Noasis? Noel says he quit because of "verbal and violent intimidation"

Noel Gallagher has elaborated on his reasons for walking out on the band he masterminded and brought to the top of the pops in the Nineties and, after giving up sole songwriting duties and ceding them to various bandmembers, commandeered through new hits and world tours until Friday.

He's quoted in a statement on the Oasis website:

“Dearly beloved, it is with a heavy heart and a sad face that I say this to you this morning.

As of last Friday the 28th August, I have been forced to leave the Manchester rock’n'roll pop group Oasis.

The details are not important and of too great a number to list. But I feel you have the right to know that the level of verbal and violent intimidation towards me, my family, friends and comrades has become intolerable. And the lack of support and understanding from my management and band mates has left me with no other option than to get me cape and seek pastures new.

I would like firstly to offer my apologies to them kids in Paris who’d paid money and waited all day to see us only to be let down AGAIN by the band. Apologies are probably not enough, I know, but I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to say to the good people of V Festival that experienced the same thing. Again, I can only apologise - although I don’t know why, it was nothing to do with me. I was match fit and ready to be brilliant. Alas, other people in the group weren’t up to it.

In closing I would like to thank all the Oasis fans, all over the world. The last 18 years have been truly, truly amazing (and I hate that word, but today is the one time I’ll deem it appropriate). A dream come true. I take with me glorious memories.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a family and a football team to indulge.

I’ll see you somewhere down the road. It’s been a fuckin’ pleasure.

Thanks very much.

Goodbye.”

Word is that Liam Gallagher and the other members of the band will decide whether to carry on without big brother.

Exclusive photos! Cristina's Court wins second Emmy in a row! Best Courtroom Program! Canceled????!!!!

Sandra Gin

The Kats' out of the bag about Steve Friess' Las Vegas "tribute" to Michael Jackson

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Rolling out act after self-congratulatory act while a flurry of tweets about its wonderfulness was unleashed by its producer and his friends, beauty queen-turned televisioon entertainment reporter Alicia Jacobs and Norm Clarke of The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the “Michael Jackson’s Untimely Death Was The Best Thing That Could Ever Have Happened To Michael Jackson’s Music Show" went off as scheduled at the Palms resort in Las Vegas yesterday-- but not without some serious questions aimed at its producer and promoter, Las Vegas blogger, New York Times stringer, Gay Vegas author and comp queen Steve Friess.

The questions came from Tabloid Baby.

Friess gave his answers to the Las Vegas Sun.

One thing the Danny Gans case has made clear is that journalists working in Las Vegas read Tabloid Baby, and while some curse us for calling them out on their cowardly refusal to investigate the big questions while hyping some questionable enterprises, they do take our criticism to heart-- and when they can slip it past their editors, take up our challenge.


In this case it was John Katsilometes of the Las Vegas Sun who, in a promotional piece on the Jackson "tribute," cornered Friess about his obvious conflict of interest, if not the bizarre notion of his producing a "tribute" that he insisted was not a tribute to Jacko the man, even though the tribute took place on Jacko's birthday, with Jacko's father as a guest.

Kats gets Friess to answer the questions we have asked in this space, and in many unanswered emails to Friess, including:

Was Joe Jackson paid to attend the tribute?

How much does he plan to raise in total?

How much money will go to ""production costs" and expenses?

Either Katsilometes asked the questions or Friess used the friendly reporter to give his answers, unchallenged.

Writes Kats:

"Friess finds himself performing something of a moonwalk between the Jackson death investigation and the Palms benefit. His role in covering the Vegas angle of the Jackson story has coincided with his involvement in organizing a charity show that is essentially authorized by the Jackson family. Friess, who writes regularly for Las Vegas Weekly (a Greenspun Media Group publication) among his freelance gigs, allows that it has been an interesting summer ever since the details of Jackson’s death spilled out to include Las Vegas.

“'There’s no doubt it’s weird for me,” Friess said today. 'When this was conceived, it was just a couple of days after his death. Nobody believed it would be a homicide at that point, that it would be anything this controversial connected to Las Vegas... Journalists don’t have to divorce themselves from their communities.' (Friess plans to write of his shifting between journalist and benefit producer in next week’s L.V. Weekly.)

