New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

- By MICHAEL BARBARO - June 24, 2011 - The New York Times

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

At around 10:30 p.m., moments after the vote was announced, Mr. Cuomo strode onto the Senate floor to wave at cheering supporters who had crowded into the galleries to watch. Trailed by two of his daughters, the governor greeted lawmakers, and paused to single out those Republicans who had defied the majority of their party to support the marriage bill.

“How do you feel?” he asked Senator James S. Alesi, a suburban Rochester Republican who voted against the measure in 2009 and was the first to break party ranks this year. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

The approval of same-sex marriage represented a reversal of fortune for gay-rights advocates, who just two years ago suffered a humiliating defeat when a same-sex marriage bill was easily rejected by the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. This year, with the Senate controlled by Republicans, the odds against passage of same-sex marriage appeared long.

But the unexpected victory had a clear champion: Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who pledged last year to support same-sex marriage but whose early months in office were dominated by intense battles with lawmakers and some labor unions over spending cuts.

Mr. Cuomo made same-sex marriage one of his top priorities for the year and deployed his top aide to coordinate the efforts of a half-dozen local gay-rights organizations whose feuding and disorganization had in part been blamed for the defeat two years ago.

The new coalition of same-sex marriage supporters brought in one of Mr. Cuomo’s trusted campaign operatives to supervise a $3 million television and radio campaign aimed at persuading several Republican and Democratic senators to drop their opposition.

For Senate Republicans, even bringing the measure to the floor was a freighted decision. Most of the Republicans firmly oppose same-sex marriage on moral grounds, and many of them also had political concerns, fearing that allowing same-sex marriage to pass on their watch would embitter conservative voters and cost the Republicans their one-seat majority in the Senate.

Leaders of the state’s Conservative Party, whose support many Republican lawmakers depend on to win election, warned that they would oppose in legislative elections next year any Republican senator who voted for same-sex marriage.

But after days of contentious discussion capped by a marathon nine-hour closed-door debate on Friday, Republicans came to a fateful decision: The full Senate would be allowed to vote on the bill, the majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, said Friday afternoon, and each member would be left to vote according to his or her conscience.

“The days of just bottling up things, and using these as excuses not to have votes — as far as I’m concerned as leader, it’s over with,” said Mr. Skelos, a Long Island Republican who voted against the bill.

Just before the marriage vote, lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly approved a broad package of major legislation that constituted the remainder of their agenda for the year. The bills included a cap on local property tax increases and a strengthening of New York’s rent regulation laws, as well as a five-year tuition increase at the State University of New York and the City University of New York.

But Republican lawmakers spent much of the week negotiating changes to the marriage bill to protect religious institutions, especially those that oppose same-sex weddings. On Friday, the Assembly and the Senate approved those changes. But they were not enough to satisfy the measure’s staunchest opponents. In a joint statement, New York’s Catholic bishops assailed the vote.

“The passage by the Legislature of a bill to alter radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage leaves us deeply disappointed and troubled,” the bishops said.

Besides Mr. Alesi and Mr. Grisanti, the four Republicans who voted for the measure included Senators Stephen M. Saland from the Hudson Valley area and Roy J. McDonald of the capital region.

Just one lawmaker rose to speak against the bill: Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx, the only Democratic senator to cast a no vote. Mr. Díaz, saying he was offended by the two-minute restrictions set on speeches, repeatedly interrupted the presiding officer who tried to limit the senator’s remarks, shouting, “You don’t want to hear me.”

“God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage, a long time ago,” Mr. Díaz said.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States is a relatively recent goal of the gay-rights movement, but over the last few years, gay-rights organizers have placed it at the center of their agenda, steering money and muscle into dozens of state capitals in an often uphill effort to persuade lawmakers.

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did. Advocates moved aggressively this year to capitalize on that shift, flooding the district offices of wavering lawmakers with phone calls, e-mails and signed postcards from constituents who favored same-sex marriage, sometimes in bundles that numbered in the thousands.

Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Many of them were approved in the past few years, as same-sex marriage moved to the front line of the culture war and politicians deployed the issue as a tool for energizing their base.

But New York could be a shift: It is now by far the largest state to grant legal recognition to same-sex weddings, and one that is home to a large, visible and politically influential gay community. Supporters of the measure described the victory in New York as especially symbolic — and poignant — because of its rich place in the history of gay rights: the movement’s foundational moment, in June 1969, was a riot against police at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village.

In Albany, there was elation after the vote. But leading up to it, there were moments of tension and frustration. At one point, Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, erupted when he and other supporters learned they would not be allowed to make a floor speech.

“This is not right,” he yelled, before storming from the chamber.

