Jennifer Lopez's Aversion to Tabloids
Jennifer Lopez surrounds herself with people who protect her from reading rabid tabloid reports about herself, she says.
Lopez, 31, whose first ever concert is an NBC sweeps special (Nov. 20 at 8 p.m.) to promote her new album, "J Lo," said her manager and her friends don't want the diva reading articles about herself that might upset her.
"They know it's untrue and they know it's going to upset me," Lopez said yesterday. "So I learned a long time ago not to read [those things].
"But when I do hear [those reports] it hurts me. And it's a surprise to me because I know how I conduct myself and when you know that you're a cool, nice person and people want to believe otherwise, or create something that's otherwise, it's always hurtful," she said.
Lopez has been at the center of a rash of tabloid stories for several years.
In late Sept. she married choreographer Chris Judd less than a year after she and Sean "Puffy" Combs ended a relationship. Combs has compared their affair to the marriage of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
The relationship was severally strained after the pair were caught up in a 1999 shooting Manhattan nightclub shooting for which Combs was acquitted last March.
But the fiasco is now the subject of an upcoming "ripped from the headlines" episode of NBC's "Law & Order" - something Lopez did not know until a reporter asked her about it yesterday.
"It's always going to be weird, but when you're in the public eye, these are the kinds of things that confront you on a daily basis," she said. "Somehow you can't let it affect you [to the point where] it affects what you do.
"I can't let all of the media coverge . . . affect me, because then it's not fun for me anymore, so I don't let it in my world. I have the satisfaction of always knowing the truth and I never do anything that is going to make it hard to make me sleep at night," she said.
Lopez also said she had nothing to do with a lavish contract rider that her representatives reportedly submitted to the organizers of a recent charity event for AIDS research and the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The contract-rider, which appears on the Web site www.smokinggun.com, says that Lopez requires a 40' trailer or a 45' one if the smaller was not available. She also needed an all-white dressing room, including white flowers, furniture and drapes, a lavish food spread and a VCR and CD player. "No exceptions" on those two last items the contract-rider states.
"Anything as far as [contract] riders and things like that, I'm not involved with that. I go to the places, if its nice it's nice. If it's not it's not," Lopez said.
The NBC special is half as long as the original concert, which lasted about two hours and was taped last September in her parents' homeland of Puerto Rico, at San Juan's Roberto Clemente Stadium.
