Crime pays in Los Angeles, as usual. Mel Gibson, according to TMZ and other sources, has cut a deal with the Los Angeles District Attorney in his domestic abuse case with former lover and baby mama Oksana Grigorieva. He gets no jail time, just counseling, and, of course, pays up for admitting to “battery.”
Thus, Gibson gets rid of the case six weeks before he must do promotion for his new movie, “The Beaver.” You can just imagine those junkets: Mel will likely bar reporters from asking about this, or the custody case, Oksana, plus all his other stuff including DUI, anti-Semitism. his father or the Holocaust. Or his church. Or his divorce. Or “sugar tits.” During promotion last year for “Edge of Darkness,” Mel verbally attacked several reporters. These will be short interviews!
Gibson — as a movie star not bound by the usual laws– is in Guatemala on what’s described as a charity mission to save the rainforests. It doesn’t matter that he’s had no connection to rainforest preservation in the past. Or to the main groups–like the Rainforest Foundation and the Rainforest Alliance. It’s a photo op, or a pr stunt, to dilute the news of the plea.
According to TMZ “Mel will plead no contest to simple battery, a lesser charge than corporal injury on a spouse. Although battery is a misdemeanor, under the law, since it involves “a person with whom the defendant is cohabiting” and “a person who is the parent of the defendant’s child,” Mel must appear in person.”
Gibson will be back from Guatemala and in court on Friday.
Mel’s neighborhood is getting to be an interesting place. A couple of years ago I ran into another star who’d beaten the system, Robert Blake, having lunch at a bikers’ bar jusr down the road from Mel’s personally funded church. Stars in Agoura Hills!
