived at her personal website by "searching for a colleague's name + 'pussy.'" In case you don't already know, when you search for something in Google or Yahoo or whatever and click on one of the hits, your browser forwards the search terms to the destination site (by sending the whole referring Web address). Usually this isn't a big deal, because you're searching for something innocent, or sitting at home behind a quasi-anonymous internet connection. But the professor who hit Newton's site was not so careful: his first initial and last name are part of his internet address (let's just assume he's a dude), along with the name of the university where he works. Whoops! Luckily for the prof, Newton has not outed him, at least not yet. But she is all in a snit:

A while back, I was the one responsible for publishing a rumor about David Sedaris—one of my favorite dropouts/essayists—picking up dudes on his book tours. Now poor Sedaris, a noted Luddite, is being asked about it, and it's just not true! "The Internet is so new to me. I didn't realize you could just go on and lie about people." Oh, David, you totally can. If he's paying special attention to anyone, it's teenage girls, he says!

So Page Six—the oft-vicious Murdoch-owned gossip sheet—occasionally goes after MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann, partly because Olbermann's kind of an easy target but mostly because Olbermann wages nightly war on all of Murdoch's News Corp. But you knew that. Recently, when NBC's Tim Russert died, Olbermann tried to preempt a Page Six report unfavorable to him and his MSNBC coworker Chris Matthews by denying it before it even ran. Oddly, he declared Page Six second-in-command Paula Froelich his Worst Person In the World instead of the more evil Richard Johnson. So Paula responded in email to us. But we all knew what was coming! Today, Page Six itself strikes back against Olbermann. What terribly embarrassing story do they have for us?

"Philadelphia news anchor Larry Mendte has been fired by CBS amid the FBI probe into allegations he hacked into former co-anchor Alycia Lane's computer and leaked embarrassing stories about her to Page Six." [Post]

An email tipster claims to have received the following soap-opera-like chain of email messages in response to a "help wanted" ad on Craigslist. "The applicant attached her resume (which was a MESS) to this personal email chain — I can't imagine why!" she writes. "I have no idea how I got so lucky to have this gem dropped into my lap." Neither can we! Perhaps because it is an elaborate prank? Or maybe it's real, and originated from someone who doesn't realize that not everything on email has to be a reply or a forward — one CAN start new messages. In any case, what starts as comically awkward but otherwise unremarkable e-courtship takes an interesting, if sad, turn around message nine. Whether its origin, the thread does a good enough job simulating the experience of snooping into someone else's email inbox. Read it because you can't stop yourself, after the jump.

Federal prosecutors did not snare Raffaello Follieri's charitable foundation yesterday when they had the Italian businessman arrested for fraud and money laundering. The case against Follieri, at present, focuses on his alleged crimes against private, profit-seeking investors and not the Follieri Foundation he chairs, which supposedly vaccinates children in third-world countries. But the Feds' fraud and money-laundering charges against Follieri Group raise questions about the trustworthiness of the foundation to which it is so closely tied — questions made all the more acute by the fact that Follieri Foundation is itself under investigation by New York's attorney general after apparently failing to file U.S. tax disclosure forms. The foundation, [formerly] directed by Annie Longon, pictured at left via her Facebook profile (via same name/university/city as her Follieri-linked LinkedIn profile), is still raising funds, on the off chance you trust Follieri bookkeeping: [UPDATE: Longon wrote in to say she left Follieri companies in early 2007. For whatever reason, the foundation had not yet removed her name from its website at the time of publication.]

Paris Hilton was recently accused, via Page Six, of yet another antic concerning the welfare of a helpless animal, and she's just about had it. She took her case to the people's court, also known as her MySpace blog: "I was catching up on news last week only to read a story about me walking by some puppies for sale, and demanding that I be given a Yorkie puppy to be an accessory for a photo shoot. These stories have gotten out of control and I want to clear some things up."

"Talkmeister Larry King's stunning TV-personality wife, Shawn Southwick King, 48, has gone into rehab for addiction to painkillers." [Post]