A Florida appeals court Wednesday upheld a judge’s ruling that allowed Anna Nicole Smith to be buried in the Bahamas, agreeing evidence supports that’s what the former Playboy Playmate wanted. Virgie Arthur needs to accept this and move on!!
The starlet’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, challenged last week’s ruling by Judge Larry Seidlin, who gave control of the body to an advocate for Smith’s 5-month-old daughter. Arthur wanted to bury the starlet in her native Texas.
But Smith’s boyfriend, Howard K. Stern, had argued that she had wanted to be buried in the Bahamas next to her 20-year-old son, who died last year of apparent drug-related causes. The 4th District Court of Appeal agreed.
The trial court concluded that Smith’s “last ascertainable wish” was to be buried alongside her son, the appellate judges said in their ruling. “This finding is not essentially disputed.”
It was not immediately clear when Smith’s body would be transported, but attorney Richard Milstein, the baby’s advocate, has said a funeral in the Bahamas could be held as early as Thursday.
Smith’s body has been stored at a medical examiner’s office since shortly after she died Feb. 8 at 39. A cause of death has not been released.
During the Wednesday hearing, two members of the panel said Smith’s purchase of burial plots in the Bahamas suggested a desire to be taken there.
“Why wouldn’t that be written evidence?” Judge Mark Polen asked the attorney for Smith’s mother, Virgie Arthur.
Arthur had challenged a circuit judge’s decision last week to give control of Smith’s burial to the court-appointed advocate for Smith’s infant daughter, Dannielynn. Arthur’s lawyer, Roberta Mandel, argued to the appeals court that the mother is the legal next of kin.
Appeals Judge Barry Stone asked the advocate’s attorney, Christopher Carver, how his client could figure out what a 5-month-old baby wanted.
Some people will do anything to appear in the papers. But few have the audacity of a man in Switzerland, who conned one of the country’s biggest media companies into publishing a two-page ad he created of himself posing semi-naked beside a bottle of Gucci perfume. Now this is funny!
The man, who claimed to represent the Italian fashion giant, called up the Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung last week to book the expensive color spread in Sunday’s edition, a spokesman for the paper said.
Christoph Zimmer told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the man asked for the 60,000-Swiss-franc (about $50,000) bill to be sent to Gucci.
“We’ve spoken to Gucci and apologized for the mistake,” Zimmer said. “We’re going to try and get the money back from this guy, but we don’t rate our chances.”
The Milan, Italy-based Gucci could not be reached for comment.
Zimmer said the paper fell for the scam because the call arrived too late for the advertising department to check whether it was genuine.
It wasn’t the first time that the mysterious model — a dark, handsome man appearing to be in his late 20s — tried to sneak his way into the limelight.
According to the Zurich-based daily Blick, the man attempted to book concert venues by passing himself off as Puerto Rican singer Chayanne. The paper said it narrowly avoided also being conned, but was tipped of the hoax by record company Sony BMG, which represents Chayanne.
The man is under investigation for alleged fraud, said Meinrad Stoecklin, a spokesman for police in the canton (state) of Basel.
American Idol executive producer, Nigel Lythgoe, has stated that Antonella Barba won’t be disqualified for the pictures of her that hit the internet. He said that the only way she’ll be kicked off is if the viewers decide this. Simon Cowell seconds that by saying, “If the public wants to keep her in, they’ll keep her in. These people haven’t done anything illegal; that’s their private life.”
They did not, however, explain how this is different from Frenchie Davis being kicked off in season 2. Frenchie was kicked off after nude pictures of her surfaced.
Paris Hilton was pulled over for driving on a suspended license, after her birthday party at the Prime Grill restaurant in Beverly Hills. On the way home from the party, she got pulled over by the West Hollywood Sheriffs Dept, because the dumb ass failed to turn on her headlights. Paris was most upset, as they towed away her 250,000 dollar Bentley.
Pictures are posted nearly every day, showing her driving around… yet she’s not being arrested? And furthermore… Paris, lay off the self tanner, you look like a bruised orange!
The headline alone has got me laughing. When I first saw this photo, I thought it was clearly some woman rummaging through garbage. That is… until I saw the bare foot hanging out of her bag.
Heather Mills was spotted going into a dance studio, preparing for the next session of “Dancing with the Stars“. Who’s paying for her lessons?
Did Anna Nicole Smith die from a disease she kept from the world?
Tonight on ET, Anna’s longtime friend, FRANK RODRIGUEZ, drops a bombshell — claiming that the late TRIMSPA spokesmodel possibly died due to complications from the autoimmune disease, lupus.
A close friend of Anna Nicole’s since 1996 who also appeared on “The Anna Nicole Show,” the emotionally distraught Frank exclusively tells ET’s THEA ANDREWS, “I just remember her telling me she didn’t want her fans to remember her this way; that it couldn’t get out.”
Frank says Anna revealed her secret to him about two years after they met, in 1998. Lupus is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks its own organs and tissues. It most often affects the joints, skin, kidneys, heart, lungs, blood or brain, which can result in achy joints, fever, prolonged fatigue and seizures.
“Her whole body would ache,” says Frank, who claims that Anna was in denial about her situation and may have not sought further treatment for the disease. “She would just shut down, basically; she would sleep for days. It was frightening at times, the seizures. She went into seizures a lot. She’d black out a lot of the times. She pulled me aside and she told me that she was on medication for it. She told me her condition.”
Frank says he believes Anna died because of lupus (”I think her body just shut down,” he says), and that he finally came forward because he wants to set the record straight and put the speculation to rest that Anna Nicole had been abusing drugs.