"Friess finds himself performing a moonwalk
between the Jackson death investigation
and the Palms benefit. His role in covering
the Vegas angle of the Jackson story
has coincided with his involvement in
organizing a charity show that is essentially
authorized by the Jackson family."
--Las Vegas Sun

"Soon after Jackson’s death, Friess was approached by Bergen, a friend who is a lifelong Jackson fan, to assist in organizing the benefit show. Bergen has invoked an audio clip of himself at age 4 singing 'Man in the Mirror' during his performances at the Liberace Museum and has written a piece for the Sun relating Jackson’s influence on his career. It was Bergen who first thought to turn Jackson’s untimely death into a means of raising money for local arts programs, and both organizers have said that the show is to honor the creative work, not the mercurial and ultimately tragic lifestyle, of Jackson.

"At this writing, about $90,000 in advance ticket sales have been raised, Friess said. The goal is $100,000... Friess says that all money taken in after production costs will be donated to the Public Education Foundation to fill such needs as instruments, maintenance of instruments, sheet music, supplies and specialized tutoring (the books will be opened to anyone who wants to review how the money was allotted, he said, adding that the Jacksons did not ask for fees to appear at the show or dedication ceremony)."

If Steve Friess is indeed writing another apologia for his actions in the Las Vegas Weekly, we hope it is as amusing and mind-boggling as his "A Fine Restraint" excuse for not investigating the death of local superstar Danny Gans.

Meanwhile, we should point out that Michael Jackson's death was suspicious from the start, his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray of Las Vegas, was sought for questioning from day one, after he disappeared from the emergency room hours after Jacko's death, and Friess, who wrote in the Weekly's July 2nd issue that "Michael Jackson’s untimely death was the best thing that could ever have happened to Michael Jackson’s music," was covering the Las Vegas investigation of Murray weeks after he began producing the birthday part for the man whose "baggage" he claimed "imprisoned and stigmatized" his "product."

No fluke: Canceled Cristina's Court wins second Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Courtroom Program

Cristina's Court has won the Emmy award for Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program for the second year in a row.

The show starring Cristina Perez and produced by (tabloid) television legend Peter Brennan picked up the statuette last night at a ceremony at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.

Cristina's Court stunned the television world when it picked up the first-ever Emmy Award for Outstanding Legal/Courtroom Program a year ago. That win was the biggest news to come from last year's Emmy Awards, because it was the first court show Emmy, and generally assumed to have been created in order to give Judge Judy a prize.

Last night's announcement proved that Cristina's Court's first Courtroom Program Emmy was no fluke. The win was suspected a few weeks ago when the Emmy producers decided-- after the votes were counted-- to remove the popular category from tonight's televised awards show and stick it with the the technical awards that were handed out hours ago.

The second Emmy does come with bittersweet cheer. The Fox Television Stations Group canceled Cristina's Court in February to make room for a court show featuring Republican politician Jeanine Pirro, which had been running to lower ratings on Fox's CW Daytime lineup. Republican adviser and Fox News president Roger Ailes is also chairman of the Fox Stations Group.

Cristina's executive producer Peter Brennan, who created the tabloid television genre with A Current Affair, was the original producer of Judge Judy.
Developing...

Greg Lott: "I was Farrah's secret lover!"

Farrah Fawcett's college sweetheart and website business partner has gone international with explosive revelations about what he claims was a torrid love affair that was reignited eleven years ago and ended only when Ryan O'Neal took over Farrah's affairs and refused to allow him to see her in her final weeks on earth.

Greg Lott, who dated Farrah at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1960s and did two terms in prison for drug trafficking before he and Farrah rekindled their relationship in the late Nineties, provides photos, love letters and intimate details to the Daily Mail-- including the revelation that he and Farrah took "intimate photos" on a Mexican holiday-- and "now believes Ryan found them just months before Farrah’s death."


