'Romeo and Juliet' child actors sue over 1968 nude scene

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'Romeo and Juliet' child actors sue over 1968 nude scene
Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, seen here in 2018, claim in their suit that the nude scene in 'Romeo and Juliet' was exploitative(AFP)

The actors who played star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film are suing Paramount Pictures for child abuse over their brief nude scene, their lawyer said Tuesday.

Olivia Hussey was 15 and Leonard Whiting 16 when they starred in the Oscar-winning version of William Shakespeare's tragedy.

The actors, now both in their 70s, claim in a suit filed in Santa Monica last week that a bedroom scene in which buttocks and bare breasts are visible amounts to sexual exploitation by movie studio Paramount, and that the company was guilty of distributing nude pictures of adolescents.

The suit says Zeffirelli -- who died in 2019 -- cajoled them into performing the scene, telling them without it "the picture would fail", having originally insisted there would be no actual nudity, with both actors covered by flesh-colored underwear.

"Defendants were dishonest and secretly filmed the nude or partially nude minor children without their knowledge, in violation of the state and federal laws regulating indecency and exploitation of minors for profit," the suit says.

The complaint, which claims damages of hundreds of millions of dollars, says the two performers have suffered mental anguish and emotional distress in the five-and-a-half decades since the film came out, and that both had only limited professional success in its wake.

Both won Golden Globes for their performances.

Solomon Gresen, representing the actors, told AFP the years that have elapsed since the film was made did not lessen the damage done, especially as it has been re-released since.

"(Paramount) have images that they know are images of underage nudity that should be removed from the film. That would be the beginning for sure," he said.

"Sexually explicit images of children are bad and they shouldn't be tolerated.

"If they were under 16, then they're under 16. It's a sexually explicit image of an underage person, it should be forbidden."

December 31 was the final date for historical child sex abuse lawsuits to be filed in California under a temporary waiver of the statutes of limitation.

A raft of claims were lodged during the waiver, including one last week by a woman who says she was the teenage lover of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler in the 1970s.

There was no immediate response from Paramount to AFP's request for comment.

Variety reported that during its 2018 interview with Hussey, she had defended the nude scene, which she insisted Zeffirelli had done tastefully.

"It was needed for the film," she told the outlet at the time.

© 2023 AFP

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Trailblazer's career in tatters as latest Trump loyalist gets thrown overboard

Maria Bartiromo turns 59 next week and Fox News gave her an early — and, might I add, well-deserved — birthday present. They fired her.

As I began writing this column soon after the announcement, I clicked on her staff bio, and a message appeared that said, “something has gone wrong.”

Wow, that’s for sure, because Bartiromo went wrong, way, way wrong, when she jumped ship from CNBC 13 years ago, and ended up becoming a frothing mouthpiece for Donald Trump on Fox Business News. She went from the Money Honey to Trump Chump.

Bartiromo was the first journalist to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She was a legit trailblazer at CNBC whose work was appreciated even by people who suspected, correctly, that she leaned politically right.

Then, in 2013, she left CNBC for Fox Business. It was big news. I can recall telling people she went to the dark side. And boy did she ever!

It didn't happen all at once. She edged her way, like her network, closer and closer to Donald Trump once he was elected president in 2016. Then, she put her bathing cap and goggles on, and went in for a deep dive into the Trump muckety-muck.

And she did it so brazenly.

In April 2017, in an interview now infamously called "the chocolate cake interview," Bartiromo let Trump recount how he'd ordered a missile strike on Syria while eating a chocolate cake dessert with China's president. It was a tone deaf, dark and dystopian remark — bomb a country and kill people while eating delectable sweets.

Bartiromo didn't push. She gobbled it up like, well, chocolate cake. When you watch the video, you can’t help but wonder why her next question wasn’t, “What are your three favorite desserts?”

Later that same year, she went further, wrongly asserting on air that no sexual misconduct allegations existed against Trump. Say what? It was so indefensible she took it back and said it was taken "out of context."

By the 2020 impeachment trial, she wasn't even pretending to be a fair and balanced journalist anymore. At Davos that year, as Trump rattled off a parade of false claims during an interview, Bartiromo was more worried that he wouldn’t get a "fair trial."

And it just kept getting worse. After he lost the 2020 election, she became something closer to a bona fide Trump confidant. Text messages later surfaced by the January 6th Committee showed her feeding interview questions, and suggested answers, directly to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before putting them to Trump on air, so he'd know exactly what was coming and how to spin it.

She gave Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell a national platform for demonstrably false conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines that Fox's own people, reportedly including Bartiromo herself, privately called "wackadoodle."

That segment, and others like it, helped cost Fox a $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion, one of the largest settlements in American media history.

A year later, she was ramping it up, dumbly sitting across from Trump as he dumbly called the January 6th rioters "peaceful people" full of "love," and echoing him by describing Ashli Babbitt as a "wonderful woman" at a "peaceful protest." No pushback like the enjoyable chocolate cake war interview. Not even a raised mascara-drenched eyebrow.

