Michael Lohan has stated that Perez Hilton is likely to gets AIDS because he is a “sausage jockey.”
His epithets came soon after Perez posted Tuesday on his site an apparent screen grab of Michael’s Twitter page in which Michael appeared to have tweeted about his daughter Lindsay being HIV positive. The image appears to be Photoshopped and taken from the blog ONTD, not Michael’s Twitter page.
Michael was quick to claim he had been hacked by a cyber-impersonator who posted and swiftly deleted several vicious and untrue remarks. He said he contacted his lawyer in an attempt to track down the hacker then fired off this homophobic rant at Perez.
“I love sausage!” Perez tweeted in response. And: “Despite you, Lindsay will get help. And she still will want nothing to do with you! Eventually you will have to get a job.”
Lindsay isn’t convinced it wasn’t in fact her own father who started the HIV rumor.
“He’s a grown man and has done the exact same things on TV/interviews, why wouldn’t he lie on Twitter, and everywhere else!” she told Gossip Cop. “He just wants money — and he’s using me, my name, my status, my mother, brothers and sister for the cash to pay for [another] wedding.”
Lindsay Lohan hurled a drink at the head of her ex, Samantha Ronson, Friday night, sending shattered glass flying and ensuring she will never return to the LA club Trousdale.
“Samantha was DJ-ing and went to sit with her friends when Lindsay stormed over and threw a glass at her head,” a source told the New York Post. “Glass flew everywhere, and Samantha looked really shaken up. The club owner asked Lindsay to leave and was overheard saying she’ll never come back.”
“Just got a glass thrown at my head. … Hmmm – wonder who did it?” Sam tweeted in the early hours of Saturday.
A bit later Lindsay seemed contrite.
“Last night – never again – believe it or not she’s done with the club scene i’ve learned my lesson – sometime’s it just takes a glimpse of reality,” she tweeted.
By Saturday night at 2 a.m., Lindsay was back out on the town, entering the Chateau Marmont, according to the Daily News.
Deaf, dumb and blind. No one ever expected the company to have the same footprint when it passed from the hands of Emanuel to Asim Abdullah. These changes always bring an eruption of sorts. The old timers want it to stay the same and the new kids want radical, news breaking shifts. What always seems to make or break these rebirths are owners with a vision, a strategy for the future. Patience with the design team as well as the public’s perception is also key to a gradual and ideally smooth transition. Listening to the marketplace, the press and one’s own gut is a part of the process, but that’s where it can get sticky. It’s the listening and to whom one listens that can help or confuse. Too often the voices of the crowd carry more weight than the voice in your head. With Ungaro’s owner, Asim Abdullah, it’s increasingly clear that he hears and sees nothing.
Esteban Cortazar, the first Creative director to take the reins with Ungaro’s departure, seemed to be doing a good enough job. The collections were not mind blowing, but that’s rare these days. It was sufficient that he was finding his way and bringing the buyers, press and clients along with him. All was well, enough. The insidious virus circling these grand couture houses undergoing cosmetic surgery is always one form or other of the celebrity. The celebrity face, the celebrity endorsement or the most fatal of all, the celebrity Creative Director. The most virulent of infections took over this house when Lindsay Lohan was dragged from the lowest depths of the celebrity pool to come in and Direct the designer and be the face of the company . At the time I was kind of dumbfounded by this decision. Cortazar ‘s reaction to the hire, and his decision to leave seemed rash and immature. I understood his feelings of revulsion, but also thought he’d outlast this aberration with just a season’s patience or two. How long could she possibly last before she got booted or bored ? He left in a huff and Estrella Archs came to the rescue, surely with the same disgust and reservations of having to tackle this huge responsibility with a stoned tween in the driver’s seat.
