Jennifer Love Hewitt slams talk show hosts for jokes about her breasts

Jennifer Love Hewitt was just 18 when her breakthrough film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was released.

But the actress quickly found the public was more interested in talking about her body rather than her work.

Now, at age 45, Hewitt is hitting back at the culture that allowed for her to be sexualized at such a young age.

Speaking on Mayim Bialik’s podcast, Breakdown, Hewitt recalled just how inappropriate it was being asked at age 16 about her breasts by ‘grown men’ on TV.

Initially, Hewitt said she laughed along when jokes about her body were made, but it wasn’t until she was an adult that she realized just how unacceptable the situation was.

Looking back at her early career, she said: ‘In my 30s, I sort of went back and looked at that time again and I was like, “Oh my God. There were grown men talking to me at 16 about my breasts just openly on a talk show, and people were laughing about it.” I don’t even remember that, I really didn’t take that part in, but in hindsight it was really strange I think to become a sex symbol sort of for people before I even knew what that was.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is slamming the public’s obsession with her breasts as a teenager following her breakthrough role on I Know What You Did Last Summer; pictured on the 1997 film

‘Like I didn’t even know what sexy meant and I was on the cover of Maxim magazines, and people would openly walk up and be like, “I took your magazine with me on a trip last week.’”

Hewitt said she would laugh along but admitted, ‘I didn’t know what that meant, you know what I mean? It’s kind of gross.’

Read More Jennifer Love Hewitt, 45, hits back at ageism and internet troll

‘So, I think later it sort of hit me more, kind of the things that I probably went through somewhere. But at the time, it felt very innocent and exciting and fun,’ she continued.

‘So I’m thankful for that. Had I taken on some of that earlier, I think it would have messed with me a little bit, but it didn’t for whatever reason,’ she said.

Hewitt said a ‘light bulb’ went off after she watched the Britney Spears documentary, and the reality of the attention she faced as a teenager suddenly hit her.

‘When I watched the Britney Spears documentary, that was really honestly the light bulb for me. When I watched it, I finished watching it, and my husband was like, “Why do you look so disturbed?” I was like, “I know what that feels like.” I know sitting there and being asked those questions and it never dawned on me that it was inappropriate.’

Hewitt recalled even wearing a shirt that said ‘Silicon Free’ during the press tour for I Know What You Did Last Summer, with her body then the butt of the joke.

‘When I Know What You Did Last Summer came out I went to Australia and I wore a T-shirt that said “Silicon Free” on it for the press junket because after the movie came out, everybody said, “Oh I know what your breasts did last summer” and that was like the joke.’

She recalled how ‘everybody’ would laugh at the jokes, which in turn made her laugh.

‘Again, everybody would laugh, and so I would laugh, ’cause it was supposed to be funny, I guess. It didn’t register with me that this was a grown man, talking about my breasts on national television,’ she said.

Speaking on Mayim Bialik ‘s podcast, Breakdown , Hewitt slammed Hollywood for obsessing over her breasts when she was just 16-years-old

Hewitt added she didn’t ‘blame’ those who asked the questions at the time as the culture made it acceptable.

‘By the way, I don’t blame them for asking the questions or making the jokes or doing it. It was a culture that was fully accepted. They were allowed to believe that that was appropriate, I answered the questions, laughed right along.

‘I give no problem with them for doing it. But when you sit and you look at where we are now versus then, it’s really mind-blowing.’

Hewitt played Julie James in the 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer and the 1998 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

Hewitt with co-stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe in the 1997 film

She will be reprising her role in the upcoming sequel, which does not yet have a title.

It’s not the first time Hewitt has addressed being sexualized at a young age.

She previously discussed modeling for Maxim at age 17 during an appearance on the Inside of You podcast in 2023, insisting she didn’t even know why she had landed the cover.

‘I didn’t feel self-confident. I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time,’ Hewitt said. ‘I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was. I was 17 years old on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why I was on the cover of Maxim. I was honored. I loved it. But why?’

