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NY Daily News JV gossip Lloyd Grove reports that during a recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania, director Kevin Smith told the story of one of the stranger celebrity bathroom couplings now on record, one between Silent Bob partner-in-crime Jay Mewes and skeletal Simple Life personage Nicole Richie:

Smith also claimed, to roughly 1,000 laughing undergrads, that the 24-year-old Richie once lured Jason Mewes, a frequent character in Smith's movies as the Jay of "Jay and Silent Bob," into a restroom for a spirited quickie.

Richie's spokeswoman, Cindy Guagenti, told Lowdown: "She didn't know his real name till I explained, then said: 'I met him but, ewwwww! Are you kidding me? I've never ever had sex with him.'" [...]

Once, Smith continued at Penn, Richie "pulled Jay into a bathroom and just sat on [him] and started going at it." Richie, an admitted ex-heroin user herself, "had had a few drinks or something," Smith added, before making an unprintable crack about the aftermath of the alleged encounter.

Smith lamented to Grove that the Mewes-and-Richie-humping-in-a-bathroom anecdote might seem tawdry and sensational stripped of its context within the larger story of Mewes' heroic recovery from drug abuse. So, in our continuing mission to provide the proper context for all scandalously pullquoted tales of Nicole Richie squatting on strangers in confined, semipublic spaces and "going at it," here's Smith's explanation of the flap over this story from his blog:

It's not like I haven't told this story at other college gigs over the last few years, but for some reason, it's now news. I got an email from someone at the NY Daily News regarding not just this bit, but another story that came from a question that night regarding my enmity for Reese Witherspoon (which is pretty well-covered in the book "Silent Bob Speaks") that they want to run on Monday. This was my response...

"It's one thing to tell that tale out of school at a college Q&A (in the context of a far larger, longer story about Mewes' hard journey from heroin abuse to three-years of total sobriety), and a completely different thing to just pull the stuff about bathroom sex and run it in a gossip column. So unless you're gonna run the whole, unedited transcript of me talking about how amazing it was for Mewes to get clean (a fifteen minute oral story), I'd rather you not include just that bathroom sex snippet, which makes it all seem like unsavory locker-room chit-chat."

Naturally, I'm not expecting they'll keep the context. Sadly, it's not news that Jay - with nearly both feet in the grave at the lowest point in his life - was able single-handedly pull himself out of the self-made Hell of drug addiction and work his way back to the land of the living, clean and sober; what's news is that he had sex in a bathroom stall with one half of the "Simple Life" dorks.

Indeed, having sex with Nicole Richie makes for a pretty dramatic "and that's when he hit rock bottom" moment in any triumphant recovery story; had the copulation in question involved Paris Hilton, things would've had more of a "and that's when we knew we'd lost him forever" feel.