Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Movies

Aiming to outwit celebrity site

Actor George Clooney solicits help from friends to join his campaign against a Web site he says threatens stars.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 3, 2006

George Clooney is known as a prankster, but his plan to undermine a Web site that posts celebrity sightings is no joke, his publicist said.

Clooney has suggested swamping Gawker.com's "Gawker Stalker" feature with false notes about stars' whereabouts, spokesman Stan Rosenfield said.

In an e-mail Rosenfield recently distributed on Clooney's behalf to other high-powered publicists, the actor calls for publicity firms and their clients to join the effort against the site that some have called a threat to celebrities.

"There is a simple way to render these guys useless," Clooney said in the message. "Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars.

"A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride," Clooney writes, signing the note, "Thanks, George."

Rosenfield said he did not know how the e-mail, which was intended as private, was publicly released and reported Friday by the New York Post.

Gawker fired back online. It chastised Clooney for climbing "on his hotmail soapbox to so publicly break our hearts" and then issued a challenge to the public: be the first person to send a new camera-phone photo of Clooney to Gawker and win DVDs of his films Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve.

"It's childish what they're doing," Rosenfield said. "It shows the level of their maturity."

Clooney's effort may be working, though not exactly as he had intended.

Rosenfield said he heard from two publicists whose clients Gawker Stalker said were spotted in New York when the stars were actually abroad.

Monday, Gawker said, "Our inbox was indeed flooded with hundreds of sightings (over the weekend), almost all of which were of George Clooney. We're sure that's exactly what he meant."

Among the "sightings" the site said it received:

"Just saw George Clooney at the Peninsula. He had a mustard stain on his jacket, was kissing a Mexican woman and eating a watermelon."

"I just had a beer with George Clooney at the Ranger game in Arlington, Tx. He's quite a nice guy, very polite and good manners."

"Just spotted him at The Landings in Jacksonville, FL."

Clooney, who received the best supporting actor Oscar this year for Syriana, has weighed in before on celebrity privacy. Although an outspoken defender of the First Amendment, he has criticized tabloids and the paparazzi who shoot for them as sometimes going over the line.

Gawker, a popular New York-centric site purveying celebrity and media news and gossip, had been posting map-free "Stalker" sightings for two years. Now it pinpoints the locations of readers' random sightings using a Google map of Manhattan.

Publicists say the new feature puts their clients in harm's way by revealing their specific whereabouts.

"Not at all," the site's editor, Jessica Coen, said. "Our spies are just regular people ... people that are excited to see someone they like. Our readers are, for the most part, a very educated, well-meaning bunch."

Among the sightings listed Monday:

"Barbra Streisand & James Brolin, 1500 Broadway, April 3, 2006 @ 11 a.m. Arm in arm, but arguing about lunch plans."

"Drew Barrymore, W 18th Street at 5th Ave, April 3, 2006 ... filming 11:30 a.m."

"Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban, 423 Amsterdam Ave. April 2, 2006 @ 11 a.m. They were having brunch in a cozy booth in the back of Sarabeth's on the upper west side. They were holding hands on top of the table. They both had omeletes, he had oatmeal, and they split pancakes and fruit salad. Reading the NY Times." Rosenfield rebuts the idea of the site as a harmless diversion.

For those who would argue that, he said, "I have two words: Rebecca Schaeffer."

In 1989, Schaeffer, 21, was starring in the TV series My Sister Sam when she was shot to death in 1989 at her Los Angeles home by an obsessed fan. The fan was sentenced to life in prison.

-- Times staff contributed to this report.

[Last modified April 3, 2006, 17:25:12]