Hewitt pictured on The Jennifer Hudson Show last month

While filming Heartbreakers at 23, Hewitt recalled struggling to follow a director’s instructions to ‘be sexier’.

‘I remember doing Heartbreakers at 23 and the director was like, “We just need you to be sexier.” I had to pull him aside and be like, “I don’t know what that means. I’m only 23.”

‘I know that I’m supposed to be this thing for people but I don’t know what that means. He had to like help me figure that out.’

Marianne Faithfull, British singer, actor and pop icon, dies at 78

NEW YORK (AP) — Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones’ greatest songs and endured as a torch singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has died. She was 78.

Faithfull passed away Thursday in London, her music promotion company Republic Media said.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”

READ MORE: Joan Plowright, Tony Award-winning British actor, dies at 95

The blonde, voluptuous Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit “Broken English” album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger.

One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy “As Tears Go By,” was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.

She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of “Swinging London,” with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD “wasn’t meant to happen, it wouldn’t have been invented.” Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as “Naked Girl At Stones Party,” a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.

“One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won’t let go of their mind’s eye of you as a wild thing,” she wrote in “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” a 2007 memoir.

Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock ‘n rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards’ longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones’ songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.

Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute “She Smiled Sweetly” and the lustful “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” It was Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel “The Master and Margarita” that was the basis for “Sympathy for the Devil” and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones’ dire “Sister Morphine,” notably the opening line, “Here I lie in my hospital bed.” Faithfull’s drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Live with Me,” while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, “Wild Horses.”

On her own, the London-born Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them “Come Stay With Me,” “Summer Nights” and “This Little Bird.” But even in her teens, Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.

She had become addicted to heroin in the late ’60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early ’70s, Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.

She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably “Broken English,” which came out in 1979 and featured her seething “Why’d Ya Do It” and conflicted “Guilt,” in which she chants “I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I’ve done no wrong.” Other albums included “Dangerous Acquaintances,” “Strange Weather,” the live “Blazing Away” and, most recently, “She Walks in Beauty.” Though Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” and the “sung” ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

Her interests extended to theater, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made In U.S.A.” and stage roles in “Hamlet” and Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” She would later appear in such films as “Marie Antoinette” and “The Girl from Nagasaki,” and the TV series “Absolutely Fabulous,” in which she was cast as — and did not flinch from playing — God.

Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards (“so great and memorable,” she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down.

“Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin,” she wrote in “Faithfull,” published in 1994. “He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.”

Faithfull’s heritage was one of intrigue, decadence and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithfull’s more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel “Venus in Furs” helped create the term “masochism.”

Faithfull’s parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a “nutty” sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.

“The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together,” she wrote in her memoir. “All these people — gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the creation.”

Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of London’s hot young bands, the Rolling Stones. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as “yobby schoolboys” and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off.

But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew “Loog” Oldham, who looked “powerful and dangerous and very sure of himself.” A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London’s Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a “very primitive” song, “A Tears Go By,” which Faithfull needed just two takes to complete.

“It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written,” Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. “A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It’s almost as is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.”

Brian Melley contributed from London.

Patti Smith Says She’s ‘Fine’ After Stage Collapse Reports

Punk rock legend Patti Smith has updated fans on her health following reports that she collapsed on stage in Brazil.

“This is letting everyone know that I am fine,” she wrote via Instagram on Thursday, January 30. “A grossly exaggerated account is being spread by the press and social media.”

Smith, 78, was beginning a headlining set with experimental music group Soundwalk Collective at the Teatro Cultura Artística in São Paulo, Brazil on Wednesday, January 29, when she collapsed on stage, according to TMZ.

The singer was reportedly reading a spoken-word statement about climate change when she experienced a health emergency and was soon ushered off stage.

According to local reports, Smith eventually returned to the stage in a wheelchair to tell fans she felt “very badly” and would not be cleared by her doctor to perform a full show. Instead, Smith sang two acapella tracks before ending the event early.

