Guilty pleasures
By NewsPress Now
Halsey reveals illness, announces new album and shares new song ‘The End’
NEW YORK | Halsey has been privately battling illness, the singer revealed Tuesday.
She shared the news on Instagram in a series of videos that appear to document the singer receiving infusions.
“Long story short, I’m lucky to be alive,” she wrote in the caption. “Short story long, I wrote an album.”
A diagnosis was not immediately clear. Representatives for Halsey did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.
“I feel like an old lady,” Halsey says aloud in the first video, while rubbing her legs in apparent pain. “I told myself I’m giving myself two more years to be sick. At 30, I’m having a rebirth and I’m not gonna be sick and I’m gonna look super hot and have lots of energy and I’m just gonna get to re-do my 20s in my 30s.”
The singer also released a new song on Tuesday, an acoustic guitar ballad titled “The End.”
The new album on the horizon is a follow-up to her fourth studio album, 2021’s ambitious “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
According to a press release, Halsey is making a donation to both The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Lupus Research Alliance alongside the release of “The End.”
In 2022, Halsey shared on Instagram that she had been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Sjogren’s syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome — known as MCAS — and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, known as POTS.
Alec and Hilaria Baldwin announce TLC series
LOS ANGELES | Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria are the next family set to star in their own reality series.
The actor and producer, who has seven kids under age 10 with his wife, announced the TLC reality show about their life as a party of nine. “The Baldwins,” the show’s working title, is set to release in 2025.
“We’re inviting you into our home to experience the ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy,” Baldwin said in a video he shared to Instagram on Tuesday.
In the announcement video, the couple joked about Hilaria announcing another pregnancy, but she said they are done having kids before the clip cut to a chaotic shot of their children screaming and the parents struggling to wrangle the bunch for a group photo.
The couple married in July 2012 and welcomed their first child in August 2013. Baldwin was previously married to actor Kim Basinger, who had his eldest daughter, Ireland.
The announcement comes as Baldwin prepares for trial for his involuntary manslaughter charge in the fatal shooting on the set of the film “Rust” in 2021. The trial is scheduled for July in Santa Fe and Baldwin has pleaded not guilty. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison.
While filming the Western movie, which Baldwin produced and starred in, a revolver he was holding fired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said that he did not pull the trigger.
In April, the film’s weapons supervisor Hannah Gutierrez-Reed received the maximum sentence of 18 months in a New Mexico state penitentiary after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter after a jury determined she failed to follow gun safety protocols.
Baldwin’s legal team attempted to dismiss the charge against him, but Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, who also presided over Gutierrez-Reed’s case, upheld the charge in May.
Muhammad Ali’s childhood home is for sale in Kentucky
LOUISVILLE, Ky. | The pink house where Muhammad Ali grew up dreaming of boxing fame — and where hundreds of fans gathered for an emotional send-off as his funeral procession passed by decades later — is up for sale.
The two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Louisville was converted into a museum that offered a glimpse into the formative years of the boxing champion and humanitarian known worldwide as The Greatest. The house went on the market Tuesday along with two neighboring homes — one was turned into a welcome center-gift shop and the other was meant to become a short-term rental.
The owners are asking $1.5 million for the three properties. Finding a buyer willing to maintain Ali’s childhood home as a museum would be “the best possible result,” co-owner George Bochetto said.
“This is a part of Americana,” said Bochetto, a Philadelphia attorney and former Pennsylvania state boxing commissioner. “This is part of our history. And it needs to be treated and respected as such.”
The museum opened for tours shortly before Ali’s death in 2016. Bochetto and his business partner at the time renovated the frame house to how it looked when Ali — known then as Cassius Clay — lived there with his parents and younger brother.
“You walk into this house … you’re going back to 1955, and you’re going to be in the middle of the Clay family home,” Bochetto told The Associated Press during a 2016 interview.
Using old photos, the developers replicated the home’s furnishings, appliances, artwork and even its pink exterior from Ali’s days living there. The museum featured videos focused on the story of Ali’s upbringing, not his storied boxing career.
“To me, that’s the bigger story and the more important story,” Bochetto said in an interview last week.
