{"id":501,"date":"2009-05-27T08:05:35","date_gmt":"2009-05-27T08:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/octo-mel-gibson-yuks-it-up-ove.html"},"modified":"2009-05-27T08:05:35","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T08:05:35","slug":"octo-mel-gibson-yuks-it-up-ove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/octo-mel-gibson-yuks-it-up-ove.html","title":{"rendered":"Octo-mel: Gibson yuks it up over infidelity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Mel<\/span>Okay, it’s one thing for uber-Traditionalist Catholic Mel to dispense with his marriage of 28 years and 7 children<\/a> in private court proceedings. But what’s up with the talk-show parade to promote his latest squeeze, Russian musician Oksana Grigorieva, who is pregnant with what will be Gibson’s eighth child.<\/p>\n

\n

“I guess I’m Octo-Mel now,” he told Jay Leno Monday night.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Har har. <\/p>\n

After the requisite breast-beating (one joke Mel didn’t make)–“Look, these things happen. It’s unfortunate,” as the PEOPLE mag<\/a> relates it–Gibson and Leno go all frat boy, as The Daily Beast’s Kim Masters has it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Gibson apologized for his diatribe against the Jews, but with women he’s digging himself in deeper every day. He told Jimmy Kimmel that he never used the phrase “sugar tits” but wished he had. Then on Monday he had an exchange with Leno that sounded like it was from five decades ago. First Gibson explained that he was drawn to Grigorieva before he ever saw her, when he heard her sing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“So you were attracted to her voice,” Leno deadpanned. “Did you hear Susan Boyle?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gibson laughed and then replied, “I could put the squeeze on Susan Boyle.” (Who would doubt it?)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“There’s very few people who are man enough for Rachmaninoff,” Gibson continued.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“And I assume she has a nice Rach-maninoff?” Leno leered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This followed an exchange in which 53-year-old Gibson revealed his girlfriend’s age. “She’s going to kill me for this–she’s almost 40,” he said. “Now I’m going to have two women mad at me.” Ah, yes–your 39-year-old friend and the wife of 28 years who bore you seven children.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But are women paying attention? That depends on whom you ask. A veteran marketer says Gibson’s female fan base is and they won’t like this recent turn in his life. “A great percentage of the audience is female,” she says. “It wasn’t guys who were paying for What Women Want<\/em> or even Ransom<\/em>.” She believes the same will apply to Edge of Darkness<\/em>, [Gibson’s first starring vehicle since 2002, to be released next year] which involves a father who investigates the murder of his activist daughter. “Avenging the death of a child skews female,” she says.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another problem is that Gibson’s behavior is perilously at odds with his image, she continues. “Mel didn’t build his career on being a bad boy,” she says. “We’re not talking about Kiefer Sutherland here.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So will this hurt Mel? Will it hurt the image of the faith? Sonia Sotomayor is already getting flack for being some species of “lapsed Catholic.” And what is Mel Gibson? It shouldn’t matter, except that Gibson has set himself up as a paradigm of orthodoxy. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, it’s one thing for uber-Traditionalist Catholic Mel to dispense with his marriage of 28 years and 7 children in private court proceedings. But what’s up with the talk-show parade to promote his latest squeeze, Russian musician Oksana Grigorieva, who is pregnant with what will be Gibson’s eighth child. “I guess I’m Octo-Mel now,” he…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nOcto-mel: Gibson yuks it up over infidelity - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/octo-mel-gibson-yuks-it-up-ove.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Octo-mel: Gibson yuks it up over infidelity - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Okay, it’s one thing for uber-Traditionalist Catholic Mel to dispense with his marriage of 28 years and 7 children in private court proceedings. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}