“[The public is] entitled to know the truth,” he says. “I mean, she’s gone and I don’t like what I hear about her. I don’t want people to remember her for what they say — that she was a drug addict. It angers me. It really, really upsets me.”
Frank says that Anna’s alleged former boyfriend, LARRY BIRKHEAD, did not know about the lupus until a little over a week ago. “I called Larry and told him; I thought that he should know,” says Frank. “I believe he’s the father [of DANNIELYNN] and I was concerned for his daughter. So I called him and I told him.” As for Anna’s partner, HOWARD K. STERN, “He may have known, he may have not, I didn’t know. Howard and I haven’t really talked.”
Today in the Bahamas, Howard acknowledged to ET’s MARK STEINES that Frank was a part of Anna’s inner circle, but he is skeptical about the lupus claim: “I’ve been told what Frankie said, and he may have believed it, but I don’t think it would be entirely accurate,” says Howard.
A comedy about life at the top, as seen from the bottom. Based on the bestselling novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, THE NANNY DIARIES stars Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney and Alicia Keyes and comes from the award winning filmmakers Robert Pulcini and Shari Berman.
SHE’S the Hollywood star credited for turning an Australian icon into a worldwide fashion phenomenon, but Pamela Anderson has taken the shears to her longterm love affair with Ugg boots.
In perhaps her blondest moment yet, the former Baywatch babe has announced she is putting the boot into her footwear staple of the last decade, boycotting Uggs after finally realising they were made from shaved sheep skin.
The mother-of-two, who is a staunch animal rights activist and member of PETA, says she is wracked with guilt over the fact that women around the globe followed in her footsteps by wearing the boots.
“I’m getting rid of my Uggs - I feel so guilty for that craze being started around my Baywatch days,” Anderson wrote on her website.
“I used to wear them with my red swim suit to keep warm never realizing that they were skin! I thought they were shaved kindly?”
Gotta love celebrities.
Here’s Pam in her Uggs and the aforementioned Baywatch swimsuit:
Larry Birkhead finally met the child he claims is his 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn, whose mother is the late Anna Nicole Smith.
In their time together, Birkhead fed the baby, burped her – and she threw up on him, according to an Access Hollywood interview and profile, part of which was aired on the the Today show Tuesday.
All Birkhead wants, according to the report, is “to be a good father.” As for his memories about Anna Nicole, the Los Angeles-based celebrity photographer says that he most cherished his private time with her.
“Every moment that we got together was kind of … that’s what everything’s about. To me, it wasn’t about the money. [Being with her] that was like gold to me, you know?” Birkhead says in the interview, which was conducted by Tony Potts and was taped before Birkhead met Dannielynn.
When he was with Smith, he said, “I enjoyed just sitting back and watching her success, and watchin’ the fact that she just loved being in front of the camera. And it wasn’t important for me to jump up and say, ‘Hey, I’m her boyfriend!’ ”
When the couple found out she was pregnant, he recalled, “She just had this different look about her. It was really weird, because her skin, everything looked different. Everything was weird. And as soon as she went to sleep, I took my hand and I went – you know, I kind of felt over and I just laid my hand there [on her stomach], because I just knew at that moment that she was pregnant.”
Asked if he knew Smith was going to have a baby just by his touching her, Birkhead answered, “I knew. I just knew then. I said, ‘Look, what if something were happening to you? I know you know – you better tell me… And she said, she said, ‘Yes, we’re having a baby.’ ”
Except that soon Smith and her lawyer-companion, Howard K. Stern, moved to the Bahamas, where in September she gave birth to Dannielynn – three days before Smith’s older child, 20-year-old Daniel, died.
Birkhead said he was surprised that Stern, and not himself, was listed as the father on Dannielynn’s birth certificate.
As for how he got his first glimpse of the child that he claims is his, Birkhead said, “They were kind of low-res pictures that [Smith and Stern] sent out to different outlets to see if they were interested in them, and they were so small that I couldn’t see. But even in that small form, I knew when I looked at them, I knew. I said, ‘She’s mine. That’s my baby. She looks like me – she is mine.’ And there was not a doubt.”
When the news broke on Feb. 8 that Smith had collapsed in a Hollywood, Fla., casino, “I was sitting in the dentist’s chair with half of my mouth numb,” says Birkhead. “And at the dentist’s they had televisions in front of you, and the headline said, ‘Anna Nicole Collapses.’ And my phone was in my pocket, and it was just going crazy. And I knew something was going wrong.
“I got to a friend of mine, and he said, ‘We don’t want you to hear about this on television, but it doesn’t look good.’ And I just kept saying, ‘No.’ I said, ‘No. Save her, somebody save her.’… I said, ‘I’ll go save her. If they can’t, I will.’ ”
Last week, during the court battle for custody of Smith’s remains, Birkhead was permitted to visit the mortuary and offer his final goodbye. He said his words to her were “something she made me say every night before she went to sleep… I said, ‘Good night, my sweet Anna baby.’ ”
Of Stern, who claims he is Dannielynn’s father and is seeking legal custody of the child, Birkhead says, “I think he is doing what he thinks is best. And I think what I am doing is best.”
As for what he one day hopes to tell Dannielynn about her famous mother, Birkhead says, “I just want her to know the good stuff. I want her to know she was a good person, a loving person. She loved kids.”
The starlet’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, challenged last week’s ruling by Judge Larry Seidlin, who gave control of the body to an advocate for Smith’s 5-month-old daughter. Arthur wanted to bury the starlet in her native Texas.
The trial court concluded that Smith’s “last ascertainable wish” was to be buried alongside her son, the appellate judges said in their ruling. “This finding is not essentially disputed.”
