Trashy Divorces

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...

Content note: Discussion of suicide. For a vanishingly brief few years in the late 80s and early 90s, America fell in love with a French actor most known for his small stature and high excitement at new arrivals. When Herve Villechaize opened Aaron Spelling's Fantasy Island with the exclamation, "The plane! The plane!" the public knew they were about to treated to another charming adventure featur...

When Bravo launched The Real Housewives of New Jersey, it couldn't have foreseen that it was launching its first Housewife inmate, but that's exactly what happened to Teresa Giudice and her husband, Joe. Their legal ordeal went on for years, and ended with the pair separated by an ocean and choosing to divorce, but Teresa - the only original cast member still present for Season 14 - seems to have...

If you were of a certain age in the 1990s, it's highly likely that Tia Mowry and her sister Tamera played a pivotal role in your development as an adolescent. The twins starred in Sister, Sister, an anchor of ABC's TGIF lineup, from 1995-1999, and became major parts of the zeitgeist of the era. Both have gone on to successful careers in entertainment, and both have married and had children of thei...

The US National Women's Soccer Team is mostly known for its dominance in the field, but lately, a cheating scandal has emerged that's rocking the sport. Not cheating at sports, mind you, but the more personal kind. Soccer power couple Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, married since 2019, are suddenly divorcing, and it looks like it has everything to do with One Tree Hill star Sophia Bush. Want early,...

Hollywood legend Joan Bennett didn't always want to follow in her family's footsteps as an actor. The youngest of the Bennett Sisters, her siblings Constance and Barbara were already film stars by the time Joan determined to hang a shingle as an interior designer, but motherhood got in the way. After her first short marriage and divorce, she had an extra mouth to feed, which launched her on a deca...

With the publication of Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography, Stacie's been following up on some of the highs, lows, and general mayhem in the life and career of Elon Musk since we first covered him back in May of 2021. We really just scratch the surface on our update - a comprehensive telling of the last couple of years would easily be as long as Isaacson's entire book, and then we re-air our or...

Some stories have so much trash it's hard to know where to begin, but for scion of the Standard Oil fortune Hugh D. Auchincloss, it's hard to know even where to stop. Auchincloss, about as blue blood as you can get, was married three times, and through that particular journey, ended up being step-father to the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwell, from his third marriage, as well as...

Bravo's The Real Housewives franchise has lent many things to our culture: feuds, fights, memes, and a constellation of people who've come to be known as Bravolebrities. For original New Jersey cast member Dina Manzo, the experience sparked genuine conflict with her sister, also a cast member, and Dina became the first Housewife to leave a series of her own volition. But that's the beginning, not...

Content Warning: Child abuse, domestic violence Actress Christina Ricci has been entertaining us on the big and small screen since she was just ten years old. While many child stars chafe under the pressure of early stardom, for Christina, escaping to a film set was a welcome diversion from her parents' troubled marriage and eventual divorce. While her career would become a sustained success as an...

The years after Tony's second marriage were not happy ones for him. His career took a downturn as Americans' musical tastes changed, and he coped with the dislocation in extremely unhealthy ways, which crashed his marriage, too. Finding himself entirely adrift, he did the most vulnerable thing a struggling parent could do: he called his adult sons and asked for help. It was the turning point in a...

By nearly all accounts, crooner Tony Bennett was one of the greats. Not just as a singer and performer, but in the ways he treated people, the causes he chose to champion, and his endless willingness to contribute his talents to charity events. But even the greats have rough spots! There may be very few people with an unkind word to say about Tony Bennett, but his two ex-wives could surely be amon...

That an actor and a musician would be divorcing isn't really news, but in the case of Jonas Brothers frontman Joe Jonas and his recently filed divorce from wife of four years, Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner, a dumb PR move turned it into a huge story. Did Joe mean for the tabloids to run stories suggesting that Sophie is a bad mom? We may never know, but this Jonas Brother has managed to give...

Rush Limbaugh ascended to heights of conservative talk radio in the 80s and 90s, introducing a brand of discourse in America most notable for its toxicity. While there was a willing audience for his bilge, it's clear from his three divorces, substance misuse, and legal issues, that his notoriety wasn't without costs. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to sales@advertisecast.com or visit...

After Carl Sagan's first divorce, from biologist Lynn Margulis, he was to find love again. And, in a massive betrayal, yet again. Look, the guy indisputably made big contributions to science and the public's understanding of it, but his personal life was a mess! Want early, ad-free episodes, bonus divorces, limited series, Zoom hangouts, and more? Join us at patreon.com/trashydivorces ! Sponsors G...

Astronomer Carl Sagan was an ever-present voice in American culture for several decades in the latter half of the 20th century, sometimes commenting on topics far beyond the scope of his space science training. If you think that suggests some ego, you would be right, and that attribute or character flaw (depending on your perspective) certainly impacted his ability to enjoy happy marriages. In thi...

We woke up to the sad news that Jimmy Buffett, music's "Mayor of Margaritaville," had passed peacefully on September 1. Alicia has been a Buffett superfan since childhood, and the only thing that felt right for today's episode was to bring back her 2020 Jimmy Buffett story. Enjoy a margarita, if that's your thing, and have a safe and happy long Labor Day weekend. Want early, ad-free episodes, bonu...