But her audience of one, Donald Trump, considered her a “Helping Honey.” So much so that rumors were abound that Trump had floated her as a potential running mate before settling on JD Vance. Can you imagine having to choose between Vance and Bartiromo? I’m definitely not going to sleep well tonight.

He praised her on Truth Social as "FANTASTIC." She really became indispensable to him, although perhaps not as much as Natalie Hart.

Then the bomb went off. Fox Business quietly instructed senior staff over the summer not to lend on-air credibility to Trump's claims about China and the 2020 election. The network was clearly trying to avoid writing another nine-figure check.

But like a gossiper with a salacious secret, Bartiromo ran around her own employer and reportedly leaked that internal guidance straight to the Trump White House. And the rest, they say, is sayonara history.

Oh Maria, you should have known better. Nobody is indispensable to Donald Trump. Loyalty to him goes in one direction. She joins Giuliani, Powell, Michael Cohen, Sean Spicer, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, among many others whose careers went kaput because they thought being loyal to the toxic Trump would pay off.

There's a rumor floating around that Bartiromo might be up for the White House press secretary job. Not a chance. First, the job is way beneath her. Second, that 59th birthday looms, and the press secretary role, as I wrote about before, is excruciatingly excruciating.

Karoline Leavitt, at 28, was burned out in less than two years. For Bartiromo to go from a potential VP running mate to presidential spokesperson is a humiliating fall from grace. And she’d be at Trump’s beck and call 24/7. He would drive her infuriatingly bananas.

More likely, she’ll do a podcast, or a humiliating stint at Newsmax. But her days in the sun are over after having DT branded on her brain, and getting burned after metaphorically and incessantly feeding chocolate cake goodies to Donald Trump.

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Trump suck-up said to learn 'final lesson' after getting burned — again — by president

Venezuelan Opposition Leader Maria Machado broke with President Donald Trump on Thursday regarding the White House’s unprecedented Venezuela oil deal, and critics were quick to ridicule her given her history of showering the president with praise.

“Her strategy of cheerleading Trump's aggression in Venezuela and appeasing him was wrongheaded,” argued independent journalist Aaron Rupar in a social media post on X Thursday night.

Last week, the Trump administration revealed that a deal had been brokered with the Venezuelan government to acquire rights to the South American nation’s untapped oil reserves for a century. The deal saw criticism from a number of conservative figures and lawmakers, and on Thursday, Machado joined in publicly scrutinizing the arrangement, while also “being careful not to attack Trump,” as noted by Wall Street Journal reporter Vera Bergengruen.

Machado was viciously mocked back in January for “groveling” to Trump in the wake of the U.S. operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. She was also criticized for awarding her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in what critics saw as an attempt to win the president’s endorsement as Venezuela’s new leader.

Trump ultimately never endorsed Machado to take the helm of the Venezuelan government, saying she didn’t have the “support or respect” among Venezuelans to lead the country, and last week, appeared to burn Machado again by reaching an arrangement with Venezuela’s current government.

“Let this be the final lesson for anyone who thinks Trump is their friend,” wrote Hal Stewart, former congressional candidate, podcast host and U.S. Navy veteran.

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald issued Machado a similarly brutal rebuke.

“I love how the pro-war western exiles from both Venezuela and Iran had to quickly realize that Trump had absolutely no interest in ‘freeing’ their countries or whatever and that the US doesn't fight wars to liberate people: only to steal their oil and install puppet regimes,” Greenwald wrote.

'Be thankful': Trump quietly confirms darkest fears about ballroom bunker

President Donald Trump quietly confirmed the possibility of a nightmare scenario conjured up by critics of his massive White House ballroom.

The 80-year-old president gave a personal tour of the construction site where the East Wing once stood to New York Magazine reporter Ben Terris, and he touched on some of the political concerns about the legally contested ballroom.

“I think the people should be for it,” Trump said when asked about those concerns. “A lot of people said, ‘Don’t do this interview.’ But I’m proud of the work I’m doing.”

He walked the reporter through the site, pointing out a pathway leading to the White House residence that had once been asphalt but now was going to be square-cut granite tiles.

“Look at the thickness of it,” Trump said. “Normally, you use one inch, as thin as you can. It’s the White House — I said, ‘F--- it, what’s the best you have?’ They said, ‘We have one that’s four inches.’”

Trump and his legal team have responded to legal efforts to slow construction on the project by arguing it was necessary for national security, and he said top generals immediately arranged a meeting when they caught wind of his plans.

“They said, ‘Sir, we’d like to build things, it would be a dream, but there’s never been anything like this proposed,’” Trump told Terris. “‘If we could build underground, we could go down five stories.’”

Trump's boasts about the project's rooftop drone port, bulletproof windows and underground military wing secure from nuclear blasts prompted Terris to ask whether the White House currently had a bunker where he could go in case of emergency.

"Not much of a place,” he says. “You can’t do much under a building that’s a little on the fragile side. You can put a little room, but you can’t put much under the White House. Nothing like this.”

Terris asked him directly about fears that have been floated that he might just hole up inside his new bunker after the 2028 election and remain in the White House.

“I haven’t heard that one,” Trump told the reporter with a laugh. “But I tell you what, it would be awfully tough to get you out. Nobody would be able to get you out.”

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