Kristen Bell has “unfrozen” her assets, teaming with Instagram influencer and star Tommy Marcus, aka Quentin Quarantino, to donate $100,000 toward paying people’s medical debt.
Initially she agreed to promote one health-related GoFundMe page a day after Marcus sent her a DM asking for her help, TMZ reported. Upon reading some of the hard-luck stories, Bell’s heart melted, and in true Disney Princess Anna style, she gave $100,000.
“This was amazing,” she wrote to Marcus, who posted screen shots of their conversation. “But I wanna do more how can I give $100,000 to people who need it for medical bills? I want to make sure we do it in the best way, how do we do it??”
In a message exchange, the two worked out a system for her to donate the second half of each fundraising appeal once the first half had been raised.
More than 100 million adults in the U.S. are saddled with a collective $220 billion in medical debt, according to Undue Medical Debt (formerly RIP Medical Debt).
Baldoni sues NY times for $250M in costar dispute
Justin Baldoni is firing back after being accused of sexual harassment by his costar Blake Lively, filing a libel suit against the New York Times on Tuesday, alleging the newspaper published an article “rife with inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and omissions” that relied on Lively’s “self-serving narrative.”
Lively had filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department in December, accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment and retaliation. In it, Lively said that after she raised concerns of sexual harassment on the set of their film, “It Ends With Us,” Baldoni and his team retaliated against her, leaking unflattering press to try to ruin her professional reputation.
Lively’s complaint was first reported in The New York Times, which published an article titled, “ ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” on Dec. 21.
Now, Baldoni is alleging that Lively created false sexual harassment accusations so she could take control of the film, then set out on a campaign to “reshape her public persona” with “salacious, headline-grabbing allegations” in the New York Times at Baldoni’s expense.
A spokesperson for the Times told CNN the publication plans to “vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”
“The role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, spokesperson for the Times, told CNN in a statement Tuesday. Attorneys for Lively told CNN in a statement that “nothing in this lawsuit changes anything” about Lively’s claims.
— From wire reports