Trashy Divorces

When the Doctor Who television series rebooted on BBC in 2005, the producers were looking for a very specific type of person to play The Doctor's human traveling companion. They wanted a young actress to connect to a new generation of viewers, but also relatably perform the role of an ordinary girl whose adventures with The Doctor connect her to what makes her extraordinary. The selection of actre...

English actress Jane Seymour has been a mainstay in film and television for decades. From her breakout role as Bond girl Solitaire in Live and Let Die to her much loved turn as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, she's been an elegant and indelible cultural presence, with a slew of awards to show for it. But her love life? Oh, that's been an awful lot rockier. Alicia has the trashy dirt on this almost-All...

We often cite Dumpster Dives as a Patreon benefit, and with so many TD Alums in the news lately, we thought it would be fun to bring one to the main feed. In the Dumpster this week, Alicia talks Grammys magic, of which there was plenty. Stacie takes a musical follow-up with the recent high-profile spat between exes Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. Then Alicia has thoughts about the spate of m...

After finally catching a live performance of Hamilton the Musical this week, Alicia's mind returned to the wild life story of Hamilton antagonist Aaron Burr. Things didn't stop for him after the infamous duel, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's play doesn't even get into Burr's secret family, unacknowledged children, or his much later marriage to - and divorce from - one of the richest women in America. And...

On March 5, 1973, Major League Baseball hosted what had to be the wildest pair of press conferences in its history. Yankees southpaw pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, for reasons that defy any kind of good explanation, revealed to reporters from spring training that they had not merely swapped wives with each other, but lives. Months before, Mike had moved into Fritz's home, with Fritz's wi...

Is there anyone who doesn't love actor Morgan Freeman? Star of iconic films like Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption, he's an Academy Award winner and the possessor of one the most recognizable voices in entertainment. As a celebrity with two divorces under his belt, he's definitely in our wheelhouse, but allegations - denied by all parties - that surfaced after his second divorce, and...

When you think of the messiest celebrity feuds of all time, who comes to mind? Is it Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun? Maybe it’s Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan… or just about anyone from any reality TV franchise? Diss and Tell is a podcast from Wondery, hosted by comedians Sydney Battle and Matt Bellassai. Each hilarious episode will take you through one of pop culture’s most iconic celebrity feuds...

Actor and musician Joey Lawrence roared into Americans' consciousness at the tender age of 5, when he tap danced his way into our hearts on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in 1982. From there, everything was coming up Joey for most of the next two decades: Gimme a Break!, Blossom, and Brotherly Love set his high water mark, but he's worked steadily in his industry ever since. He's also been through t...

In this second part, Alicia tracks Doris Day's disastrous marriage to Martin Melcher, and the enormous financial hole he left her in when he died at the young age of 52. There was still one more husband to go before Doris would decide she'd had enough of matrimony and turned her focus to a more deserving cause: rescuing animals. Want early, ad-free episodes, bonus divorces, limited series, Zoom ha...

Actress and singer Doris Day built a giant career in Hollywood on the image of the All-American Girl, a perfectly relatable Girl Next Door, virtuous and funny. It was pure spin, with Groucho Marx once quipping, "I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." Doris herself chafed at the limitations of the type-casting and how utterly at odds it was to the life she was actually...

If you were a 90s kid, you were around for the emergence of skateboarding as a sport, Tony Hawk as its king. Timing being everything, Tony didn't just master and innovate skateboarding, he also got on board the emerging art form of video games early, launching the lucrative Tony Hawk Pro-Skater series in 1999 - a franchise that continues to this day. While his success as an athlete and entrepreneu...

All the way back in Season One, Stacie covered the marriage and divorce of Sonny and Cher. But Cher's marital adventures didn't end with Sonny Bono, as Alicia shares. After things fizzled between the pair, Cher went on to marry The Allman Brothers' Gregg Allman - who was unfortunately pretty wrapped up in a cycle of addiction at the time. Things were hard for the couple, and while they gave it a r...

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Edith Wharton came by her subject matter the old fashioned way: she was born into a prominent New York City family, and was subjected to the mores of the city's high society circle from birth. This did not suit the plain, brainy young Edith even a little bit, much to her mother's horror, but Edith did eventually submit to an extremely unhappy marriage to a diagnosed...

