<![CDATA[Gawker: defamer, interventions]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: defamer, interventions]]> http://gawker.com/tag/defamer/interventions http://gawker.com/tag/defamer/interventions <![CDATA[Spears Family Incensed That Dr. Phil Accepted Their Idiotic Invitation To Ambush Britney]]>
While our proprietary, patent-pending VirtuaPhil™ technology allowed you to experience what a showdown between the KingWorld tough-love swami and a Britney Spears well-past the verge of a nervous breakdown might have looked like, the actual footage from their historic meeting will never air. (Save, perhaps, for repeated 4 a.m. screenings on a rickety Super-8 projector in the doctor's home library, popping cashews into his mouth as he obsessively relives every moment of the intervention that got away.) Now the Spears family, whose only means of dealing with a situation involves relaying their problems to the nearest national media outlet, is on the attack, with frayed matriarch Lynne Spears and fecund tween daughter Jamie Lynn having dispatched a representative to The Today Show to insist they had never authorized a Britney-themed Dr. Phil episode.

The representative further castigates the celebrity therapist for having made "inappropriate" public statements regarding Britney's mental state. A betrayal of trust does appear to have occurred here, as of the approximately 16,000 licensed mental health professionals currently working in California, the one the Spears family painstakingly selected to help a relative deeply in need, with nothing to gain from going public with this access save for perhaps a massive ratings boost on his nationally syndicated show, marks a clear breach of TV-therapist / bottomed-out-pop-star-patient confidentiality.

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=342797&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[David Hasselhoff's Darkest Moments: Only on Extra!]]>
[UPDATE: It seems that no one has the exclusive on the video. More on this confusing nonsense here.] A frenzied series of press releases arriving in our inbox this morning have alerted us to Extra's latest "get," a "cry for help" video in which "a shirtless and extremely intoxicated" David Hasselhoff "sits on the floor of a Las Vegas hotel room so out of it that he is unable to feed himself a hamburger," footage reportedly commissioned by Hasselhoff so that he could see what he looks like when he's too drunk to enjoy a room service snack, a rock-bottom moment in any celebrity addict's life.

How Extra obtained the video isn't mentioned, but one imagines that Hasselhoff decided that his self-flagellating approach to recovery couldn't truly be complete until he's suffered the public humiliation of having his alcohol-soaked nadir reduced to a slickly produced entertainment newsmagazine segment, then forcing himself to listen as Mark McGrath barely contains his disappointment in how far his Baywatch idol has fallen as he solemnly sets up the disturbing clip.

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