People in the News for March 3, 1998

Tuesday, March 3, 1998 | 10:31 a.m.

Welcome to People in the News, where this is going to hurt us more than it'll hurt you. You can avert your eyes from this Martha Stewart item when the pain gets too intense, or skip ahead to the Liz Taylor news, or flee to the relative sanity of "Dilbert" on Page 6C. Not us. We're obliged to go mano a womano with the prim lifestyle maven and her lawsuit against the National Enquirer. And we're worried for our safety, at least if the Enquirer is right and "Martha Stewart is Mentally Ill." That was the headline over a story claiming Stewart "indulged in self-mutilation and threatened suicide" and "has frantic fears of being abandoned, a chronic sensation of feeling useless and empty, and a near-constant anger." It's amazing -- what some call "mental illness" we here at People in the News refer to as "the workday" (we told you this hurts us more than it hurts you). But the allegations sent Stewart glue-gunning for the tab: She filed a $10 million libel and defamation suit. Apparently the story damaged her reputation as being better than everyone else and caused her "shame, mortification and emotional distress." The Enquirer this week moved to have her suit dismissed, claiming the article merely presented the opinions of experts. Stewart's lawyer argued that the opinions were presented as medically provable facts. The judge sided with Stewart and the suit will go on!

Briefly

"This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me" could easily have described the comedy stylings of the late Andy Kaufman, who staged a number of room-clearing performance-art-comedy ... well, thingies is the most apt description that leaps to mind. Now it appears Jim Carrey will bring Kaufman's life (and perhaps death, in 1984, of lung cancer) to the big screen in a Milos Forman biopic, tentatively titled "Man in the Moon" (after the R.E.M. song about Kaufman). He beat out several other hot actors, including Nicolas Cage and John Cusak. We've been trying to picture the "zany," rubber-faced Carrey as the non-zany, straight-faced Kaufman as the nutty, out-there Latka, but we can't do it. The shame! The mortification! The emotional distress! Man, that hurts!

Compiled by Scott Dickensheets