Yohana Banda, the biological father of Madonna's Malawi-born adopted son David, is worried about the tot's future now that David's crazy pop icon mother seems to relish fighting an ugly divorce battle in public. "I am still a poor farmer with nothing to offer, but maybe he would be better off back with us," Mr. Banda said. David's biological mother died in childbirth, and Banda, 34, has remarried and lives with his wife Flora, her daughter Tiyamike, 3, and their seven-month-old son Dingiswayo in a thatched hut. Shown a picture of David with Madonna and her manager, Banda said, "He doesn't look happy in this picture. He looks bewildered. If there is no love in the family, is there any love for him? This is a new and terrible thing to happen to him. I am too upset to think clearly. He is only three years old and he has been through so much."

Attention friends of Madonna and Guy Ritchie: You are no longer friends with Guy Ritchie. Madge is mustering her forces for what is hopefully going to be an epically nasty divorce. First strategy, gather the troops and hunker down. So the icon is reportedly telling her friends, hangers-on, sycophants, and other assorted slaves to stay the hell away from her soon-be-ex husband. You know, she doesn't want to be discussing how her lawyers may totally savage Ritchie's character in advance of a possible custody battle over their son Rocco just to have it get back to the director and his friends.

We hear from a good source that Sumner Redstone, the 85-year-old media mogul who controls Viacom (which includes MTV, BET, Paramount, and Dreamworks), is separating from Paula Fortunato, his wife of five years. Fortunato will be moving out this weekend, our source says. Redstone married Fortunato—a former public school teacher who is 40 years his junior—in 2003, several years after he divorced his first wife. Redstone's finances are currently under a significant strain thanks to the recent economic meltdown, causing him a good deal of stress. Fortunato's biggest moment in the spotlight came when she reportedly forced her husband to break with Tom Cruise in 2006. There were rumors a year ago that the marriage was not happy; now, according to our source, it's all but over. Anyone with more information can email us. This may be the first sign that relationships based on anything other than love or sexual attraction will be sorely tested by this financial crisis. Another source tells us that Martha Stewart and Mark Burnett, the reality show maven who works with her, "had a giant blowout, over money." Along with the timing of this Sumner Redstone rumor, it paints a grim picture. Let's hope this doesn't get so bad that it filters down to the non-rich.