Ali got his start in boxing after his bicycle was stolen. Wanting to report the crime, the 12-year-old Ali was introduced to Joe Martin, a police officer who doubled as a boxing coach at a local gym. Ali told Martin he wanted to whip the culprit. The thief was never found, nor was the bike, but Ali became a regular in Martin’s gym.
Ali lived in the home when he left for the 1960 Olympics. He returned as a gold medal winner, launching a career that made him one of the world’s most recognizable figures as a three-time heavyweight boxing champion and globetrotting humanitarian.
The home became a worldwide focal point on the day of Ali’s burial, when hundreds of people lined the street in front of the house as his hearse and funeral procession slowly passed by.
Despite its high-profile debut, the museum ran into financial troubles and closed less than two years after opening. The museum is situated in a western Louisville neighborhood several miles from downtown, where the Muhammad Ali Center preserves his humanitarian and boxing legacies.
As efforts to reopen the childhood museum languished, offers to move the 1,200-square-foot (111-square-meter) house to Las Vegas, Philadelphia and even Saudi Arabia were turned down, Bochetto said.
“I wouldn’t do that because it’s an important piece of Louisville history, Kentucky history and I think it needs to stay right where it is,” he said.
Las Vegas real estate investor Jared Weiss bought the Ali childhood house — then rundown and vacant — in 2012 for $70,000 with plans to restore it. Three years later, Weiss formed a partnership with Bochetto, who acquired a half interest in the project. Both were avid fans of Ali, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the restoration project. They also purchased the two neighboring homes, financed a documentary, subsidized museum operations and incurred expenses for all three properties. Weiss has since died and his wife is the project’s co-owner, Bochetto said.
Now, Bochetto said he’s hoping they’ll find a buyer with the “marketing and operational know-how” to make the museum a success.
“I want to make sure that it continues in that fashion and never goes back to where it’s abandoned or dilapidated,” he said. “That should never have happened.”
Former protege sues The-Dream, accusing the producer of sexual assault
LOS ANGELES | A former protege of The-Dream, a Grammy-winning writer and producer on some of biggest hits by Beyoncé and Rihanna, among others, filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing him of sexual assault and other abuse.
Chanaaz Mangroe, who performed under the stage name Channii Monroe, alleges in her lawsuit that The-Dream, whose legal name is Terius Gesteelde-Diamant, lured her into “an abusive, violent, and manipulative relationship filled with physical assaults, violent sexual encounters, and horrific psychological manipulation” after she left her native Netherlands for the U.S. with hopes of making it big as a singer.
Gesteelde-Diamant, an eight-time Grammy winner who was a writer and producer on huge hits including Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” has denied the allegations.
Mangroe, 33, says a representative of Gesteelde-Diamant reached out to her on social media in 2014 and asked her to send samples of her music, and that the producer flew her to Atlanta early the next year promising to help her career.
According to the lawsuit, Gesteelde-Diamant began recording with her and “told her that he would make her the next Beyoncé and Rihanna,” but that she would have to share intimate and embarrassing details with him and allow him complete control over her. Though he was married, Mangroe says he told her they would become a famous couple who won 10 Grammys together.
Mangroe alleges that over the course of more than a year, Gesteelde-Diamant pressured her and forced her to use drugs and alcohol excessively, had sex with her that was violent beyond her consent, raped her at times, and kept her locked in a room for long stretches. She says he was violently controlling, forcing her to diet and exercise, and allowed her little contact with others.
Representatives of Gesteelde-Diamant did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment. But he told the The New York Times in a statement that the allegations “are untrue and defamatory.”
“I oppose all forms of harassment and have always strived to help people realize their career goals,” the statement said. “As someone committed to making a positive impact on my fellow artists and the world at large, I am deeply offended and saddened by these accusations.”
Mangroe alleges in her suit that rather than helping her career, Gesteelde-Diamant upended it by forcing her to be dropped from a record deal she had signed. She says the trauma caused her severe anxiety and depression, along with financial losses from the harm done to her career. The lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles federal court, seeks damages to be determined at trial.
“What Dream did to me made it impossible to live the life I envisioned for myself and pursue my goals as a singer and songwriter,” Mangroe said in a statement. “Ultimately, my silence has become too painful, and I realized that I need to tell my story to heal.”
The Associated Press doesn’t typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Mangroe has.
—From AP reports