That pivotal collection came off to a cacophony of boos. Archs grimaced and bore it, Lindsay was so wasted she likely doesn’t remember if it was a dream or a nightmare. Universally, the fashion community laughed at the company and not in a good way. You’d think that would be the end of Lindsay considering she was responsible for the lion’s share of looks that staggered down the runway, but she kept her head and the CEO lost his. From there it went precipitously down hill. Finally, Lindsay got the boot and Estrella took a pass leaving the house of Ungaro rudderless. What to do? Who to hire? Who to advise? I would venture to guess that somewhere at some point the Vogue Employment Agency stepped in and made its recommendations which Abdulla was only too happy to follow.
Giles Deacon, an English designer with his own collection of spotty merit is the name that has bubbled to the surface. He’s popular, considered star material by those who know, and has a career that’s on the rise. His collections are also wildly inconsistent. The last 3 I’ve seen have left me puzzled and unmoved. Using Daphne Guinness as muse and design compass is like taking a divining rod to the middle of the Sahara. You’ll do a lot of walking until you drop dead of thirst. Daphne is the rich man’s Isabella Blow, highly overrated and suspiciously self serving, but those are magic ingredients for stardom on the fashion stage. Deacon’s Spring 2010 collection, which prominently featured Daphne as model/muse was sophomoric, repetitive, uninteresting and banal. Those adjectives add up to a very low number in the new scoring system. Giles has shown little zip since then other than his wildly successful note card collection he created for a very highbrow stationer in London featuring his sketches of dresses. I did see signs of life in his recent Fall 2010 collection that looked clean, minimal and had an esoteric twist that showed a promising departure from corset dresses with flyaway skirts. There were conceptual head ornaments that were memorable.
Ungaro has shown itself to be lost in the woods. I’m hopeful this hire, if it turns out to be Deacon, will be fruitful and not leave them adrift at sea.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, the Celebrity Rehab / Loveline guy, is getting a lot of flack for his recent comments about Lindsay Lohan. (If you’re reading this, doctor, you are welcome any time on our show to defend yourself live.) You can imagine with my hectic 4/20-week travel schedule (2,000 miles in 6 days with LA this weekend) when I’m scanning headlines on the BlackBerry, my brain’s spam filters drop anything with “Lindsay Lohan” in the summary.
But as I’m riding shotgun with my wife driving us through the incredible Redwood National Park, I find the time to catch up on Twitter. Scanning through the people I follow I find this plea:
What’s this? Planting drugs to frame people? What has Dr. Drew done now? Alas, the coverage on wireless was too spotty for me to do real web surfing, but coming from Danny and SSDP, I figured I would re-tweet it.
I put my phone down to enjoy the scenery. Soon it buzzed on my leg, which it does only when I’m getting a text message. But when I pick it up, I find it’s not a text, but a direct message (DM for the g33ks) on Twitter… from Dr. Drew!
Now remember, at this point I hadn’t read the actual quote that has gotten him into trouble. I’ve since found that it was an interview piece in RadarOnline (emphasis mine):
The board certified addiction specialist tells RadarOnline.com, “If she were my daughter, I would pack her car full with illegal substances, send her on her way, call the police, and make sure she was arrested. I would make sure she was not allowed to get out of jail. I would then go to the judge and make sure she was ordered to a minimum of a three year sobriety program.”
Dr. Drew says it’s highly unlikely that Lindsay will recognize she has a problem and go to rehab of her own accord, “I would say it’s less than a 1% chance of her making the decision to go to rehab. I have said this many times before, I believe that Lindsay will make a wonderful sober person, someday, if she survives this. I absolutely wish no harm to her, but I just have a feeling that something awful is going to happen to her, like she is going to lose a limb. I hope Lindsay gets help before something terrible happens.”
I have a feeling something awful is going to happen to Lindsay, too, like somebody might pack her car full of illegal drugs in an effort to frame her for enough felonies to force her into rehab. (Lose a limb? Really? Like all the now-one-armed coke-addled starlets of the past?) First off, I like knowing that at any time, Dr. Drew can get his hands on felony amounts of illegal drugs. Even better that he has the power to “go to the judge and make sure” he gives her the appropriate sentence of three years of rehab.