Rascal Flatts is one of the most celebrated country music acts of the 21st century, but when the band announced that it would break up after a farewell tour in January 2020, the story took a bunch of unexpected turns. Obviously, the pandemic hit and the tour wasn't in the cards, but then it appears that guitarist Joe Don Rooney's life fell all the way apart in the ensuing months. The farewell tour...

2023 has been a monster year for breakups, with celebrities (Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas, anyone?), politicians (Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau!), musicians (almost too many to choose: Cardi B and Offset are done; Kacey Musgraves broke up with her longtime boyfriend), all hitting the escape hatch. Breakups are hard, but we are here to say: We're for it! If your relationship isn't giving yo...

In the 1980s, filmmaker John Hughes was the king of a certain kind of cinema, and his very favorite leading lady was teen idol Molly Ringwald. With a zest for the parts Hughes had written for her and a refreshing atypical beauty, Molly became one of the most famous faces of the era, and the performer of generation-defining characters. Her path departed from Hughes's after Pretty in Pink, and the y...

Some stories contain great seeds of trash that bloom instead into a resilient forest, and that's our story today. Actor Robert Downey Jr., Marvel's Iron Man, famously had a rough start to his career. For years, he was in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, and keeping the Los Angeles Police Department plenty busy with various drug-fueled bad decisions. Talented though he obviously was, he was al...

When The Sopranos premiered on HBO in 1999, no one knew how thoroughly it would change television for a generation. Mob boss Tony Soprano, portrayed so ably by actor James Gandolfini, was a complex anti-hero who was capable of both shocking violence and everyman confusion and ambivalence about his role as a father, husband, son, mobster, and human being. Gandolfini himself may have been the perfec...

When the powerful and influential pass, we always like to take a look at their personal stories, and wow is Henry Kissinger's time in the limelight as Secretary of State to Richard Nixon a shocking document of weirdness. Hailed as "Washington's Greatest Swinger" (which meant something a bit more tame than it does these days), the bookish foreign policy expert became an unlikely sex symbol during a...

Hollywood heartthrob Rock Hudson was everywhere on American screens in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the man every woman wanted, and every man wanted to be, but what Hollywood knew and the public didn't was that Rock Hudson was a fabrication, a character in and of himself. Roy Harold Scherer, later Roy Fitzgerald, was turned into Rock Hudson by one of Hollywood's most notorious talent agents, Henry...

Loretta Young's decades-long career, starting in 1917, was lauded in Hollywood. She's the winner of an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and three Primetime Emmy Awards, as well as the recipient of two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was married three times, but it's the affair with - or sexual assault by - Clark Gable, and the resulting child that became her "adopted daughter" that...

Actress Carolyn Jones had been prominent in Hollywood for a decade and a half before her turn as Morticia Addams made her a cultural touchstone. She also married four times - and divorced three - including to TV producer and unintentional season theme Aaron Spelling. This October 2020 episode originally appeared on Patreon, so it's a bit looser and a bit sillier than most. Happy Thanksgiving, Tras...

Last fall, daytime TV watchers were either thrilled or scandalized by The Daily Mail's revelation that GMA3 co-hosts Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes - both married at the time - had leapt the bounds of friendship and were canoodling in New York City bars and taking romantic getaways to a cabin upstate. ABC pulled the pair from the air within days, and they'd exited the network entirely by early 2023, b...

Aaron Spelling spent decades at the pinnacle of television production in America, spearheading cultural touchstones like Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, Dynasty, and, for today's story, the 90s classic Beverly Hills, 90210. The show launched numerous young stars' careers, some more successfully than others. Actor Ian Ziering portrayed Steve Sanders in all 10 seasons of the show, but his life and...

We all have celebrities that we root for through thick and thin, and for Alicia, Tori Spelling is one of those. Daughter of Aaron and Candy Spelling, Tori's life went awry when she met Dean McDermott, and both promptly divorced their spouses to be together. That was then. In this Trashy Divorces Classics episode, we re-air our Season 6 story from 2020 and Alicia brings us up to date on all the lat...