Smith later explained on Instagram that “post migraine dizziness” led to “a small incident” that had been blown out of proportion in the media.

“I was checked out by an excellent Doctor and was absolutely fine,” she wrote. “Please do not accept any other story. With all the strife in the world, this explainable incident does not merit so much attention. Thank you everyone for your concern. Trust me I am fine.”

Her collaborators Soundwalk Collective posted a statement signed by Smith via their Instagram Story to confirm that she would be back on stage for a second scheduled performance at the Cultura Artística Theater on Thursday.

“Patti has suffered from an intense migraine the past couple days and had some dizziness on stage but she still wanted to be there for all of us and you and perform today,” the statement read. “She is now being cared for by the best doctors in the most loving way and will be back on stage [on Thursday].”

Soundwalk Collective thanked those in attendance for their “beautiful energy and [their] supportive presence” in light of events.

“Patti says she is tremendously grateful for your patience and forgiveness and she sends her love to all who attended,” the group added.

The rock legend is set to be honored at the Music Of Patti Smith concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on March 26 to benefit music education for underserved youth.

Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, The National’s Matt Berninger and Sharon Van Etten are among more than 20 artists who will perform Smith’s influential music at this tribute show.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee will then appear at a free Poet’s Voice event at the Greenwich Library in Connecticut on April 12 where she will reflect on her work as a poet, singer, songwriter and fine artist over the past 50 years.

The four-time Grammy nominee’s groundbreaking 1975 album Horses was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2021. She was previously given the prestigious Polar Music Prize in 2011 for her contributions to both poetry and rock music.

Last year, Smith thanked Taylor Swift for referencing her alongside acclaimed poet Dylan Thomas in The Tortured Poets Department’s title track.

“This is saying I was moved to be mentioned in the company of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas,” she wrote on Instagram. “Thank you, Taylor.”

‘SNL50’ Concert to Stream in February With Headliners Backstreet Boys, Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga and More

The “Saturday Night Live” party is still going strong over at NBC. Peacock will live stream “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert,” a musical event that celebrates 50 years of musical acts and performances from the show. The event will stream live from Radio City Music Hall exclusively on Peacock starting at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT. Fan screening events will also be offered in select IMAX theaters at Regal Cinemas.

Fittingly, “SNL” alum and NBC star Jimmy Fallon will host the event. The concert will feature performances from Arcade Fire, Backstreet Boys, Bad Bunny, Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlile, Brittany Howard, Chris Martin, David Byrne, DEVO, Eddie Vedder, Jack White, Jelly Roll, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Mumford & Sons, Post Malone, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Robyn, The B-52s and The Roots. More performances will be announced in the coming weeks.

The one-night-only special is executive produced by Emmy Award winner Lorne Michaels as well as Grammy and Oscar winner Mark Ronson.

As for the specifics around the concert’s theatrical premiere, fan screenings will take place in Regal Edwards Ontario Palace in California, the Regal UA King of Prussia in Pennsylvania, the Regal Lone Star in Texas, the Regal Deer Park in New York and the Regal South Beach in Florida. Free tickets for the fan screenings will be available exclusively for current Fandango FanClub members, Regal Crown Club members and IMAX subscribers at a later date.

This is one of many big specials NBC and Peacock has released leading up to the “Saturday Night Live” 50th anniversary. The streamer has already released the four-episode docuseries “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” from Morgan Neville as well as NBC’s documentary “Ladies and Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music” from Questlove.

All of this celebrating will peak on Sunday, Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT when “SNL” debuts its long-awaited 50th anniversary special.

Marianne Faithfull, ‘As Tears Go By’ Singer, Dies at 78

Marianne Faithfull, the British singer who scored hits including “As Tears Go By” and “Broken English” as she went from a highly publicized romantic relationship with Mick Jagger to worldwide fame in her own right, died Thursday. She was 78.