But I hadn’t read this yet; I was just getting a direct message from Dr. Drew. I figured he was just watching his “mentions” on Twitter and auto-sending this to anyone who was propagating the Facebook petition. I clicked the link anyway and waited the very long time Huffington Post took to download as we cruised down US 101.
Addiction is a deadly disease. It is a brain disease that alters the brain’s fundamental motivational drives such that thoughts, judgment and volition become severely distorted and actually serve the abnormal motivational priority of getting and using more drugs. Untreated severe addiction is more likely to kill a patient suffering with the condition than most cancers. Treated Breast Cancers, Prostate Cancer, most Lymphomas, and the vast majority of skin cancers, have a better prognosis than a treated addict. And yet addiction is the only disease I have to convince a patient that they have and more importantly convince the patient that without treatment his or her life is in danger.
…I spend my days trying to resurrect lives that have been devastated by this disease, devastation that might have been avoided had someone been sufficiently clear to have gone to the mat for this patient when they were younger and earlier in their disease. Family members have to be willing to go to any lengths and unfortunately this often means bringing about circumstances that restrict that individual’s freedom.
…[W]hen I was asked as a father, if I were in Michael Lohan’s position, what would I do to help my daughter, I am clear that I would go to any lengths to get her to and retain her in treatment. Bringing legal consequences to bear is often the only alternative. It would kill me but I would do it. Perhaps I surrendered my equanimity to a flight of journalistic excess by even suggesting that he plant drugs. But if I was in his position and I knew she was addicted (which I personally do not) and all else had failed, I suspect I would contemplate even this as a last resort.
Let me be clear I am not suggesting this as a routine intervention but we frequently enlist law enforcement when we have exhausted other measures. To those of you who reacted in outrage when I made this suggestion, I will remind you that millions of you watched the first season of Sober House when as difficult as it was for her, the house manager, Jennifer Gimenez, summoned police to contain Steven Adler. We then advocated for long-term treatment as an alternative to imprisonment; an enlightened judge granted this, and today as a result Steven is sober and thriving. Were it not for this intervention, as miserable as it was for Steven, I believe he would have soon succumbed to his addiction.
The first of many thoughts to come to mind when reading this is if the prognosis for treated addicts is so poor, what’s the motivation to frame them to force them to choose prison or rehab? The second was that if you have to convince someone they have a problem with drugs, what you’re really saying is you think they have a problem with drugs and they don’t. The third was that people die from preventable and treatable diseases all the time; we can’t convince them all to get help. What’s next, chasing around fat people with pitchforks to force them to jog for their own good? Many more people die from gluttony and sloth than die from addiction and overdose.
Of course, that’s way more than 140 characters for Twitter. I tried DMing back to Dr. Drew, but he doesn’t follow me so I can’t. So my only option was to blast my tweet out to the entire Twitterverse as an “@reply” to @DrDrew:
RadicalRuss: OK @drdrew I read it. Judgment: using jail threat to bring you more clients is still wrong. Even if disease, it’s no crime. I’m ACoA, BTW. 7:35 PM Apr 17th via UberTwitter
Much to my surprise, I get a response, again by DM, from Dr. Drew. Maybe that first one wasn’t an automated reply. He really is reading my tweets!
Dr. Drew: That’s cool and I have no issue with NORML’s position but as you see using the law helps me for those in dire straights
7:38 PM Apr 17th
Dr. Drew: Or straits that is
7:44 PM Apr 17th
So, we’re framing people for their own good? We’re forcing people to get treatment for their diseases? Diseased or not, the addict is still a person who is an adult citizen free to make hiser own choices. For example, suppose Lindsay Lohan decides to leave Hollywood for Oregon City and becomes a Follower of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian sect that believes only in faith healing, no medicines and no doctors. (There was a high-profile conviction of such a couple in Oregon City for allowing their child to die from an easily treatable condition. My wife comes from that religion and knew those people personally.) Suppose she contracts pneumonia and would certainly survive with the most routine medical care, but she steadfastly refuses to go and instead kneels and prays. Does Dr. Drew then go to any extreme means necessary to force antibiotics into her system against her wishes? If not, then why does he allow her to choose a religion that will likely kill her, but not a lifestyle that will likely kill her?
