Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are a couple no more, two months after Ashton's sixth-anniversary gift to Demi of a scandal around his alleged infidelity with a San Diego party receptionist while she was off working in New York City. Her belated gift to him was, of course, her decision Thursday to get a divorce.
After his-and-hers statements Thursday, speculation -- some of it humorous -- has filled the information vacuum. Prepare yourself for some gossipy gossip, which we hope you'll keep in the proper perspective.
Who gets Bruce Willis? What will @mrskutcher's new Twitter handle be? Will this drama, like the life of Charlie Sheen, be incorporated into Ashton's "Two and a Half Men" character's story line? (Whoops, too late on that last one, as Kutcher's Walden Schmidt has already been suffering the pain of a divorce from a wife who told him he was emotionally immature.)
Then there's the open-marriage buzz. "Everyone in Hollywood knows about their arrangement," an unnamed "insider" told the Star tabloid, "but they've managed to keep it a secret from the general public."
Chelsea Handler, who said she doesn't know them "personally very well," opined to a shocked, simply shocked Piers Morgan on his CNN show that "I think they probably had a lot of good times with some other women... Clearly they had a lot of threesomes, that led to twosomes without Demi and that leads to a divorce." After watching tape of the couple on a previous "Piers Morgan Tonight," she added, "I absolutely feel for her."
One such twosome was allegedly with Sara Leal, who went public with her claim that they'd had unprotected sex twice, that Ashton was not "weird or perverted," and that they'd talked aboutastrological signs and politics afterward.
Leal said he'd told her he was "separated," and she believed him.
And still bubbling in the background -- as opposed to bubbling in the hot tub allegedly shared pre-coitally by Kutcher, Leal and another young lady, all of them naked -- is a slightly lower-profile scandal from 2010, involving a woman named Brittney Jones who claimed she and Ashton had done the nasty while Demi was out of town.
"Ashton told me that both he and Demi had an 'open relationship' and that he was not in fact cheating," Jones told TMZ on Friday, adding that even though divorce is a bummer, she felt somewhat vindicated.
Jones' veracity became suspect when she released a sex tape late last year, using Kutcher's name to market it (though not claiming he was in it). He threatened to sue her, and then Ashton and Demi launched a charm offensive on Twitter and elsewhere, declaring their marriage to be rock solid.
After the Leal revelation, the couple pretty much kept their mouths shut, up until Thursday. Except for his pro-Joe Paterno tweet. Oops.
Now, with all that muck having been raked, it seems divorce might actually bring a bit of good news for Demi, who some have worried looks scary thin these days. Turns out women and men alike tend to gain weight "in a period of marital change," according to our friends at Booster Shots.
So bring on the comfort food, soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Kutcher. It's what happens next.