Truth rating: 0
5:51 pm, May 17th, 2012
(Star)
(National Enquirer)
Sister tabloids National Enquirer and Star are continuing to attack John Travolta with allegations that his marriage to Kelly Preston is a sham and that he’s engaged in a decades-long string of gay liaisons.
This week, the mags have given particular attention to Vikki Lizzi, the estranged girlfriend of the late Jeff Conaway, Travolta’s co-star in Grease more than thirty years ago.
Lizzi makes some very serious, completely unsubstantiated claims in both the Enquirer and Star – specifically, that Conaway allegedly revealed that Travolta had once performed oral sex on him as he slept.
In the Enquirer, Conaway is said to have “left Vikki a shocking note he’d written for a failed suicide attempt in 2006″ in which he supposedly claimed that at some point in the 1990s, he “awoke in his home to find Travolta giving him oral sex.”
According to Lizzi, the incident “ruined the actors’ friendship.”
Star quotes Lizzi — again, the estranged girlfriend of a deceased, long-ago Travolta co-star — as saying, “Jeff told me that John and Kelly’s marriage was an arrangement.”
She adds, “Jeff said that Kelly was OK with the arrangement. Jeff said that Kelly knows that John is gay, and that’s why she’s OK with it.”
Conaway, of course, is not around to verify Lizzi’s story, and Travolta’s lawyers point out that Lizzi has been a longtime “source” for American Media Inc. (AMI), the company behind both the National Enquirer and Star.
Marty Singer, Travolta’s attorney, slams Lizzi’s credibility in a statement to Gossip Cop.
“Vikki Lizzi, the late Jeff Conaway’s estranged girlfriend, has been a regular paid source for the AMI’s tabloids, yet this is the very first time we are hearing this new outlandish story that is supposedly based on a six-year-old notarized suicide note,” Singer tells us.
He continues, “Vikki Lizzi sold more stories than we can count to AMI publications both before and after Jeff Conaway died. Why didn’t this ‘notarized letter’ story ever come up before? Why did this story surface only now, after the AMI tabloids sparked a frenzy with its bogus Doe #1 story, and a year after Mr. Conaway’s death when he is no longer around to refute it?”
The two John Does who recently accused Travolta of sexual harassment have since withdrawn their lawsuit.
Singer tells Gossip Cop, “This spate of recklessly published tabloid stories is just part of a malicious tabloid agenda to boost lagging sales by running outrageous defamatory stories about my client sourced by people seeking notoriety or a payday.”
It bears noting that despite the flurry of rumors around Travolta’s sexuality and his marriage to Preston, the salacious stories in the Enquirer, Star and other tabloids have all wilted under scrutiny, with the accusers unwilling to take a real legal stand.
There’s no reason to think there’s any actual evidence to back up Lizzi’s sensationalism.
Follow @GossipCop on Twitter!
Like us on Facebook!