But again, too much for Twitter, so I sent this:
RadicalRuss: Also @drdrew you can’t guarantee “enlightened judge” 4 the non-Steven Adlers. Most you’d plant drugs on would get prison (aka “lousy rehab”) 7:48 PM Apr 17th via UberTwitter
Surprisingly, Dr. Drew kept responding:
Dr. Drew: You’d be surprised we get mandated treatment all the time.BTW be clear I am not interested in bumming anyone’s high.
7:50 PM Apr 17th
Where’d that come from? “Bumming anyone’s high”? It’s nice to know Dr. Drew is compassionate about harshing my mellow. And no, I’m not surprised at all that you get mandated treatment all the time, when the latest Treatment Episode Data Set shows 37.5% of all admissions to rehab for drugs are criminal justice referrals (and 56.9% of all marijuana users in rehab were forced there by a court.)
In response to Dr. Drew’s “using the law helps me” tweet, I sent:
@drdrew Sure it helps, and so would a gun to their head. “Go to rehab, now!” Framing people for their own good is still wrong. 8:25 PM Apr 17th via UberTwitter
I must have touched a nerve, because then Dr. Drew had to pull the “What About the Children!?!” card, the last refuge of the prohibitionist:
Dr. Drew: Are you a father?
8:26 PM Apr 17th
Ah, yes, I couldn’t possibly understand because I haven’t reproduced. I can appreciate how a father’s love for his daughter might compel him to do some pretty radical shit, like maybe killing her rapist, or maybe kidnapping and roughing up her pimp, or even maybe planting drugs in her car and narcing her off to the po-po. How he feels about the harms done to her by herself or others does not legitimize the commission of other crimes in response.
RadicalRuss: @drdrew No I am not a father but my dad was an addict. Him in prison would’ve ruined my life. He CHOSE rehab! 8:44 PM Apr 17th via UberTwitter
I’m not ignorant of the whole Twelve Step drug rehab addiction disease modes of thought. I’m an Adult Child of Alcoholic/Addict (ACoA, they call us) and read many textbooks and attended many groups as my father went through medical detox, 30-day inpatient rehab, and then returned to college at age 40, became president of the Student Social Workers, and got his degree and became a drug and alcohol counselor himself.
Dr. Drew: what if his disease was such that he could not choose and he died and someone could have gotten him in but didn’t
8:51 PM Apr 17th
Exchange the word “gotten” with “forced” and it’s closer to what you mean. I know that an addict becomes crazy as drugs take over their life. But if someone has become so insane that they are likely to be self-injurious, we have laws that cover declaring them mentally unstable and mandating forced in-patient treatment in a secure facility (I used to work in one such psychiatric hospital processing that very type of paperwork.) That doesn’t entail framing them for felonies that will remain on their record and affect their entire life, sober or high.
RadicalRuss: @drdrew It was. He was speed/booze addict on bridge about to suicide when I was 12. Sad if he’d died, but prison wouldn’t have helped. 9:05 PM Apr 17th via UberTwitter
And that was the end of our Twitter conversation, as Dr. Drew hasn’t replied since. To this day, I would have preferred my dad to jump off that bridge rather than be forced into rehab. He’d actually been forced, a couple of times, in response to DUIs he’d racked up and cars he had rolled, and those coerced treatment sessions did nothing.
The old joke goes: “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change.” I actually believe in drug treatment – it saved my dad’s life – but I believe even more that taking drugs or being a drug addict is not a crime. People have a right to make their own decisions, even bad ones.
