Sandra Bullock and her husband were unhurt after a head-on crash with a drunken driver in Massachusetts, police said on Saturday.
The actress and her husband, Jesse James of TV’s Monster Garage, were being driven in a sport-utility vehicle on Friday night when a station wagon crossed the center line and hit them, Gloucester police Lieutenant Jerry Cook said.
Both vehicles were totaled, but no one was hurt. The vehicles were traveling at no more than 32km per hour, Cook said.
PHOTO : AP
The other car was driven by Lucille Gatchell, who registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.20 percent, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent, Cook said.
She was held by Gloucester police overnight and released on personal recognizance. She is to be arraigned tomorrow.
According to Cook, Bullock, 43, was “gracious” and concerned about whether Gatchell was OK.
PHOTO : AP
The actress is in Massachusetts filming the romantic comedy The Proposal.
In a different kind of collision, a judge on Friday awarded US $4,510 in damages to a photographer who worried he would be killed when Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband punched him in the face on a Beverly Hills street.
The eccentric hubby, Frederic Von Anhalt, initially wanted to give the man much more for busting open his lip.
In his complaint, Dirk Smeten claimed Frederic Von Anhalt, 62, angrily approached and began punching him repeatedly while Smeten attempted to photograph him in May 2005. The blows caused Smeten to fall to the sidewalk, according to the complaint.
Smeten claimed he suffered lip lacerations, cuts to his face, swelling, pain, high blood pressure, headaches and stress symptoms.
“Plaintiff thought he was going to be killed by defendant,” according to the complaint. Smeten was seeking US$137,000 in damages.
Von Anhalt said he was taking his wife to the hairdresser and was trying to get her out of his car and into her wheelchair when the photographer approached.
“I have this camera over my shoulder trying to photograph my wife. No respect whatsoever,” Von Anhalt said. “I pushed him away. He came back. I pushed him away again. He came back again,” Von Anhalt said.
But Von Anhalt believes the judge’s decision was fair.
“I knew I had to pay something. His lip was bleeding. The bleeding lip was probably when I pushed the camera in his face,” he said.
Von Anhalt said he wanted to settle the case, and offered Smeten US$20,000.
“They didn’t take it. Now they get US$4,500. It makes me very happy,” he said.
Also on Friday, rapper Foxy Brown was freed from a New York City prison after serving eight months of a one-year sentence stemming from an assault of two nail salon stylists over a US$20 manicure.
Brown, 29, whose real name is Inga Marchand, was sentenced to probation in October 2006 for assaulting the stylists. But in September 2007 a judge ruled she was not taking probation seriously and sent her prison for one year.
A Department of Corrections spokesman said inmates typically serve two-thirds of their sentence, adding that Brown had been released and driven from the Rikers Island prison by New York City Councilman Charles Barron.
He said this was a highly unusual move as inmates are usually taken from prison on a public bus and delivered to a city parking lot. But he said that as a public official, Barron had access to prison and had requested to pick up Brown.
In October authorities said Brown received 76 days in isolation in jail after getting into a shoving match with another inmate and refusing to do a drug test.
Then in January, Brown asked for early release to treat an ear condition she feared could threaten her hearing.
“Yes, I’ve made some bad choices and stupid mistakes. But please understand that sitting in a prison with murderers and criminals is not rehabilitating or what I need to deal with my inner issues,” Brown wrote in a four-page handwritten letter to Judge Melissa Jackson.
Brown became the first female rap artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with her 1999 album Chyna Doll
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