Tabloid Baby brought Greg Lott's story forward exclusively in May after he contacted our offices to tell us that after years of unfettered access to his good friend Farrah, he'd been banned from seeing her by O'Neal and others who had gathered around her as her cancer worsened. Lott had come to Los Angeles from Lubbock, Texas and stayed, holding vigil in a nearby hotel, until Farah lost her cancer battle on June 25th.

We reported on the documented relationship that Farrah and Lott had resumed after she split with O'Neal in 1997, and included photos showing the pair together in later years. While Lott showed us evidence of his close relationship with Farrah, he stopped short of going public with the details of the romantic relationship.

Lott has gone farther with the Daily Mail, as these highlights show:

"In a series of startling revelations, Greg claims that O’Neal froze him out of Farrah’s life against her will and that she referred to O’Neal as the ‘Fat F*** from the beach’.

"...in 1996 when Farrah and Ryan’s romance came unstuck thanks to his volatile temper and infidelity, she called. ‘We arranged to meet in Texas. 'She was doing a fundraiser for battered women and invited me to the event at a hotel. She walked into the room and the electricity was there between us.’

"Farrah invited Greg to visit her at her home in Bel Air: ‘She flew me out to Los Angeles and we fell into each other’s arms.

"‘Farrah was always a very sensual woman. She never wore make-up at home and would shop at cheap stores like Walmart for her sweatpants. She had no airs and graces. That’s what I loved about her. She looked a million dollars without doing anything. In a letter written on one flight back to LA, a besotted Farrah reflected on a recent clandestine meeting:

"...'Thank you for making it so special. No stressure. Great food, great weather, great sex, great, great you!’ Greg explains: ‘Stressure was a Farrah-ism. Stress and pressure; that is what she was under with her health, her child, her parents and Ryan.’

"Greg says: ‘People close to us knew we were an item but I never wanted to be Mr Farrah Fawcett so we kept it low-key. I never wanted to go to high-profile Hollywood events.’

...The couple had holidayed in the resort of Maroma in early 2000. Greg says: ‘We’d been to Mexico once before, right at the start of our relationship at college. We went to Acapulco for Spring Break when we were madly in love.

"‘We went back at the start of 2000. It was this isolated hotel and Farrah said it was our honeymoon.’ While they were there, the couple took intimate Polaroid photos and Greg now believes Ryan found them just months before Farrah’s death..."

Read the entire Daily Mail article here.

Oasis split follows guitar-smashing fight

Noel Gallagher's announced split from his band Oasis followed a guitar-smashing altercation with his brother Liam. The band was set to play the Rock en Seine festival in Paris last night, but the crowd were told by Bloc Party, who were due to perform before Oasis, the band would not be taking the stage. Many in the audience assumed it was a joke until screens confirmed that the show was cancelled "as a result of an altercation with the band."

Scottish singer Amy Macdonald, who was playing at the French festival last night, wrote on her Twitter page shortly after 9pm, "Oasis cancelled again with one minute to stage time! Liam smashed Noel's guitar, huuuge fight"

She later updated: "Noel's quit."

Oasis pulled out of a headlining gig last weekend, supposedly because singer Liam had laryngitis.

Battles between the Gallagher brothers have marked and hurt the band's progress. Liam refused to join a US tour in 1995; Noel walked off a tour in 2000; all other original band members are long gone; the brothers recently confirmed they don't speak to each other. But this is the first official Gallagher resignation.

The Day The Music Died?

Noel Gallagher announced he's quit his band Oasis because he can't work another day with brother Liam. It's not the first time one of the brothers has walked out on the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band. We hope it will not be the last.

DJ AM's last Tweet

DJ AM, former fat kid Adam Goldstein, who was severely burned in a jet crash that he and Travis Barker survived somewhat miraculously less than a year ago, was found dead in his apartment in New York City, which he knew ain't always what it seems.

TMZ caught lying about "exclusive"

Corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com got hoist by its own stinky petard with its silly attempt to be first to post a John Mayer mugshot. Beaten to the punch by The Smoking Gun, shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin and his subliterate rent boy crew tried to make it seem otherwise by claiming credit for the "exclusive" anyway, with the help of a fraudulent timestamp on the post.


