Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
Justin Timberlake charged with driving while intoxicated
in the Hamptons
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. | Pop star Justin Timberlake was charged early Tuesday with drunken driving in a village in New York’s Hamptons, after police said he ran a stop sign and veered out of his lane in the posh seaside summer retreat.
The boy band singer-turned-solo star and actor was driving a 2025 BMW in Sag Harbor around 12:30 a.m. when an officer stopped him and determined he was intoxicated, according to a court document.
“His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage was emanating from his breath, he was unable to divide attention, he had slowed speech, he was unsteady afoot and he performed poorly on all standardized field sobriety tests,” the court papers said.
Timberlake, 43, told the officer he had one martini and was following some friends home, according to the documents. After being arrested and taken to a police station in nearby East Hampton, he refused a breath test, said the court papers, which listed his occupation as “professional” and said he’s “self-employed.”
The 10-time Grammy winner was released without bond later Tuesday morning after being arraigned in Sag Harbor. He was charged with a driving-while-intoxicated misdemeanor, and his next court date was scheduled for July 26, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office said.
Timberlake’s lawyer and representatives did not immediately return requests for comment from The Associated Press.
A young Timberlake began performing as a Disney Mouseketeer, where his castmates included future girlfriend Britney Spears (he’s now married to actress Jessica Biel). He rose to fame in the behemoth boy band NSYNC, embarked on a solo recording career in 2002 and was one of pop’s most influential figures in the early 2000s.
Fluent in the inflections of pop and R&B, he’s known for such Grammy-winning hits as “Cry Me A River,” “SexyBack,” “What Goes Around…Comes Around” and “Can’t Stop The Feeling!” He has performed at Super Bowl halftime shows multiple times, including the infamous 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” moment when he ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s clothing and revealed her bare nipple.
The episode led to Jackson’s exclusion from the Grammy telecast a week later. She said in a 2022 documentary that what happened was an accident and that she and Timberlake remained good friends.
Timberlake also built an acting career, garnering acclaim in movies including “The Social Network” and “Friends With Benefits” and winning four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Last year, Timberlake was in the headlines when Spears released her memoir, “The Woman in Me.” Several chapters were devoted to their relationship, including deeply personal details about a pregnancy, abortion and painful breakup. In March, he released his first new album in six years, the nostalgic “Everything I Thought It Was,” a return to his familiar future funk sound.
Timberlake has two upcoming shows in Chicago on Friday and Saturday, then is scheduled for New York’s Madison Square Garden on June 25 and 26.
Sag Harbor, a onetime whaling village mentioned in Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby-Dick,” is nestled amid the Hamptons, around 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of New York City. The Hamptons have long been a hot spot for the rich and famous, and various stars and otherwise prominent people have had brushes with the law there.
Located on a bay, Sag Harbor for years cultivated a more down-to-earth, “un-Hampton” reputation than its oceanfront neighbors — a place where people gathered not at a country club but at a corner bar called the Corner Bar. There is still a five-and-dime store, and a mainstay of the social scene is the quaint, cozy mid-19th-century American Hotel.
The village has long had its share of prominent homeowners and residents, including singer-songwriter Billy Joel, former CNN host Don Lemon, Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck, feminist writer Betty Friedan, and Pulitzer Prize winners Colson Whitehead and Lanford Wilson. Whitehead’s novel “Sag Harbor” is set there, particularly in a beachfront enclave where generations of Black families have spent summers.
In recent decades, Sag Harbor has increasingly become a destination for celebrities, wannabes and even cruise ships. Manhattan-like restaurants and pricey boutiques have multiplied. Homes fetch seven or eight figures, and the village’s evolving nature has prompted grumbles from some longtime residents about traffic, crowds and a changing character.
Noam Chomsky’s wife says reports of famed linguist’s death are false
NEW YORK | Noam Chomsky’s wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, says reports Tuesday that the famed linguist and activist had died are untrue.
“No, it is false,” she wrote Tuesday in response to an emailed query from The Associated Press. Noam Chomsky, 95, had been hospitalized in Brazil while recovering from a stroke suffered a year ago, Valeria Chomsky told the AP last week. But the Beneficencia Portuguesa hospital in Sao Paulo said in a statement that Chomsky was discharged on Tuesday to continue his treatment at home.
Earlier Tuesday, Chomsky was trending on X as false reports of his death abounded. Jacobin and The New Statesman published obituaries for Chomsky, though the former changed its headline from “We Remember Noam Chomsky” to “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky.” The New Statesman took its essay by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis down altogether. Brazilian news site Diario do Centro do Mundo also took down its story announcing Chomsky’s death and issued a correction.
The Chomskys have had a residence in Brazil since 2015. Noam Chomsky, known to millions for his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, taught for decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2017, he joined the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Lawyer for man accused of attacking Rushdie says client doesn’t want offered plea deal
MAYVILLE, N.Y. | The New Jersey man accused of repeatedly stabbing author Salman Rushdie is not interested in an offered plea deal that would shorten his time in state prison but expose him to federal prison on a separate terrorism-related charge, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Hadi Matar, 26, sat silently in Chautauqua County Court as lawyers outlined a proposal they said was worked out between state and federal prosecutors and agreed to by Rushdie over the past several months.
The agreement would have Matar plead guilty in Chautauqua County to attempted murder in exchange for a maximum state prison sentence of 20 years, down from 25 years. He would then also plead guilty to a yet-to-be-filed federal charge of attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, which could result in an additional 20 years, attorneys said.
Matar, who has pleaded not guilty, has been held without bail since his 2022 arrest after prosecutors say he attacked Rushdie as the acclaimed writer was about to address an audience at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Rushdie was blinded in one eye. Moderator Henry Reese was also wounded.
Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said Rushdie, who was stabbed more than a dozen times and detailed the near-fatal attack and painful recovery in a memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” favors the “global resolution” proposed in the case, which otherwise could mean two separate trials.
“His preference was to see this matter come to an end,” said Schmidt. Without Rushdie’s approval, Schmidt said he would have opposed reducing the maximum state prison term, given the nature of the attack.
“He came into Chautauqua County and then committed this crime, which is not just a crime against a person, but it’s also a crime against a concept of freedom of speech,” Schmidt said.
Matar’s attorney, Nathaniel Barone, said Matar wants to take his chances at trial.
“He’s saying, ‘What have I got to lose?,” Barone said after the hearing.
Judge David Foley instructed Matar to discuss the offer with Barone and to provide a definitive answer at his next appearance, on July 2.
Rushdie, who turns 77 on Wednesday, spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for his death due to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie slowly began to re-emerge into public life in the late 1990s, and he has traveled freely over the past two decades.
After the on-stage attack, investigators said they were trying to determine whether Matar, who was born nearly a decade after “The Satanic Verses” came out, acted alone. The federal charge that prosecutors are reportedly considering points to the possibility that he did not.
“The approach is that it was a terrorist organization supported by countries in the Middle East, and that’s how they’re handling it,” Barone said.
“The federal government is taking the position that there was support before it happened,” he said. “I think in order for them to indict or obtain a conviction on any terrorist-related type of charges, they’re going to have to demonstrate that there was support beforehand as part of a conspiracy.”
Barbara Burns, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment on the potential terrorism charge, explaining that the office doesn’t confirm or deny investigations.
Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. His mother has said that her son changed, becoming withdrawn and moody, after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018. Schmidt has said that Matar got an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arrived from New Jersey a day early bearing a fake ID.
Rushdie, whose works also include “Midnight’s Children” and “Victory City,” wrote in his memoir that he saw a man running toward him in the amphitheater, where he was about to speak about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.
The author is on the witness list, should Matar’s trial go forward as scheduled for September in Chautauqua County.
Aimée, the radiant French star of ‘A Man and a Woman,’ dies at 92
PARIS | Anouk Aimée, the radiant French star and dark-eyed beauty of classic films including Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” has died. She was 92.
Aimée’s agent, Sébastien Perrolat said in an text message to The Associated Press that Aimée died Tuesday morning “surrounded by her loved ones.” He did not give a cause of death.
“I was beside her when she died this morning, at her home in Paris,” Aimée’s daughter Manuela Papatakis wrote on Instagram.
Aimée worked with an array of acclaimed directors, including Jacques Demy, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jacques Becker, Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet. She was perhaps best known for 1966’s “A Man and a Woman,” in which she starred opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant as a widow who meets a widower race-car driver (Trintignant) at the boarding school where each has a child attending.
The film was an enormous success, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Aimée won a Golden Globe for her performance and was nominated for an Oscar. The film won Academy Awards for Lelouch’s screenplay and for best foreign language film.
But Aimée’s career spanned seven decades — she reunited with Lelouch and Trintignant for 2019’s “The Best Years of a Life” — and across that time remained a uniquely elegant and enigmatic presence. She stared in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) as the seductive socialite Maddalena and again in the director’s “8 1/2” (1963) as the estranged wife of Marcello Mastroianni’s filmmaker.
Fellini once said Aimée “represents the type of woman who leaves you flustered and confused — to death.” He said she belonged among the pantheon of cinema’s “great, mysterious queens,” comparing her to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford.
“A film is always much richer when actors have the confidence not to explain, but just to do; when they feel secure enough to leave things open,” Aimée told The Guardian in 2007.
Aimée was born Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus on April 27, 1932, to actor parents Henri Dreyfus (who acted under the name Henry Murray) and Genevieve Sorya. At the age of 13, Aimée was walking down a Paris street when the director Henri Calef stopped her and asked if she would like to be a movie. Aimée later said she was on the way to see “Double Indemnity” with her mother.
Aimée took her character’s name, Anouk, from her first film: “The House Under the Sea.” “Aimée” — the French word meaning “loved” — came from the poet Jacques Prévert who co-wrote her first lead role in 1951’s “The Lovers of Verona,” a modern-day “Romeo and Juliet.”
Following “La Dolce Vita,” Aimée starred in Jacques Demy’s “Lola” (1961) a New Wave soap opera about a cabaret entertainer with a string of lovers. “Lola,” Demy’s first film, was less appreciated at the time but is now considered a standout of French New Wave cinema. Eight years later, Aimée reprised the role in the Los Angeles-set “Model Shop,” playing a woman working in a photo studio.
Aimée married and divorced four times. The first three marriages — to Edouad Zimmermann, the filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, the actor and composer Pierre Barouh — didn’t last four years. Her longest was to the British actor Albert Finney, whom she was married to from 1970 to 1978.
Though Aimée had brushes with Hollywood, including Lumet’s “The Appointment” and Altman’s “Prêt-à-Porter,” she remained largely a European film actor. Among the roles she turned down was Vicki Anderson in “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the role that eventually went to Faye Dunaway who starred opposite Steve McQueen.
But Aimée remained a legend in France. She won best actress in Cannes for the 1980 dark comedy “A Leap in the Dark.” In 2002, she was given a lifetime achievement award at the Césars, France’s equivalent to the Oscars. On Tuesday, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, in a statement, called her “the symbol of elegance, talent, commitment.”
“The secret — it was Fellini who taught me this — is that the most important thing of all is to listen,” Aimée told The Guardian of acting. “Just listen, to what the other characters say. And don’t take it too seriously. So, no regrets.”
—From AP reports
