George Clooney Says Arianna Huffington Threatened Him

Posted on March 16, 2006

Yesterday, George Clooney said in a statement that he did not write the blog post that the Huffington Post posted on Monday. Arianna Huffington wrote an explanation on the Huffington Post saying she got permission from a PR rep working on Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck film to cobble together a Clooney blog post using old interview quotes from Larry King Live and the Guardian. Now, New York Daily News journalist Lloyd says George Clooney told him Arianna threatened him over the blog post.

"She said some things that I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me -- bad for my career. Well, screw you!" the movie star told me yesterday about a conversation he had with the doyenne of Huffingtonpost.com. "I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Clooney, in his only interview on the subject, took off the gloves in his fight with Huffington over a blog purportedly written by the "Syriana" Oscar-winner and posted on her Web site Monday.

"I feel abused," he said.

Grove says he saw the emails from one of Clooney's PR reps that granted Huffington the permission to use the quotes.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."

People are supposed to write their own blog posts but not everyone does as this blog debacle has made very clear. Clooney's blog post was here but it has since been removed.

---

---