The Smoking Gun caught them, just as we did when TMZ played around with time, facts and truth in reporting on the death of Michael Jackson:

"TMZ posted the photo at 3:10 PM, with the site's customary 'EXCLUSIVE' claim. While the TMZ item carries a backdated "posted" time of 3:03 PM, a check of the item's comments section shows that the first comment was recorded at, not surprisingly, 3:10 PM, moments after the photo appeared on the gossip site... TMZ's own commenters were under no illusion as to where the photo first appeared... One reader noted, at 3:08 PM, 'Posted on TSG.' A minute later, another reported, 'The Smoking Gun has it on their Website. It was a 2001 Arrest in Georgia for speeding.'"


In an attempt to wriggle out of the mess, the TMZ tools changed the time stamp again when they posted their apology. Too late.

What scumbags.

Mayer had offered $25,000 if TMZ could find the shot. Notice the site chose animal rescue organizations rather than a group like Children of The Night, which rescues runaway teens on Santa Monica Boulevard...

Today we ran into Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal

We saw Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal this afternoon, separately, of course. We ran into Ryan after he burst in through the back door of Musso & Frank in Hollywood in time for lunch, big and only occasionally boisterous in a double-breasted brown suit, settling into a booth with a couple of women. Farrah we happened to visit at the Westwood Village Memorial Park because there was traffic on Wilshire Boulevard and we had some time to kill on the way back to the Tabloid Baby office.


We also wanted to see if her tombstone has yet been inscribed. It hasn't, so Farrah's unmarked grave took some finding. There were a number of similar unmarked plots with a headstone and two benches in this newer, more modern south side of the cemetery (the middle of the park has mostly ground-level markers while many folks are slid into crypts along the walls) but we knew Farrah is next to Merv Griffin.


Farrah rests across the driveway from Dominique Dunne, whose father Dominick died yesterday. Dominique's death by strangling at the hands of her boyfriend set her father on his career chronicling celebrity murder trials.


Billy Wilder is buried in a small section behind Farrah, with one grave separating him from Jack Lemmon. We liked his inscription best.

Exclusive! Comedy legend Chris Bearde opens comedy school!

Comedy genius Chris Bearde, the man who arrived from Australia to write Laugh-In, Elvis' 1968 special, create The Gong Show, direct a movie starring The Hudson Brothers (well, nobody's perfect), and most recently stand out as the lone and brave political comedian dishing out dozens of one liners and laughs at conservatives' expese day after day at the essential Beardes's Eye View site, announced minutes ago that he is accepting students at the until-now legendarily rumoured Chris Bearde School of Comedy.

Chris writes on Facebook:

"The Comedy School that rocks!! The School was started in Las Vegas. It's a six weeks course open to anyone with a sense of humor. At the end of the course the students get to perform on a live stage in front of a large audience.

"We are starting the school soon in LA and will be looking for students. Some of our initial students have already appeared in movies and television shows. Call us at 310.598.6345. and ask for Carolyn. Come to our offices in Santa Monica and talk... if you're a funny person you get to enroll... however we don't like people who condone torture or Sarah Palin...."

New feature: Death of The Day

We give up. 2009 has turned into the Celebrity Death Year. We submit to the Celebrity Reaper, no longer content to take them in Threes, but now scytheing them up at several a day. Ted Kennedy... Ellie Greenwich... Dominick Dunne... We realize more are going because more are out there, living longer and waiting to get the crook of the skeletal finger (as one Tabloid Baby pal explained: "We are entering the beginning of the sunset years for boomers, the largest population group in history, born during a profound media expansion. So a population expansion begets a celebrity expansion. They are dying at a faster rate simply because there are more of them. Think of what will happen when the reality TV stars start to drop en masse..."), but we're filling up too many posts with too many mentions of dead people.