During a brief recess during the voting, Senator Shirley L. Huntley, a Queens Democrat who had only recently come out in support of same sex marriage, strode from her seat to the back of the Senate chamber to congratulate Daniel J. O’Donnell, an openly gay Manhattan lawmaker who sponsored the legislation in the Assembly.

They hugged, and Assemblyman O’Donnell, standing with his longtime partner, began to tear up.

“We’re going to invite you to our wedding,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “Now we have to figure out how to pay for one.”

Danny Hakim and Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting from Albany, and Adriane Quinlan from New York.

Abraham was fascinated with his penis

Abraham was a sociopath, a psychopathic madman. In fact there are huge body of historic evidences proving that all of these patriarchal crap was concocted by the likes of him.

Keep in mind that human body, Mother Nature's most breathtakingly complex, fantastic biological invention on Earth, does not need a barbaric, criminal schmuck like Abraham to alter her laws of Nature and write laws about how we should treat and use our body organs, what is sin, what is good and what to do with our body? - Besides; if Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom had seen fit not to grow foreskin on the tip of all male's species penis, then she would have done so herself, naturally.

The amazing part of it all is that bunch of slave holding, misogynists, barbaric, murderers, child molesting, pedophiles who wrote the Judaism and its two derivatives: Christianity and Islam's religious manuals have managed to keep these barbaric laws intact for so long.

We must never forget that subscribed barbarisms such as: stoning of women, beheading of non-believers, circumcision, kosher, female circumcision, slavery, and so much more written in the Judaism and its two derivatives: Christianity and Islam's religious manuals have been used by religious criminal mullahs until now, the year 2011.

We must spread the truth and stop brainwashing and indoctrinating our children with these mad-man-made rubbish.

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Efforts to Ban Circumcision Gain Traction in California

- By JENNIFER MEDINA - June 4, 2011 - The New York Times

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — When a group of activists proposed banning circumcision in San Francisco last fall, many people simply brushed them aside. Even in that liberal seaside city, it seemed implausible that thousands of people would support an effort to outlaw an ancient ritual that Jews and Muslims believe fulfills a commandment issued by God.

But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits. Now a similar effort is under way in Santa Monica to get such a measure on the ballot for November 2012.

If the anti-circumcision activists (they prefer the term "intactivists") have their way, cities across the country may be voting on whether to criminalize a practice that is common in many American hospitals. Activists say the measures would protect children from an unnecessary medical procedure, calling it "male genital mutilation."

"This is the furthest we've gotten, and it is a huge step for us," said Matthew Hess, an activist based in San Diego who wrote both bills.

Mr. Hess has created similar legislation for states across the country, but those measures never had much traction. Now he is fielding calls from people who want to organize similar movements in their cities.

"This is a conversation we are long overdue to have in this country," he said. "The end goal for us is making cutting boys' foreskin a federal crime."

Jewish groups see the ballot measures as a very real threat, likening them to bans on circumcision that existed in Soviet-era Russia and Eastern Europe and in ancient Roman and Greek times. The circumcision of males is an inviolable requirement of Jewish law that dates back to Abraham's circumcision of himself in the Book of Genesis.

They say the proposed ban is an assault on religious freedom that could have a widespread impact all over the country. Beyond the biblical, there are emotional connections: checking for circumcision was one of the ways Jewish children could be culled from their peers by Nazis and the czar's armies.

"People are shocked that it has reached this level because there has never been this kind of a direct assault on a Jewish practice here," said Marc Stern, associate general counsel for the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group. "This is something that American Jews have always taken for granted — that something that was so contested elsewhere but here, we're safe and we're secure."

Mr. Hess also writes an online comic book, "Foreskin Man," with villains like "Monster Mohel." On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement saying the comic employed "grotesque anti-Semitic imagery."

Jena Troutman, the mother of two young boys who is promoting the ballot measure in Santa Monica, said she did not think of herself as a crusader against religion. Instead, she views her work as a chance to educate would-be parents against a procedure that "can really do serious damage to the child."

"I am just a mom trying to save the little babies," Ms. Troutman said. "I'd rather be on the beach, but nobody is talking about this, so I have to."

Ms. Troutman has run the Web site wholebabyrevolution.com for two years, and she is fond of rattling off sayings like "Your baby is perfect, no snipping required." Well versed in the stories of circumcisions gone awry, she said the recent death of a New York City toddler who was circumcised at a hospital convinced her that she should push for the ballot measure.

Ms. Troutman, who has worked as a lactation educator and a doula, said she often approached women on the beach to warn them about the dangers of circumcising, but she has declined to answer questions about her own children.

Although precise numbers are not known, several studies have indicated that circumcision rates have been declining in the United States for the past several years and now range from 30 percent to 50 percent of all male infants.