She forged a dramatic comeback in 1979 with the album Broken English, which landed her a Grammy nomination for best female rock vocal performance. In 2011, she was awarded the Commandeur of The Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres, one of France’s highest cultural honors.

Born on Dec. 29, 1946, in Hampstead, London, Faithfull was the daughter of a British Army officer and Austro-Hungarian mother with aristocratic roots. They divorced when she was 6, and her childhood was marred by bouts with tuberculosis.

Faithfull began her singing career in 1964, performing folk in coffeehouses in London, where she attended a Rolling Stones release party and met the band’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Her first hit, “As Tears Go By,” recorded when she was 17 in 1964, was written by Jagger, Keith Richards and Oldham and became an instant success, and she followed with such songs as “This Little Bird,” “Summer Nights” and “Come and Stay With Me.”

She married artist John Dunbar and had a son, Nicholas, but shortly after left her husband to live with Jagger. They broke up in May 1970, losing custody of her son, which led to a suicide attempt.

Faithfull was famously photographed wearing just a fur rug at a Stones drug bust at Richards’ home in West Wittering in 1967. She was arrested and that sent her life into a downward spiral, she said.

She was influential in the development of the Stones — “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was reportedly written about her, as were the songs “Wild Horses” and “I Got the Blues” — and she was given co-writing credit on “Sister Morphine.” She also appeared in the Stones’ 1968 Rock and Roll Circus concert movie, singing “Something Better.”

Faithfull’s Broken English album was influenced by punk and her marriage to Ben Brierly of The Vibrators that same year. The LP also included “Why D’Ya Do It,” a punk-reggae song that was a forerunner of rap, with lyrics adapted from a poem by Heathcote Williams about sexual betrayal.

Faithfull moved to New York after the release of 1981’s Dangerous Acquaintances, and, while still suffering from addiction, had a disastrous appearance on Saturday Night Live in which her vocal cords seized up.

Her 1984 double-album set, Rich Kid Blues, was a collection of earlier, unreleased work, combined with new recordings. In 1985, she performed “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” on Hal Willner’s tribute album, Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill.

Faithfull reinvented herself as a jazz and blues singer on the 1987 Willner-produced Strange Weather, an album of cover songs that received critical kudos for her new version of “As Tears Go By.” It also included versions of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” and tunes once recorded by Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith.

Faithfull played Pink’s overprotective mother in Roger Waters’ all-star The Wall, performed live in Berlin in July 1990. Her subsequent live album, Blazing Away, recorded at St. Ann’s Cathedral in Brooklyn, offered definitive versions of “Sister Morphine,” “Why D’Ya Do It?” and Edith Piaf’s “Les Prisons du Roy,” featuring accompaniment by Barry Reynolds, The Band’s Garth Hudson and Dr. John.

In 1994, her memoir, Faithfull: An Autobiography, with David Dalton, was published, accompanied by A Collection of Her Best Recordings. The latter included a version of Patti Smith’s “Ghost Dance,” which featured Charlie Watts and Ron Wood and Richards co-producing. In 1997, she contributed background vocals to Metallica’s “The Memory Remains” from their album ReLoad and appeared in the song’s music video.

Faithfull’s “Kissin’ Time,” released in 2002, featured songs written with Blur, Beck, Billy Corgan, Jarvis Cocker, Dave Stewart and French pop singer Etienne Daho and a tribute to Nico (“Song for Nico”). “Before the Poison,” a collaboration with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, came out in 2005.

Rihanna makes first court appearance at the trial of her partner A$AP Rocky, as accuser testifies

LOS ANGELES — Rihanna appeared for the first time at the trial of her longtime partner A$AP Rocky, on the day of its most important testimony — the description by a former friend of the moment Rocky allegedly fired a gun at him.

The singer superstar, who has two toddler sons with the rapper Rocky, sat out of view of the courtroom’s cameras, between Rocky’s mother and sister, in the downtown Los Angeles criminal courthouse. Security brought her in surreptitiously to avoid crowds Wednesday morning.

Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Athelston Mayers, has been standing trial on two felony charges that he fired a handgun at the former friend, who is known by the name A$AP Relli and was born Terell Ephron. If convicted, Rocky could get up to 24 years in prison.

Rihanna watched Wednesday as Relli testified about the moment Rocky allegedly fired a gun at him on a Hollywood street in 2021.

He had been shouting angrily at Rocky, who was walking away after an initial confrontation and scuffle, when Rocky pulled a gun from his waistband and held it in the air, Relli testified.

“He turned around and then it was like BOOM!” he told the jury. “The whole thing was like a movie, he kind of like pointed down and he shot the first shot.”

He said “I felt my hand hot” and later added, “I was hit. Or I was grazed. I didn’t have a hole or nothing.”

The trial’s key witness said he grabbed one of their mutual friends who were with Rocky after the first shot was fired and stood behind him for protection. He said he did not see Rocky fire the second shot, and Rocky ran away moments later.

When jurors were being selected, prosecutors asked them whether Rihanna’s connection to the case, especially if she appeared in court, would affect their ability to deliver a guilty verdict.

Nearly all those questioned had heard of her — far more than had heard of Rocky — and some described themselves as fans, but all said they felt it would not affect their decisions.

It was not clear whether they could see Rihanna or were aware of her presence as they watched the testimony. She wore a long black dress with buttons on the front that resembled a winter overcoat, and had a pair of glasses on her head that she put on during the prosecution’s questioning.

Earlier in the trial, which began on Jan. 21, Relli said he and Rocky, members of A$AP, a crew of creators at a New York high school, had been close but their relationship eroded after Rocky became famous.

He said their relationship had been strained for years and was getting worse in the days leading up to the incident, but he was still “furious” when Rocky pulled a gun on him after a scuffle that began the moment the two met up near the W Hotel. He dared him to use it.

When Rocky walked away, he testified that he followed and shouted after him, until the shots were fired.

Rocky’s lawyer says the shots he fired were not even from a real gun — they were blanks from a starter pistol that he carried as a prop. The lawyer said Relli knew this, and that was why he was so fearless walking after him.

“Oh it was a real gun,” Relli testified Wednesday, saying he knew because of his scraped hand.

He said he felt free to follow and shout at Rocky because “I felt like because he put it away and we’re on a busy street in Hollywood. He’s definitely not gonna shoot it.”

Since the shooting, and his decision to go to police and testify, he has gotten death threats and has been shunned as a snitch, he said, and the modest music management career he built fell apart.

“It’s been a living hell,” Relli said.

About an hour after the shooting, Relli returned to the scene and said he photographed and recovered two shell casings. Earlier, while responding to a report of a shooting, police did not find any.

He sent a text to Rocky that was shown in court saying “U try killing me.”

He sent Rocky photos of the shell casings and his grazed hand.

Rocky said he was making stuff up and speaking “all type of nonsense” and was trying to “extort” him.

The court day ended after just a few hours of testimony because of scheduling issues. Rihanna was shuffled out through a restricted exit by deputies, and Rocky left separately through the main courthouse doors.

The defense will begin their cross-examination of Relli on Thursday.

Raised in Harlem, Rocky’s rap songs became a phenomenon in New York in 2011. He had his mainstream breakthrough when his first studio album went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2013. The second one, in 2015, did the same.

He’s set to have his biggest career year as a multimedia star. This Sunday, he’s nominated for a Grammy Award for best music video for his song “Tailor Swif,” at the ceremony at Crypto.com Arena just two miles from the Los Angeles courthouse where his trial’s being held.

He’s also set to headline the Rolling Loud Music Festival, to star opposite Denzel Washington in a film directed by Spike Lee, and to co-chair the Met Gala in May.

But the prospect of a conviction and the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence casts a shadow over all of it.

Rocky and Rihanna, both 36, have two sons together: 2-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and 1-year-old Riot Rose Mayers. She revealed she was pregnant with the younger boy after headlining the Super Bowl halftime show in 2023 with a visible baby bump.

