In the news
■ Taking the stand in a Manhattan court this week, Eagles co-founder Don Henley expressed “regret” over his 1980 arrest, when police entered his Los Angeles mansion and found cocaine, quaaludes, marijuana, and a 16-year-old prostitute who’d suffered an overdose. Henley, now 76, said the band’s breakup months earlier had left him intensely depressed, and so he’d called a “madam” to arrange “company.” He said he hadn’t known the girl was underage, “but I know there was no sex.” Henley pleaded no contest in 1981 to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The testimony came during the trial of three collectors accused of scheming to sell stolen handwritten drafts of songs from the Eagles’ 1976 album Hotel California, including the iconic tile track. Henley said his drafts were stolen by a biographer in the late ’70s; the defendants cited his arrest as evidence of Henley’s poor judgment at the time, claiming he voluntary handed the papers to the author.
■ Former daytime talk-show host Wendy Williams is suffering from alcohol-related dementia, her son said in a new Lifetime documentary. Where Is Wendy Williams? chronicles the many health problems that caused Williams, 59, to lose her long-running show in 2022. The documentary shows her spending days in bed surrounded by bottles of booze, struggling with memory loss, and crying as she explains that she’s lost almost all feeling in her visibly swollen feet. Her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., says doctors told him, “She was drinking so much, it was starting to affect her headspace and her brain.” Shortly before the documentary aired, other family members said Williams had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and the language disorder aphasia.
■ Supermodel Gisele Bundchen was spotted kissing fellow Brazilian Joaquim Valente while out in Miami last week, after spending months denying that she was dating the hunky jujitsu instructor. Bundchen and Valente were spotted vacationing in Costa Rica in late 2022, just two weeks after she finalized her divorce from NFL legend Tom Brady—with whom she has two children. Brady, who is now in a relationship with model Irina Shayk, suspects the pair started dating as early as mid-2021, reports the Daily Mail (U.K.). “Tom and Joaquim are not friends,” a source said, “but Joaquim is around his kids, so Tom has to find the good in him.”