So we introduce the Tabloid Baby Death of The Day. It can be found among the features in the column at the right --> We will update accordingly. Heck, at this rate, we might have to institute the Tabloid Baby Death of The Hour... Sad about Dominick, even though he did give us the "author" Mark Fuhrman...

Last tabloid legend standing? (Or rolling around in a wheelchair, at least?)

Paula Abdul could be the new Danny Gans

Paula Abdul is shopping for a theatre in Las Vegas for a singing and dancing variety show. She was at the Las Vegas Hilton over the weekend (that's where they sell Manilow Water) and there's also talk she may take over the Encore Theatre at the Wynn Las Vegas on the Strip. The Encore, of course, was Danny Gans' room until his untimely death on May 1st.

Ted Kennedy was a great Senator

Ted Kennedy's tabloid television close-up

…The story would be a watershed in American political and sexual mythology. Generations of condoned womanizing by America’s royal family had led to this: a young woman, claiming she was raped at the famed Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in the early hours of Easter morning after a late-night drinking binge with Teddy, his son, and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith.

Willie, as he was know, son of Steve Smith, the late “fixer of Kennedy scandals, was accused in the biggest family disgrace since Chappaquiddick. This would be the first defining new story of our tenure at Hard Copy, and we were sure to come up against massive competition from A Current Affair. After all, Brennan and Dunleavy had written Those Wild, Wild Kennedy Boys back in the seventies—and it wouldn’t get much wilder than this.

We stationed a live truck outside the Kennedy mansion and led the next’s day show live from Palm Beach, Dimond had Michelle Cassone, a young woman who claimed to have gone to the mansion with the victim the morning in question. Cassone accused Senator Ted of chasing her around in a nightshirt while his nephew was having his way with the victim out on the beach.

Back in LA, we had Mike O’Gara don a nightshirt and stand in is stocking feet while a cameraman did a pan from his toes up to his belly As Michelle Cassone described her alleged encounter, we threw in the shot in a frightening, almost subliminal recreation of Ted’s lower regions.

The cops weren’t talking and that made the story even better, Dimind dug up everything possible and we ran stories every day that week. It wasn’t difficult for her to get exclusives, though. For some reason, there was no competition…

After years of looking the other way while Teddy stumbled and groped his way around Washington, going as far as to allegedly have relations with a woman under table during lunch in a private restaurant-- though he apparently won points with the press corps by making use of a private dining room -- all these network newsmen in the Brooks Brothers shirts and loosened ties who spent time taking “L’s” and “R’s” out of Tom Brokaw’s scripts actually ran through a list of the world events and decided that a story in which Senator Ted Kennedy was embroiled in a rape case wasn’t even worth fifteen seconds. The arrogance of the networks was mind-boggling—at least until you considered the Kennedy influence and infiltration…

Read the rest of this story... and much more about Ted Kennedy, his family and their tabloid history... in Tabloid Baby.

Tabloid Teddy

Teddy

Ryan O'Neal makes a deal for his and Farrah's junkie son to walk out of prison and into a reality television show

Father of The Year Ryan O'Neal must be hellbent on getting his and Farrah Fawcett's son Redmond off drugs and on the straight and narrow. The man who took over Farrah's cancer documentary after her health worsened, and with the help of producers from NBC Dateline turned it into a morbid soap opera in which he had a starring role, has reportedly brokered a deal for Redmond to begin filming a reality television series as soon as he's sprung from prison.

And yes, Ryan O'Neal will be a costar.

The show reportedly will chronicle 24-year-old Redmond as he struggles with addiction-- which is about all the kid has done for most of his life. Filming will supposedly begin in four months, as soon as he's released from the prison where he’s serving time for narcotics possession and bringing narcotics into a jail facility.

Ryan O'Neal, who was arrested with Redmond last September for methamphetamine possession, will be remembered for helping engineer the scene in Farrah's Story in which Redmond was brought from prison in leg shackles to visit his semi-comatose mother and climb into her deathbed with her. According to the official story, junkie Redmond is doing the reality show to honor his mother's memory.

Farrah died on June 25th at age 62.

Redmond inherited most of her estate. Supposedly, he only gets the money is he remains sober. We don't know where the money goes if he dies.

