A 24-year-old Malawian man who claims to be the father of a girl Madonna wants to adopt vowed yesterday to fight the US pop icon’s adoption bid.
Speaking one day before Malawi’s supreme court was to hear Madonna’s appeal against a judge’s rejection of her application to adopt three-year-old Chifundo “Mercy” James, James Kambewo said, “I want Mercy back. I am the biological father of Mercy.”
“I don’t have the money to pay a lawyer, but I am looking for one so that I can issue an injunction stopping Madonna from continuing to seek to adopt my daughter,” Kambewa said.
Madonna has appealed against a high court decision to reject her request to adopt Mercy, who would have become a sibling to David Banda, a boy she adopted in Malawi in 2006.
Three supreme court judges, headed by chief justice Lovemore Munlo, will hear her appeal today.
Kambewa said he had not seen Mercy since her mother gave birth to her and died shortly afterwards.
He said he abandoned the baby after the parents of Mercy’s mother accused him of killing their daughter because she had died soon after giving birth.
When he learned that Madonna wanted to adopt Mercy, he said, “I discovered it was my daughter and vowed to see if could bring her to my home.”
Kambewa works as a domestic worker in Blantyre, the commercial capital, earning about US$80 a month.
In other legal news, the son of actor Ryan O’Neal has been sentenced to pursue a strict drug rehabilitation program after a series of arrests for drug possession, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said.
Redmond O’Neal, 24, was ordered back to court on May 28 for a progress report, a spokeswoman for the office said on Thursday.
“If he successfully completes the program, which is at least a year but could be longer, his criminal convictions in two separate cases for drug possession will be dismissed. If he fails, he could face up to four years in state prison,” said Jane Robison, the district attorney’s press secretary.
O’Neal, whose mother is actress Farrah Fawcett, pleaded no contest this month to a felony charge of methamphetamine possession after drugs were found in a raid on his 67-year-old father’s Malibu home in September.
He was on probation at the time of the raid following a guilty plea in June 2008 for possession of heroin and methamphetamines, and driving under the influence.
He was arrested for drug possession again on April 5 outside a prison after visiting a friend. He is due in court May 22 for a preliminary hearing in that case.
Ryan O’Neal, who received an Oscar nomination for Love Story in 1971 and also starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, was sentenced in January to 18 months in a drug rehabilitation program.
On the lighter side of celebrity goings-on, a Vienna radio station has admitted that it sent a look-a-like of US pop star Beyonce as a prank to the Albertina Museum, which was angered after organizing a personal tour, the APA news agency reported.
KroneHit radio said that the American star, who gave a concert in Vienna on Tuesday, was not aware that the station had hired the German look-a-like to walk around the Austrian capital.
Some newspaper reports had previously said Beyonce hired the double to go to the museum while she went shopping.
“We followed the look-a-like around Vienna all day to see how people reacted when they met Beyonce,” Andrea Hilber, KroneHit’s marketing chief, told APA.
“We had an excellent private visit of the Albertina Museum carried out by its director,” Klaus Albert Schroeder, Hilber added.
The Albertina is one of the Austrian capital’s most famous museums. Recent visitors include Hollywood stars such as Brad Pitt and Nicolas Cage.
Originally believing that Beyonce sent a double so that she could go shopping, the museum had said it would protest to the star’s management.
“What a cheek,” Albertina spokeswoman Verena Dahlitz was quoted as saying.
Not all practical jokes go totally unappreciated, though.
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