Many medical groups take a neutral approach, saying that the practice is not harmful and that there is not enough scientific evidence to conclude that it is necessary, and leave the decision to parents and their doctor. Several studies have linked circumcision with a reduction in the spread of H.I.V. Roughly half of the 694 baby boys born in the Santa Monica-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital in 2010 were circumcised before they left the hospital, officials there said.

Dr. David Baron, a family physician, certified mohel — someone who performs ritual circumcision — and former chief of staff at Santa Monica-U.C.L.A., said that he would not press any parent to circumcise a son but that he viewed the effort to ban the procedure as "ridiculous and dishonest."

"To say it is mutilation is wrong from the get-go," Dr. Baron said. "It is a perfectly valid decision to say that it is not what you want for your child. Any doctor who says it is needed is not being honest, but to say that it needs to be banned is shocking."

If the ballot measure passed, it would certainly face legal challenges. But several legal experts said it was far from certain that it would be struck down in a court. Ms. Troutman said she considered putting religious exemptions in the measure, but then decided, "Why should only some babies be protected?"

Rabbi Yehuda Lebovics, an Orthodox mohel based in Los Angeles who says he has performed some 20,000 circumcisions over several decades, said he often had to soothe nervous mothers.

"I am now doing the sons of the boys I did 30 years ago," Rabbi Lebovics said. "So I turn to the new mother and ask, 'Do you have any complaints in the way it turned out?' "

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Benefits of Circumcision Are Said to Outweigh Risks

- By RONI CARYN RABIN - The New York Times - August 27, 2012

The American Academy of Pediatrics has shifted its stance on infant male circumcision, announcing on Monday that new research, including studies in Africa suggesting that the procedure may protect heterosexual men against H.I.V., indicated that the health benefits outweighed the risks.

But the academy stopped short of recommending routine circumcision for all baby boys, saying the decision remains a family matter. The academy had previously taken a neutral position on circumcision.

The new policy statement, the first update of the academy’s circumcision policy in over a decade, appears in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Pediatrics. The group’s guidelines greatly influence pediatric care and decisions about coverage by insurers; in the new statement, the academy also said that circumcision should be covered by insurance.

The long-delayed policy update comes as sentiment against circumcision is gaining strength in the United States and parts of Europe. Circumcision rates in the United States declined to 54.5 percent in 2009 from 62.7 percent in 1999, according to one federal estimate. Critics succeeded last year in placing a circumcision ban on the ballot in San Francisco, but a judge ruled against including the measure.

In Europe, a government ethics committee in Germany last week overruled a court decision that removing a child’s foreskin was “grievous bodily harm” and therefore illegal. The country’s Professional Association of Pediatricians called the ethics committee ruling “a scandal.”

A provincial official in Austria has told state-run hospitals in the region to stop performing circumcisions, and the Danish authorities have commissioned a report to investigate whether medical doctors are present during religious circumcision rituals as required.

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which for several years have been pondering circumcision recommendations of their own, have yet to weigh in and declined to comment on the academy’s new stance. Medicaid programs in several states have stopped paying for the routine circumcision of infants.

“We’re not pushing everybody to circumcise their babies,” Dr. Douglas S. Diekema, a member of the academy’s task force on circumcision and an author of the new policy, said in an interview. “This is not really pro-circumcision. It falls in the middle. It’s pro-choice, for lack of a better word. Really, what we’re saying is, ‘This ought to be a choice that’s available to parents.’ ”

But opponents of circumcision say no one — not even a well-meaning parent — has the right to make the decision to remove a healthy body part from another person.

“The bottom line is it’s unethical,” said Georganne Chapin, founding director of Intact America, a national group that advocates against circumcision. “A normal foreskin on a normal baby boy is no more threatening than the hymen or labia on your daughter.”

In updating its 1999 policy, the academy’s task force reviewed the medical literature on benefits and harms of the surgery. It was a protracted analysis that began in 2007, and the result is a 30-page report, which includes seven pages of references, including 248 citations.

Among those are 14 studies that provide what the experts characterize as “fair” evidence that circumcision in adulthood protects men from H.I.V. transmission from a female partner, cutting infection rates by 40 to 60 percent. Three of the studies were large randomized controlled trials of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine, but they were carried out in Africa, where H.I.V. — the virus the causes AIDS — is spread primarily among heterosexuals.

Circumcision does not appear to reduce H.I.V. transmission among men who have sex with men, Dr. Diekema said. “The degree of benefit, or degree of impact, in a place like the U.S. will clearly be smaller than in a place like Africa,” he said.

Two studies have found that circumcision actually increases the risk of H.I.V. infection among sexually active men and women, the academy noted.

Other studies have linked male circumcision to lower rates of infection with human papillomavirus and herpes simplex Type 2. But male circumcision is not associated with lower rates of gonorrhea or chlamydia, and evidence for protection against syphilis is weak, the review said.

