Clooney: I Feel Abused

Poor George Clooney - he's engaged in a battle of wits with the unarmed Arianna Huffington. A few days ago a blog item appeared under Clooney's name at the Huffington Post. Unfortuntely for both George and Arianna, George didn't write it. It was put together by Huffington from excerpts of other interviews Clooney had given. When George complained, Huffington threatened (from Lloyd Grove):

George Clooney is spitting mad at Arianna Huffington - and the blogosphere is wobbling on its axis.

"She said some things that I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me - bad for my career. Well, screw you!" the movie star told me yesterday about a conversation he had with the doyenne of Huffingtonpost.com.

"I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Clooney, in his only interview on the subject, took off the gloves in his fight with Huffington over a blog purportedly written by the "Syriana" Oscar-winner and posted on her Web site Monday.

"I feel abused," he said.

Yesterday, Clooney released an angry statement calling Huffington's methods "purposefully misleading," and she acknowledged that his so-called blog - slamming Dems who voted for the war in Iraq for fear of being labeled "liberal" - was actually compiled from Clooney's recent interviews with the UK's Guardian and CNN's Larry King.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."

Huffington, who'd been haggling with Clooney's publicist, Stan Rosenfield, over the wording of a disclaimer, told me: "I believe it is time for all of us to move on."

Clooney and Arianna deserve each other.

In other Hollywood news, actress Sharon Stone has some thoughts about over-40 women as she promotes "Basic Instinct 2: the Return of the Groin Shots" (or something like that):

"In America we tend to erase women after 40, and it's a period when women become their most interesting. They are sexual in a different and alluring way," added the star, who recently became the face of Dior skincare.

Correction, Sharon - in Hollywood they erase women after 40 (or they erase themselves through plastic surgery). In America, women over 40 are still respected and loved.