How 20/20 landed La Toya without paying!

The network news organizations don't pay for interviews. When one of them lands a great "get"-- meaning an in-demand interview subject-- its because of their powers of persuasion and the confidence their integrity inspires. Yeah, right. If you believe that, we've got a great health care reform bill that will solve everything. Network news operations from the Today show to 60 Minutes pay for interviews-- although they use very creative methods to get around having to admit it. Our pal the Rumor Rat has the latest example as it looks at the "coincidence" of La Toya Jackson guest-hosting ABC's Barbara Walters show, The View, while agreeing to give "her first one-on-one" interview to Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20-- and finds it's no coincidence at all.

In fact, it's what we've been telling you-- and what the networks have been denying-- for the past ten years.

They pay.

Writes The Rat:


"How's this for coincidence: LaToya Jackson is recruited to co-host ABC's The View for two days at almost exactly the same time she decides to give her first one-on-one U.S. television interview to "20/20" which airs on the same network.

"Not buying it? Neither are we...

"A source tells The Rat that ABC, which 'never pays for interviews,' has worked out a deal with Jackson whereby she's paid a much higher-than-normal fee for co-hosting The View.

"In exchange, she throws in a 'free' interview with 20/20..."

That's how they do things at the networks. And that's another reason Rumor Rat is becoming a go-to site for lots of influential people in the media. While Perez Hilton slips dangerously, posting a surprising number of day-old and older used stories and the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com becomes more irrelevant with its subliterate, crass childishness, Rumor Rat is having great fun taunting both of the mainstream-backed phonies while making great use of the sources it seems to have in every network newsroom and infotainment show studio office.

Read the rest of Rumor Rat's story here.

Propofol was Michael Jackson's "milk"

Court records unsealed this week add an intriguing clue to the mystery of why Michael Jackson used propofol, the powerful anesthetic that the coroner says killed him.

We reported yesterday on a report in the May 2007 issue of Anesthesiology News that many revealed many propofol addicts were not only insomniacs like Jacko, but victims of childhood sex abuse, looking to block out the painful memories. The report raised the questiom of whether Michael Jackson turned to propofol to escape memories of his own molestation and abuse.

According to court records, Dr. Conrad Murray, who may be charged for giving Jacko his lethal dose, says he feared the star was addicted to the stuff. Jacko, he told police, spent his final hours pleading to be shot up with propofol.

Murray said that Jackson referred to propofol as "milk."

Las Vegas Sun finally reports week-old Danny Gans pharmacy story: Reporter claims Alicia Jacobs snatched her scoop!

While the Las Vegas Review-Journal continues to keep a conspicuous distance from covering the drug death of Strip headliner Danny Gans and its aftermath, its putative competitor, the Las Vegas Sun, has finally reported news from early last week that the entertainer who died from an overdose of Dilaudid was a part-owner of a pharmacy.

The coverage however, comes in the blog section of its website.

Dana Gentry, a local television reporter and executive producer local cable television shows Face to Face and In Business Las Vegas, reports the story, this afternoon, as well as posting the 2003 letter confirming Gans' stake in the drug business.

Gentry also claims she had the scoop a week ago, but that it was snatched away the following day by a competitor: Danny Gans close personal friend, the beauty-queen-turned-TV entertainment reporter, Alicia Jacobs, who "reluctantly" asked the tough question.

Gentry reports:

Gans owned pharmacy
By Dana Gentry · August 24, 2009 · 3:46 PM

Danny Gans’ friends and family maintained that the late entertainer had little use personally for prescription drugs, though his death in May was from an overdose of Dilaudid, (the generic is Hydromorphone) a painkiller. The source of the drug that killed Gans has not been identified.

Now the Board of Pharmacy is investigating Gans’ ownership interest in Green Valley Med, a distributor of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to doctors. Documents we obtained from the state reveal Gans had held a stake in the local pharmacy since 2003. The pharmacy board took Gans’ records from Green Valley Med in June, but will not reveal the nature of the documents seized. Green Valley Med bills itself on its website as the "largest medical supplier in Southern Nevada.'