Now that the cat has tumbled mewling out of the divorce bag and she's begun saying nasty things about her husband in public, pop icon (popcon?) Madonna is at a metaphorical crossroads. Where do you go once you've escaped suburban Detroit banality, conquered the grimy 1980's New York City club scene, become a music and fashion superstar, attempted acting in movies and Broadway plays, borne approximately 143 reinvention comebacks from your be-hot-panted loins, settled down with a film director husband and cobbled together a hodgepodge of children, become a fitness-obsessed British lady, written children's books, directed your own film, worked your arms into clobbering, veiny horror shows, and then suddenly the happy quiet marriage dissolves and you're free to be yourself again? What's a material girl to do? We'll offer some suggestions after the jump. Become a Worldly, Knowing Head of State She's not tearing up the charts like she used to, she's not setting hearts aflutter, she's not even shocking anyone anymore. It's time we all—bourgeoisie and rebel—face the Music: the Age of Madonna has ended. Hell, the Age of Britney has ended. The pop music world is now dominated by skinny, moaning white boys, fiercely syncopated black ladies, and throwbacky retro British chicks. There's no room, really, for a 50-year-old with a message. Which is why Madge ought to hang up the riding crop and rest comfortably on her throne as the lifetime achievement Queen of Pop. (There's a spot next to hers where Michael Jackson should be sitting, but that whole thing went off the rails somewhere a few years back). Let the young ones claw their way around the industry, hoping for some attention. They're all trying to be Madonna anyway. Why mess with a classic and release subpar albums and muddle through rickety tours? Take a break, babe. You deserve it. And hey, now that your husband's out of the picture, you can declare Prima Nocta and bed every Joe and Jim Jonas who comes sexually blossoming across your path. They're yours by right. By Godly cree. Pause For Some Introspection The great thing about being a fabulous, wealthy, creative superstar is that when you fuck up or are fucked over, you get to stern your face up, put on some amazingly big sunglasses and be strong about it. People will call you a hero simply for breathing in and out, putting one foot in front of the other. So maybe Madonna should emulate her adopted country's stiff upper lip, turn inwards, and then a year or so from now, release some quiet, heartfelt album about what it means to be 50-years-old and alone again (save for those kids, but whatevs). Pen some soaring tunes with lyrics that talk about change and rebirth and the mystical cycles of things—the moon spins and so do wheels and carousels and what's so amazing that keeps us stargazing and how are we moving forward if all we're doing is turning around and around. That kind of thing. People will call her brave and reinvigorated and the definitive voice of her generation. (The funny thing being that Madonna's fans have generally always been just slightly younger than her.) She'll play Carnegie Hall and maybe even chat with someone on NPR and she'll finally get that classiness she's so desperately craved ever since she had a fleeting taste of it back in the Bedtime Stories/Evita days. Go Crazy Yeah, maybe she should just go nuts. Turn into an eccentric woman-of-a-certain-age. Hole up in her London apartment and emerge only to yell at songbirds or snatch cats off the street or go floating down the street swathed in caftans and turbans. She could say big, sweeping, beautiful things like "What a world it used to be, the old world. It's dead now. Dead and gone. In the old world we had parties every day and nobody cried because they were sad. Even when we were sad, we were happy." And she could become a drunk and always have some glass of amber-colored something or other swirling around. And maybe she could grab beautiful young men by the ears and cock her head a little nuttily and say, almost to herself, "so pretty. Pretty pretty little pet. I wonder how much you are. Everything's so expensive these days. Everything costs so very much. Don't they, pretty pet? Don't they..." and then she'll glide off cackling. It could be pretty fucking awesome, and at the young age of 50, she'd be getting a good head start on it. It could grow and change and evolve over the next 30-plus years! By the time she's 85, she could be writing long, curious letters to the editors of various newspapers in South America, accusing lampposts of being Nazis and calling the neighbor's dog Mussolini. And it would be fabulous. Or, you know, she could just continue working out and raising her children and maybe spend a little more time in New York than she has been and that will be that. Maybe she'll move to Connecticut and buy a Volvo. The world will just have to wait and watch. And really, isn't that the wonderful thing about Madonna? You just never know what's coming next.

Uh oh, the Madonna divorce may be getting ugly and, God bless us all, public. While muscling her way through her Sticky & Sweet show in Boston last night, the Queen of Pop made reference to the "emotionally retarded" when introducing a song about her soon-to-be-ex-husband, film director Guy Ritchie. Which, um, zing? She also opened the show with her tune "Human Nature," which is about not being sorry about things and features the oft repeated lyric "I'm not sorry." Though, she's been hinting at this for a week now. You may remember that last week ol' Madge was in New York, and said cryptically at her concert: "In exactly 29 moves, the Queen will dump the King." She had 29 tour dates left at that point, and I guess she was hoping to keep the gargantuanly expensive divorce (like lots of millions of dollars, or about six pounds) under wraps until her tour ended. But, I guess she was just too giddy about the exciting, shitty news so she made sly and self-important references to it in beloved old Boston and I guess we'll eat it up. A messy public divorce would be just the right thing to take Maddy from her too-comfortable role as fitness-crazed London mommy to bitter, song-spewing, 50-year-old chick from Detroit with scores to settle. Madonna's been way too nice for the past few years. Let's hope that her Beantown outburst means that the bitch is back. [Daily Mail]

It's typical for aging entrepreneurs in mid-career to acquire a fancy new set of wheels. Elon Musk has instead acquired a job running a fancy carmaker — Tesla Motors, the electric-car startup he has backed from the get-go with the millions he made selling Internet companies. He is also getting a divorce, according to a blog post by his wife, fantasy novelist Justine Musk. This is no mere tawdry personal detail.Do the geographical math. Until Justine threw him out this summer, the couple lived in a Bel Air mansion with their five children. Los Angeles is clearly a better locale for Justine to pursue her writing career. Tesla is based in the Bay Area. Word swept the Tesla office of a pending divorce after Elon showed up to the opening of Tesla's Menlo Park showroom with a "twentysomething actress," one attendee said. How he managed to pursue an affair while meddling in the affairs of Tesla and his other company, space-exploration startup SpaceX can only speak to Musk's off-the-charts time-management skills. His decision to fire Tesla's CEO and take over the job himself just means more time away from his family. Only Elon and Justine know all the reasons why they are divorcing. And which came first — did Elon decide to throw himself into his work after realizing his marriage was a failure, or did his obstinate workaholism jeopardize his marriage? Either way, it beggars belief to think the divorce wasn't a factor in the uproar at Tesla. That will be no comfort to the employees who will soon be laid off by a CEO going through a midlife crisis.

So Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie are finally getting divorced. It's a very shocking thing, since earlier this summer, when reports of a pending divorce surfaced, Madonna's flack assured the world that the couple had "no divorce plans." Could it be that the flack, Liz Rosenberg—a charter member of our list of lying flacks—told something less than the full truth? After the jump, Liz's side of the story, and then the other, more accurate side: We asked Liz Rosenberg about this discrepancy between what she said earlier, and what's happening now. Her answer: "there was no pending divorce earlier this year." So, we asked, does that mean that, for example, the Sun's report that Madonna "initially planned to move back to the US with their three children in July" is false? "yes," Rosenberg replied. Well, how credible is Liz Rosenberg? She told the world in 2006 that Madonna was not adopting a baby in Malawi. Although, of course, Madonna did adopt a baby in Malawi. What else do we know about Rosenberg?

Antivirus software company Kaspersky Lab plans to sell 20 percent of the company for $100 million to investors in a private placement next year, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant. Oh, this is juicy: Founder Eugene Kaspersky owns 50 percent of the company. His ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky, owns 30 percent. [Quintura]

With his success on the awesome 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin's been enjoying his reclaimed status as beloved funny dude for the last couple of years now. But raise the subject of his ex-wife Kim Basinger and you'll be treated to hot flashes of psycho "you're a little pig" voicemail dad. In a profile in the upcoming New Yorker, he asks, "Think I'm walking stiffly? Yeah, there's a 120-pound actress on my back." Baldwin's gripe, he says, is that Basinger is constantly trying to drive a wedge between him and their 12-year-old daughter, Ireland.

Andrew Fisher, the President of Cox Television and a former reporter and Emmy award winner, is currently locked in a nasty divorce battle in Atlanta-one that centers on allegations of Fisher's "sadomasochistic sex affair at the Mayflower Hotel in 2003." That's the same hotbed of sin hotel that played host to Eliot Spitzer's famous zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a poom-poom with call girl Ashely Dupre! The Atlanta media is strangely silent on this whole affair despite Fisher's big-shot position. A custody hearing is scheduled for next week, and the S&M evidence has been ruled inadmissible. Which is good for Mr. Fisher, except for the fact that the lawyers put out a press release about the whole sordid mess:

The Charles Schwab Corporation has predictably named its president, Walt Bettinger, to succeed its eponymous founder as CEO. Bettinger, like Schwab, is a scrappy entrepreneur, or so the canned corporate biography has it; he founded a company at the age of 22, which Schwab later bought. Not mentioned in Bettinger's bio: A court case involving a Walter W. Bettinger II and Laura Bettinger. In 2005, this Walter tried to get a $6,000/mo. child-support payment to Laura reduced, in part because the value of her Schwab account had increased. If that's the same Walt Bettinger, Schwab shareholders should be impressed: He may not have kept the marriage intact, but he successfully retained his ex-wife as a customer.

The man and his estranged wife at the heart of the recent mostly bullshit sex scandal involving CBS correspondent Lara Logan have both been ordered by a judge to stop talking to the gossip-starved press, long, long after everything damaging ended up in the papers. Contractor Joseph Burkett—who's now in a relationship with Logan after he impregnated her in Baghdad—is trying to divorce his wife Kimberly back home in Texas. She (or her attorney) took the story to The Enquirer, and then Logan took her side of the story to the Washington Post, and now the judge presiding over the divorce has finally issued gag orders to Joe and Kim. Now we won't learn anything embarrassing about them ever again! [DailyTimes]

That Slate lady-blog has been talking about divorce all week, all because Maureen Dowd wrote a column about how no man on Earth is good enough to marry her (or "you"). And because Ellen Tien wrote an O Magazine piece about how her husband is an utter shithole who she can't wait to divorce, right ladies? Anyway. For those keeping score at home:

Despite tons of tabloid speculation that Madonna and director Guy Ritchie are divorcing-she's been seen around NYC without her wedding ring or her husband!-Ritchie's mother is having none of it. Lady Amber Leighton is telling the gossips to STFU and declaring that the terror couple is just dandy. "It is absolute rubbish, worse than that. Guy will be furious at me talking to you, but I feel I can't just let these reports go unanswered as they make me so angry and they are hurtful intrusions into their private lives."