The singer and the rapper, who are both fashion moguls, first became close when he provided a verse to her 2012 song “Cockiness (Love It)” and they performed it at the MTV Video Music Awards. They became a couple in 2020.

Marianne Faithfull, singer and pop icon, dies at 78 – The Boston Globe

Her death was announced by her music promotion company, Republic Media.

The blonde, voluptuous Ms. Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s, and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit “Broken English” album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger.

One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy “As Tears Go By,” was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.

She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of “Swinging London,” with Ms. Faithfull once declaring that if LSD “wasn’t meant to happen, it wouldn’t have been invented.” Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Ms. Faithfull identified in tabloids as “Naked Girl At Stones Party,” a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.

“One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won’t let go of their mind’s eye of you as a wild thing,” she wrote in “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” a 2007 memoir.

Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock ‘n rollers as their prime influences, but Ms. Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards’s longtime partner, opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time and helped transform the Stones’ songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.

Ms. Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute “She Smiled Sweetly” and the lustful “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” It was Ms. Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel “The Master and Margarita,” which was the basis for “Sympathy for the Devil,” and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones’ dire “Sister Morphine,” notably the opening line, “Here I lie in my hospital bed.” Ms. Faithfull’s drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Live with Me,” while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, “Wild Horses.”

On her own, the London-born Ms. Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them “Come Stay With Me,” “Summer Nights,” and “This Little Bird.” But even in her teens, Ms. Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.

She had become addicted to heroin in the late ’60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant, and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early ’70s, Ms. Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall, and was hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.

She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably “Broken English,” which came out in 1979 and featured her seething “Why’d Ya Do It” and conflicted “Guilt,” in which she chants “I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I’ve done no wrong.” Other albums included “Dangerous Acquaintances,” “Strange Weather,” the live “Blazing Away,” and, most recently, “She Walks in Beauty.” Though Ms. Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” and the “sung” ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

Her interests extended to theater, film, and television. Ms. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made In U.S.A.” and stage roles in “Hamlet” and Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” She would later appear in such films as “Marie Antoinette” and “The Girl from Nagasaki,” and the TV series “Absolutely Fabulous,” in which she was cast as — and did not flinch from playing — God.

Ms. Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards (“so great and memorable,” she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie, and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Ms. Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down.

“Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin,” she wrote in “Faithfull,” published in 1994. “He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.”

Ms. Faithfull’s heritage was one of intrigue, decadence, and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Ms. Faithfull’s more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel “Venus in Furs” helped create the term “masochism.”

Ms. Faithfull’s parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a “nutty” sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez, and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.

“The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together,” she wrote in her memoir. “All these people — gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the creation.”

Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of London’s hot young bands, the Rolling Stones. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as “yobby schoolboys” and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off.

But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew “Loog” Oldham, who looked “powerful and dangerous and very sure of himself.” A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London’s Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a “very primitive” song, “As Tears Go By,” which Ms. Faithfull needed just two takes to complete.

Netflix Orders ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Reboot More Than 40 Years After Original Series

Esther Kang is a writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2023 and has previously worked for publications like TMZ and TooFab.

Fans are heading back to the little house on the prairie!

More than 40 years since the original series concluded after nine seasons in 1983, Netflix has greenlit a reboot of the 19th century period western series, Little House on the Prairie.

According to the streaming platform, the new show will be “part hopeful, family drama, part epic survival tale and part origin story of the American West.”

Netflix added that “this fresh adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s iconic semi-autobiographical Little House books offers a kaleidoscopic view of the struggles and triumphs of those who shaped the frontier.”

Rebecca Sonnenshine, known for The Boys and Vampire Diaries, will act as showrunner and executive producer. Joy Gorman Wettels for Joy Coalition, Trip Friendly for Friendly Family Productions, Dana Fox and Susanna Fogel will also executive produce.