We wanted to know if it carries Dilaudid. Owner Scot Silber seemed stunned last Monday when I asked about his business relationship with Gans. Silber confirmed the two were partners but wouldn’t say whether Green Valley Med carries Dilaudid. Coincidentally, the very next day Gans’ self-described friend, Channel 3 entertainment reporter Alicia Jacobs, detailed Gans’ ownership interest and reluctantly delved into the possibility that Gans obtained the lethal drug through that association.

Attorney Bob Massi, who represents Green Valley Med and doubles as its marketing director, declined to be interviewed but in an e-mail said, "The perception that is being portrayed of Danny Gans is disgusting. He was a great man, an ambassador to Las Vegas, and he is being smeared by an affiliation which was and has been a matter of public record."

You can see the story tonight on In Business Las Vegas, Las Vegas ONE, Cox Cable Channel 19.

(click photo to enlarge it)

Did Michael Jackson take propofol to block out memories of childhood sexual abuse?

Did Michael Jackson use the drug propofol to block out memories of being sexually abused as a child? A recent study of propofol addicts indicates the possibility is highly likely-- and could explain why Jacko chose to combat insomnia with a hazardous, stupefying anesthetic-- and perhaps explain a few other things about his life, as well.

We'd never heard of the propofol before Jacko's death case (if we did, there was never a reason for it to register in importance), and like most people were pretty shocked at reports that canisters of a drug that’s usually limited to surgical theatres had been trucked into Jacko’s bedroom so his doctor could shoot him up and knock him out.

What we didn’t suspect-- and what we haven’t seen reported in the weeks since Jacko’s death— is a study that shows a great number of propofol addicts are not only insomniacs—but victims of sexual abuse (coincidentally, one expert estimates that forty percent of sexual abusers were sexually abused as children).

Proopofol, says one doctor, “blocks out the world. One of the hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is hyperarousal. Folks with PTSD want to block that out.”

Today’s news that the LA County Coroner is ready to call Jackons’s death by propofol an act of homicide led us back to an article handed to us by a top Tabloid Baby pal a few weeks ago.

"Propofol Abuse Growing Problem for Anesthesiologists," from the May 2007 issue of Anesthesiology News, says propofol is among the most widely-used anesthetic agents in both hospitals and doctors’ offices (“It’s everywhere,” says one doctor). It’s also the drug of choice among doctors and anesthesiologists looking for a quick high.

Real quick.


“Because propofol is such a short-acting substance, heavy abusers must inject it frequently to stay high— as many as 50 to 100 times during a using session is not unheard of…”

Yet, “only a few cc’s more than what’s required to put a person to sleep can trigger fatal respiratory arrest. That threat is an insufficient deterrent for determined users; 40% of residents who reportedly abused the anesthetic died from the high—the peril of propofol’s exquisitely narrow therapeutic window.”

The article contains lots of medical journal statistics on the number of doctors and medical workers who use propofol—and die from it. But Jacko watchers will be most interested in the section at the end:

“'Propofol is a drug that in a sense doesn’t get you high,' said Omar S. Manejwala, MD, associate medical director at the William J. Farley Center at Williamsburg Place, an addiction treatment clinic in Virginia that, like Talbott, also focuses on physicians. 'It blocks out the world.'

"In his experience, Dr. Manejwala said, nearly every propofol addict started injecting to overcome persistent insomnia. That aspect of the medication fits neatly with the link both Drs. Manejwala and Earley have observed between propofol abuse and a history of trauma. 'One of the hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] is hyperarousal. Folks with PTSD want to block that out,' Dr. Manejwala said.

"What’s puzzling, experts said, is the strength of the connection. 'I don’t know of any other drug where the perceived incidence of trauma, particularly of sexual trauma [in abusers], is so high,' Dr. Manejwala said. 'It’s really quite remarkable.'"

According to court records, Dr. Conrad Murray administered 25 milligrams of propofol at 10:40 a.m. on the day Jacko died, after Jackson repeatedly demanded the drug.