Just a few days ago, we outlined our top three reasons as to why Madonna and her (current) husband Guy Ritchie will never be having "incredible sex" again. Well, it seems that we can now add a fourth reason to that list — Madonna has reportedly enlisted the counsel of top notch British lawyer solicitor Fiona Shackleton. Before you dismiss "Steel Magnolia" (no really, that's her nickname) as being nothing more than the English version of Arnie Becker, it's worth noting that she is the tiny, dental-hygiene-challenged island's highest profile divorce litigator, having negotiated both Prince Charles' and Paul McCartney's divorce (the latter of whom left his case $50 million poorer). However, lest you think that Madge is driving this lorry all by her lonesome, it's worth noting that Guy Ritchie seems to be just as fed up with Madonna as she is with him. Quoth The Daily Mail:

The seven-year itch has reportedly struck the unusually long and strong union between Madonna and Guy Ritchie, but news of the split isn’t exactly sending anyone into shock. It was only three years ago when Madonna practically divorced her frostylocks husband on television, telling the world in an MTV documentary that she “wanted to end everything,” and that Guy hadn’t lived up to whatever S&M-loving, hotel room-wrecking ideal she’d “imagined him to be.” But we’re not so sure the soft-spoken director of speedy-spoken indie flicks was necessarily the problem child in this couplet. Considering Madonna’s behavior over the past year or so, scented ever so slightly with desperation and Justin Timberlake’s ass cheeks, we came up with three of the most likely reasons we think the love story went sour:

Former supermodel Christie Brinkley-and her lawyer-want you, me, and everyone else to know what a prick her ex, teen-screwing architect Peter Cook, really is. "The couple, who are due in court to hammer out custody issues on July 2, went to New York's supreme court on Thursday in an attempt to settle an escalating argument over whether their case be held in private. Interestingly Brinkley, 54, is fighting to have the proceedings open to the media-a tactic, sources say, designed to embarrass the 49-year-old architect who two years ago was discovered having an affair with his 18-year-old assistant. 'Only the full and unfiltered truth may restore to Christie and her family their reputation,' her lawyer, Robert Cohen said last week, adding: 'Frankly, his long affair with a teenaged girl is only the tip of the iceberg.'"

Today’s news that Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon’s seven-year long marriage has just now “officially” ended invites all kinds of speculation on just why it took nearly two years for the divorce proceedings to finalize. Citing “irreconcilable differences” all the way back in 2006, the blonde duo split amid speculation that Ryan’s bad boy behavior ranged from publicly making out with current girlfriend Abbie Cornish on the Texas set of Stop Loss to an increasing level of resentment regarding his wife’s fast-rising star status. And while celebrity divorces do typically take longer than usual, considering how many more properties, cars, adultery allegations and cash they tend to have, we find the timing of this particular pair’s final John Hancocks a little suspicious given the past month's unusually abundant Reese-and-Ryan gossip flood. Is today’s news just a coincidence, or did each party's very public pictorial statements recently have anything to do with it?

Go figure: It turns out the jilted, crazy wife of Shubert Organization President Philip Smith, who aired their messy divorce battle on YouTube, has a long history of turbulent relationships and public flame-outs involving mostly men. Judging from the profile that just appeared in New York, the wife, Tricia Walsh-Smith, has done two sensible things in her life, starting with her lucrative appearance in close to 500 television commercials, including the Hellmann's mayonnaise ad pictured at left. She also wrote and starred in a popular play in Britain called Bonkers, about "a bulimic ex-model whose husband is always having affairs." Everything else has been kind of a disaster, particularly her many breakups:

Tricia Walsh-Smith, the whacky would-be-ex of Shubert Organization president Philip Smith is continuing to broadcast her mad, mad, mad, mad diary to the world. In this week's episode, there is dancing. And gnashing of teeth.