“Little House on the Prairie has captured the hearts and imaginations of so many fans around the world, and we’re excited to share its enduring themes of hope and optimism with a fresh take on this iconic story,” Jinny Howe, Netflix’s Vice President, Drama Series said in a press release. “Rebecca’s vision threads the needle with an emotional depth that will delight both new and existing fans of this beloved classic.”

Sonnenshine added, “I fell deeply in love with these books when I was five years old. They inspired me to become a writer and a filmmaker, and I am honored and thrilled to be adapting these stories for a new global audience with Netflix.”

Plans to reboot Little House on the Prairie, which first premieredon NBC in 1974, were first reported back in 2020, with Friendly — whose father, Ed, bought the TV and movie rights to Wilder’s auto-biographical novels — serving as an EP.

“It has been a long-held dream of mine to carry on my father’s legacy and adapt Wilder’s classic American stories for a 21st century audience in a way that brings together fans of both the books and the original television series,” Friendly said in a statement. “I am thrilled by our talented creative team led by Rebecca Sonnenshine who are bringing these beloved stories about family, community, and survival to long-time fans and new generations.

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While speaking to PEOPLE in June 2024, original cast member Karen Grassle, who played matriarch Caroline Ingalls, admitted that she didn’t believe the magic of the 1974 series could be recreated.

“There have been lots of attempts to do a Little House on the Prairie again,” Grassle said. “There have been shows, there have been a musical, and I think we had a unique experience and it can’t be repeated.”

Stand-up comedian Ken Flores dies at 28: ‘Thank you for all the laughs’

The comedian, born Kenyi Flores, died on Tuesday, according to online records from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner reviewed by USA TODAY. A cause of death was not given.

Flores’ family mourned his death on Wednesday in a statement posted to Instagram.

“It is with great sadness that we confirm the untimely passing of our friend, brother, and son, Kenyi Flores,” the statement read. “Please respect our privacy at this time as we are all shocked and devastated by this loss.”

USA TODAY has reached out to Flores’ representative for additional information.

The Chicago native got his comedic start in his teens by posting videos on YouTube, with some of his clips going viral on WorldStarHipHop, according to Flores’ 2023 interview with The Comedy Gazelle. While working as a bank teller in his early 20s, Flores said he was encouraged by the owner of The Comedy Shrine to perform at the Aurora venue’s open mic event.

“If you get that one big pop, you get bit by the stand-up bug and you’re addicted,” Flores told the outlet. “Ever since I went up the first time, I couldn’t stop.”

Flores launched his headlining Butterfly Effect Tour on Jan. 10 in Portland. The comedian was set to hit the stage in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia; Austin, Texas; and San Diego through April. Flores’ next show was scheduled for Thursday at the Desert Ridge Improv in Phoenix, according to his official website.

Regarding his career aspirations, Flores told The Comedy Gazelle that he wanted to “tour for the rest of my life, write new material, and make people happy.”

“There’s a lot of people like me around the world that think like me, and we just don’t have a voice,” Flores said. “There are Latino comics, like Gabriel Iglesias, but he’s not like me. He didn’t grow up in the hood. He wasn’t a drug addict. He didn’t grow up like me, so he doesn’t speak for me.

“But there’s a lot of people that I can speak for that don’t really have a voice in comedy. One of the things that makes me the happiest is when people tell me, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever gone to a comedy show. I relate to all your (stuff), bro, and I had to come see it.’ “

Comedians pay tribute to ‘rising star’ Ken Flores

Several of Flores’ peers in the comedy world took to social media to mourn the comedian’s death, including the comedy venue the Hollywood Improv.

“We were honored to share your talent on our stages,” the venue wrote in a tribute on Instagram. “You were greatness, and it was only a matter of time until the whole world saw it. You were also kind and a tremendous friend to all lucky enough to know you. We love you Ken, thank you for all the laughs.”

“Rising star — see you on the other side bro 💫 🕊️,” Pedro Herrera commented on Instagram.

