Mostly, it's a pretty good deal to be rich and celebrated in America � unless you come up down with a dread disease and someone leaks your medical information. What do you do? What can you do?
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As Christina Applegate observed last week, the options are limited.
She is exactly the latest celebrity to find her medical troubles in a tabloid. Patrick Swayze, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Dennis Quaid, George Clooney, Farrah Fawcett � all in late years receive seen information from their medical records, or those of loved ones, spread in the press and on the Internet � without their permission and sometimes in violation of the law.
Sometimes leaks stem from happenstance.
"I've been at the doctor's office and had some other person in the waiting room call and report that I was in that location � I think it's appalling," says actress Jennifer Garner.
But frequently celebrities suspect that medical personnel or loved ones have been lured by money to share sexual details. In a celebrity-mad culture in which stars' medical problems have high news value and tabloids have abstruse pockets, the people's proper to recognise about Swayze's pancreatic cancer or TomKat's baby echogram or Clooney's injuries in a motorcycle accident trumps celebrities' right to preserve their medical records private.
Unsurprisingly, celebrities, their publicists and their lawyers are bitter, even though there's aught new virtually this: Elizabeth Taylor's many medical crises have been tabloid fodder for decades. What's new now, they say, is the increased public appetency for any celebrity news, the increased competition to get that news and the immediate payment some outlets wave to entice people.
"Every time you think the bar can't get any lower, it gets frown. It's beyond outrageous," says publicist Ken Sunshine. "This is way, way over the line and unwarrantable in a civilized society."
Blair Berk, a Los Angeles lawyer wHO has delineate many celebrities, says no one should have to give up all rights to concealment just because he's famous.
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