Trashy Divorces

In her later years, French actress and icon Brigitte Bardot devoted her considerable talents to the protection of animals all over the planet. In the 1980s, having retired from film, she created the Brigitte Bardot Foundation dedicated to animal welfare, and used her substantial platform to contact governments and heads of state with letters decrying their nation's treatment of animals. But her attitudes about people becam...

As Brigitte made her way into the 1960s as a bona fide, worldwide celebrity, she found the experience was not especially to her liking. Where she had once strolled the streets of her beloved Saint-Tropez barefoot and happy, by the time she found herself pregnant and married for a second time, an army of photographers assembled outside of her home made her little more than a prisoner in her own life. 

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In the final days of the no-good, very-bad year of 2025, the world learned that the iconic French actress Brigitte Bardot had died at the age of 91. Having achieved international stardom back in 1957 in the film And God Created Woman - a collab with her first husband, director Roger Vadim - she became a significant cultural export from France in an era where the rules that seemed to govern the conduct of ordinary people we...

Comedian and actress Amy Schumer had a bit of whirlwind romance with her husband, chef Chris Fischer. They married after just four months of dating, but seven years later - after a child, a round of IVF, various health challenges, an autism diagnosis - they've announced that the marriage has come to its end. But cleanly, and apparently very amicably. Are Amy and Chris role models for a good divorce? 

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We live in an era where scandals often fail to make much of a dent in the reputations of the rich and famous, and today's story illustrates that this sad situation isn't really new. In 1870s Brooklyn, a famous preacher named Henry Ward Beecher had a problem in his private life. He was having affairs. Lots and lots of affairs. But it was his affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his close friend Ted, that would scandali...

Happy New Year, Trash Pandas! We're back, and so much happened during our short break that we wanted to get into the highlights - and lowlights! In the dumpster this week:

• Mel Gibson is single again, and we wonder if that's related to Mel Gibson being able to own guns again. 
• Gisele Bundchen won her divorce from Tom Brady so hard that she's now married to the karate guy! Jiu-Jitsu, but you know what we mean. Mazel!
• C...

In this encore from July of 2020, Alicia has screen legend Charlie Chaplin, who passed away on Christmas Day in 1977. His four marriages typify the line from Dazed and Confused, “I get older, they stay the same age.”

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Most of the world met Paul Hogan in 1986, when he starred in the smash hit film Crocodile Dundee. A sensation, the movie remains the highest grossing Australian film ever. For Paul, global stardom was the result of an entirely unexpected series of events that led him to a career as a TV funnyman, but what happened next did a lot of damage to his reputation - and marked the final end to his first marriage. 

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This week, Alicia shines the spotlight on The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. From her turbulent childhood to her career trajectory, with a few divorces and spiderwebs thrown in too, Aretha's story really does contain multitudes. 

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In this encore mash-up, Alicia brings us the 90s-era heartbreaker split with the marriage and divorce of actors Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. Then, Stacie continues the thread with actress Helena Bonham Carter, whose post-Branagh relationship, with director Tim Burton, began every bit as controversially as the one with Ken had.

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For a certain kind of political obsessive, the Trumpworld dispatches penned by Olivia Nuzzi in the first term were almost too on-the-nose. Still in her 20s then, her ability to paint the distorted, distorting figures that inhabited the era in prose was always interesting and often revelatory. And then, she fell in love with a subject, then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and her life, her job, and her engagem...

When two visionaries meet, strange things can happen. So it was for Natalie Massenet, founder of upscale shopping site Net-a-Porter, and Swedish creative director and Frame founder Erik Torstensson. The high fashion power couple parlayed their early successes into venture capital projects - including Skims - and then shocked their world in August 2025 with a bombshell lawsuit from Natalie alleging all kinds of inappropriat...

In this April 2019 encore, we go deep into the turbulent love, life, and times of Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Theirs was a complicated love - but also somehow quite inspiring. Check out the art we mention in the episode at our website.

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Since crossing into stardom with 1992's Basic Instinct, actress Sharon Stone has certainly had some adventures, both in her career and her personal life. It's actually difficult to summarize today's tale, but suffice it to say, there's a lot in here for fans of some of Hollywood's most notorious lounge lizards, as well as lizards of other sorts. 

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Everyone knows that JFK was a man of vociferous appetites when it came to women, but the secret story of a possible love child fathered with a teenage maid in the Hyannis Port compound is not commonly known. Many questions persist, but the tale of JFK's maybe-baby-mama, Alicia Corning Clark, is such a quintessentially American one - from refugee to the Kennedy's to Hollywood and beyond - that we can forgive that much of th...

The ACE Family channel on YouTube blew up in a big way in 2016, taking two young parents into realms of wealth and fame they couldn't possibly have planned for - and were clearly unequipped to handle. While the channel grew to some 18 million followers, brand partnerships soured into litigation and the marriage of Catherine Paiz and Austin McBroom eventually collapsed. If you've ever wondered, "What would my life be like i...

We welcome back journalist and author Andrew Morton to spill some tea, past and present, on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson. The former Duke and Duchess of York are not the only Windsor family members in the lens - also included are Prince Phillip, King Charles III, Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince William and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie too.

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On the occasion of what would have been her 111th birthday, today we revisit Alicia's 2020 story of the incredible life of Hollywood icon Hedy Lamarr. Yes, she was an outstanding and hugely popular actress, but the lesser known part of the story is that Hedy Lamarr was a passionate and gifted inventor. She and composer and pianist George Antheil developed and patented a way to encrypt messages during WWII using different f...