Entertainment
Christina Applegate contracts virus after eating food contaminated with fecal matter
Christina Applegate was still recovering from her first run-in with COVID-19 when another virus recently had her health in the toilet again.
The “Dead to Me” star spoke humorously — and graphically — about her “gross” experience with a sapovirus infection in the sixth episode of “MesSy,” the multiple sclerosis-themed podcast she shares with actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
“It’s now time for the poop talk,” Sigler introduced the segment.
“It’s a poop pod,” Applegate said. “If you don’t like this part, totally fine. I get it.”
It started with dizzy spells and a bout of uncontrollable diarrhea.
“I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t anything,” Applegate said, so she took a stool test. “You poop into a receptacle, and then you have to scoop your own poop into vials. And it was so gross, I started vomiting whilst doing this.”
The test told her she had contracted sapovirus, which occurs when one person ingests another’s fecal matter, most often via contaminated food. According to the National Institutes of Health, “Sapovirus infections are responsible for both sporadic cases and occasional outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis.”
The culprit, Applegate said, was most likely a takeout salad from a vegan restaurant she’s visited for years and declined to name.
“They say that it’s mostly from salads because cooked food kind of kills the bacteria,” she said. “Someone else’s poop went into my mouth, and I ate it.”
As if the virus wasn’t bad enough, Applegate said it exacerbated the symptoms of her multiple sclerosis, with which she was diagnosed in 2021. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, the chronic illness can cause trouble walking, difficulty with balance and fatigue.
“I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning in a pool of s—,” she said. “Having MS at 3 o’clock in the morning and trying to change your sheets, it’s not fun.”
She and Sigler then joked about their qualms with adult diapers, which Applegate said she had recently been wearing again out of convenience. Their suggestions included adding Velcro and scrapping the “pretty” designs.
“I think it would be very nice if you could give me an adult diaper that fully supported my mood when I looked at it,” Sigler said, “which would be something along the lines of the words, ‘F— me’ across my pelvis.”
“Again, we’re losing a patent. Someone’s going to do this and make millions,” Applegate riffed.
The Emmy-winning actor has spoken about her experience with MS before, including on “MesSy.”
During the podcast’s third episode, she revealed she was in a relapse at the time of recording, detailing “intense pain” in her legs and discomfort in her eye.
“I couldn’t sleep because every time I would close my eye, my eye would start doing some crazy s—,” she said, adding that damage to the optic nerve can be a symptom of MS.
During a March appearance on “Good Morning America,” Applegate said she suspects she had MS symptoms for several years before her diagnosis.
“I noticed, especially the first season [of “Dead to Me”], we’d be shooting and my leg would buckle,” she said. “I really just put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather. Then nothing would happen for months, and I didn’t pay attention.”
By the time she was filming the TV series’ third season, she was being brought to set in a wheelchair and sometimes had crew members holding up her legs out of camera range.
Even now, she said, she struggles to accept her diagnosis or explain it to others.
“I live kind of in hell,” she said. “But of course, the support is wonderful, and I’m really grateful.”
Applegate received a standing ovation when she walked onstage to present an award at the Emmys in January. A few months earlier, her former “Married … With Children” co-star Katey Sagal physically supported Applegate as she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
During her speech, Applegate recalled how, as a child, she would read the names on the stars along Hollywood Boulevard, wondering how she could get hers among them.
“So this day means more to me than you can possibly imagine,” she said.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
Entertainment
Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day
Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.
An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.
“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”
The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.
Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”
Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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