“My brother, it was a blessing to know you and share you with the world. You changed my life,” René Humberto Valdiviezo wrote. “You had so much left to do. My heart hurts for everyone whose life you made better.”

“I was hoping this wasn’t real 😔” Neema Naz commented. “What a tragic and devastating loss to the world. Ken was a gem and was going to be a star one day. RIP 🙌🏽💜😢”

“Ken 💔 Thank you for all amazing times, the laughter, the jokes, you will be missed RIP 🕊️,” Los Desvelados wrote.

“Always happy to see and hang with him backstage. May his memory be a blessing ❤️,” Darren Carter commented.

Gisèle Pélicot’s ex-husband, convicted of drugging and raping her, now caught up in other cases

NANTERRE, France — Dominique Pélicot, the convicted rapist who horrified France by drugging his then wife so other men could rape her, was questioned Thursday about other cases of rape and murder that he’s suspected in.

Pélicot is serving a 20-year prison term after he was found guilty in December for the horrific sexual abuse of his now ex-wife, Gisèle Pélicot.

His lawyer told the Associated Press that he now faces renewed questioning by an investigating magistrate who specializes in so-called cold cases — those that have proved particularly hard to resolve.

The rape and murder cases date back to the 1990s. One involves Sophie Narme, a real estate agent who was killed in Paris on Dec. 4, 1991. His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said Dominique Pélicot denies any involvement in the killing.

The other is the attempted armed rape of another real estate agent in the Paris suburb of Villeparisis on May 11, 1999. In that case, Pélicot acknowledges that he met the woman and tried to undress her but denies attempted rape, his lawyer said.

Dominique Pélicot has been under formal investigation for both of those crimes since October 2022 — a legal status meaning that investigators believe there is an accumulation of serious evidence against him.

Lawyer Florence Rault, who represents Narme’s family and the woman subjected to the alleged rape attempt, said an array of similarities between the 1991 and 1999 cases suggested the perpetrator might be the same.

“One has to remain cautious. Perhaps someone else committed the crime on Sophie Narme. But there are such similarities in the mode of operation, in the way the victims were approached — and the victims are so identical, too — that one can legitimately ask many questions,” Rault said on RTL radio.

The two cases were grouped together into one investigation in September 2022 that was taken over by the specialized unit for cold cases and serial crimes. It works out of the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

Speaking on her way into Pélicot’s hearing with the investigating magistrate for the cold-case unit, Zavarro said he plans to cooperate. She noted that he had previously been questioned in 2023 and had acknowledged having been in contact with the real estate agent in the 1999 case, but not with Sophie Narme.

“He has always said that he never met Sophie Narme,” Zavarro said.

Zavarro said Pélicot has acknowledged to investigators that he met the other real estate agent. The lawyer said police found traces of his DNA at the scene of their meeting.

“He acknowledged having had an altercation with her, having tried to undress her, but with intentions different from attempted rape,” she said.

Pélicot’s lawyer sought to separate the current investigation from what he did to his then-wife.

”Let’s remember … he benefits from the presumption of innocence,” Zavarro said. ”Let’s not make him into a guilty party ahead of time.”

She described his conditions in solitary confinement, and said he has not been allowed visitors since 2020. “It’s an isolation measure that was imposed on him, and that he lives with every day. He is not complaining — he knows it was imposed on him based on the nature of the facts.”

The rape and murder cases occurred more than 10 years before the drugging and rapes of Gisèle Pélicot for which her husband and 50 other men were convicted — a nearly decadelong stretch of sexual abuse from 2011. He rendered her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs and invited other men he met online to rape her.

Gisèle Pélicot became a hero to many in France and beyond for courageously demanding that the men’s trial be held in open court.

The evidence included stomach-churning homemade videos of the abuse that Dominique Pélicot filmed in the couple’s retirement home in the small Provence town of Mazan and elsewhere. Police subsequently found more than 20,000 photos and videos in all, stored on computer drives and cataloged in folders marked “abuse,” “her rapists,” “night alone” and other titles.