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Misa Hylton suing Mary J. Blige is 'about something else,' Charlamagne says. Hylton begs to differ

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Misa Hylton suing Mary J. Blige is 'about something else,' Charlamagne says. Hylton begs to differ

What does it take to break up a friendship? Perhaps a $5-million disagreement. Perhaps not.

Mary J. Blige is reportedly being sued by stylist Misa Hylton, her best friend for decades, over allegations that the singer undermined her business relationship with rapper Vado. The lawsuit alleges that Blige withheld Vado’s completed album to pressure him into leaving Hylton behind, according to AllHipHop.

Vado had an agreement with Hylton and her management company, M.I.S.A., entitling them to 20% of Vado’s income, the website said. Hylton is seeking $5 million.

But that dispute might be beside the point, depending on who you listen to.

According to Nicholas Ramcharitar, an attorney for Hylton who spoke Tuesday on “The Latest With Loren LoRosa” podcast, Misa wanted to handle the situation amicably with a settlement.

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“It’s unbeknownst to us why Mary J. Blige and her camp completely cut off Miss Hylton,” he told LoRosa, who played the conversation Wednesday on the Breakfast Club. “And I can tell you, this Vado lawsuit isn’t why their friendship died.”

Publicists for Blige did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Though Ramcharitar didn’t get specific about the reason, he stated that “Misa is confused, and we’ve tried, Misa’s tried, to reach out to Mary. We did not want this in the media. Misa just thought that Mary may have been busy.”

However, he said, when calls and texts stopped and Hylton was “not being included in the normal things that they do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, her antennas went up and we tried to figure out what’s going on here. And that’s really when we started to figure out that the relationship wasn’t the same.”

“Why would Misa and Mary think that a Vado album would make them $5 million? I’m just asking respectfully from a business perspective,” Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne tha God said on the show, suggesting that Vado — who signed with Blige’s label in 2024 — simply didn’t have that kind of drawing power. DJ Envy speculated that Team Hylton had “over-asked” because it was all part of a negotiation. LoRosa pointed out that court and attorney fees, plus emotional distress, might be rolled into the lawsuit.

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“This is silly,” Charlamagne said. “I mean, for them to be such close friends, like it should never have gotten to this point.”

Hylton is “upset,” her attorney said “There’s a lot going on. I mean, at the end of the day, Sean Combs and what’s going on with him, it’s unfortunate but it affects everybody.”

Yup, there it is.

Combs, of course, is sitting behind bars for months now, awaiting trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges and more. Hylton is mother to Combs’ son Justin. Blige started off as a Combs protegé.

“Misa’s a wonderful woman … but she’s upset,” Ramcharitar said. “And again, she’s more upset [about] the relationship. It’s like all of a sudden you have a sister you’ve been with forever and 40 years later your sister stops talking to you and you have no reason why.”

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Charlamagne noted that “you don’t escalate that with a lawsuit.” Later, he said, “This is obviously about something else.”

“She in her feelings,” co-host Jess Hilarious interjected. “She hurt her feelings.”

“All I do know,” DJ Envy said later, “is if Charlamagne’s not my friend anymore, I’m suing you.”

Come Thursday, Hilton herself got into the fray, in an interview — not recorded — that LoRosa talked about on “The Latest”: Hylton told LoRosa that the friendship wasn’t over because of the Vado album and the lawsuit wasn’t brought because they’re no longer friends. Rather, it was about a simple breach of contract with no communication for a year.

The $5-million figure appears to be based on work that Blige and Vado had collaborated on successfully, not work Vado released by himself, LoRosa relayed.

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“‘Why won’t Mary J. Blige just resolve this and put this behind all of us?’” Hylton asked, per LoRosa. “‘That’s the bigger question. Judgment is too easy in this situation. It is shocking. However, this is screaming so many things on so many different levels. Just take a deeper look. God bless and thank you again.’”

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA

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Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA is shared with the audience by investigator Steve Sue in a calm and charming manner, but this documentary tells a powerful, positive and fascinating story. The “hang loose” thumb, pinky sign that originated in Hawaii and carries many meanings is the focus of this film. I just learned this gesture is called a “Shaka” and has a worldwide impact.  And, there are Shaka Contests.  Who knew? And how do you throw a Shaka? For me, […]
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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

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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.”

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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.

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Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

star

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

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Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

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