The procedure has long been recognized to lower urinary tract infections early in life and reduce the incidence of penile cancer.

Although newborn male circumcision is generally believed to be relatively safe, deaths are not unheard of, and the review noted that “the true incidence of complications after newborn circumcision is unknown.”

Significant complications are believed to occur in approximately one in 500 procedures. Botched operations can result in damage or even amputation of parts of the penis, and by one estimate about 117 boys die each year.

Anesthesia is often not used, and the task force recommended that pain relief, including penile nerve blocks, be used regularly, a change that may raise the rate of complications.

The Gossip Machine, Churning Out Cash

- By JIM RUTENBERG - May 21, 2011 - The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — In late July 2010, the Southampton, N.Y., police charged Michael Lohan, the father of the actress Lindsay Lohan, with physically harassing his fiancée. When the news hit on the gossip Web site TMZ, Mr. Lohan was at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles, where he had been on the interview circuit discussing his daughter’s imprisonment stemming from drunken-driving charges.

Mr. Lohan was hardly morose about his own legal troubles. His hotel room and the hallway outside it buzzed with giddy deal-making as he and his entourage, which included two beefy, bejeweled bodyguards, conducted business with the door open. It could all be overheard by passers-by — or, by coincidence, a New York Times reporter staying in a room across the way.

An associate of Mr. Lohan’s ran through the plan: ignite a bidding war between TMZ and its rival Web site Radar for Mr. Lohan’s side of the story and for embarrassing recordings he claimed to have of his fiancée, Kate Major. “What you have to do is monetize this,” the associate said, adding, “What you want is to make them pay for that exclusivity.”

Sure enough, Radar went on to post four “exclusives” quoting Mr. Lohan denying the charges and threatening to release tapes of Ms. Major.

This is how it works in the new world of round-the-clock gossip, where even a B-list celebrity’s tangle with the law can be spun into easy money, feeding the public’s seemingly bottomless appetite for dirt about the famous.

A growing constellation of Web sites, magazines and television programs serve it up minute by minute, creating a river of cash for secrets of the stars, or near-stars. An analysis of advertising estimates from those outlets shows that the revenue stream now tops more than $3 billion annually, driving the gossip industry to ferret out salacious tidbits on a scale not seen since the California courts effectively shut down the scandal sheets of the 1950s.

It all kicked in with a vengeance last week when news broke that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California had fathered a child with his family’s housekeeper.

Radar was the first to reveal the mother’s identity, in a joint report with Star magazine. TMZ quickly flooded its site with her pictures. Several gossip outlets were prepared to bid big dollars for any new video or photographs of the mistress.

On Friday, TMZ posted the most confidential document of the entire affair: the bank form that Mr. Schwarzenegger signed last year giving her a down payment for her house.

“I don’t know who got ahold of it and how they got ahold of it,” said the mortgage broker involved in the sale, David Rodriguez.

This new secrets exchange has its own set of bankable stars and one-hit wonders, high-rolling power brokers and low-level scammers, many of whom follow a fluid set of rules that do not always comport with those of state and federal law, let alone those of family or friendship.

Now there is a growing effort to stop the flow of private information. In the past few years, a federal Department of Justice team in Los Angeles has conducted a wide-ranging investigation into illegal leaks of celebrity health records and other confidential files, according to officials involved. Working in secret, they have plumbed cases involving Tiger Woods, Britney Spears and Farrah Fawcett, among others.

That inquiry is just one of at least six here into whether workers at hospitals, the coroner’s office or the Police Department have accepted money for private information, according to officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But payment often comes in cash, making it hard to track, officials say, and new laws meant to plug the geyser, many of them promoted by Mr. Schwarzenegger, have hardly worked. “Sometimes I think we’re losing,” one investigator said.

Increasingly, celebrities are not just victims. With only so many big-time personalities in rehab, facing indictment or — á la Charlie Sheen — in public crack-up mode, a raft of reality stars, former reality stars and would-be reality stars have filled the breach with attention-grabbing antics of their own.

Some have broken the law — like the Colorado couple who falsely reported that their young son was floating away in a helium balloon — or, the authorities sometimes suspect, have pretended to break the law to create marketable storylines by staging physical altercations or domestic disputes.

In at least one case, a criminal investigation became part of a show. After prosecutors in Utah opened a bigamy investigation into the Brown family of the TLC program “Sister Wives” — one man, four women and 16 children — the clan moved across the border to Nevada. The move played out in real time on TMZ and in an episode scheduled to be shown Sunday night.

Some law enforcement officials who handled the Southampton criminal complaint against Mr. Lohan questioned whether they might have played bit parts in an endless script the Lohans were writing about themselves. After all, one official noted in an interview, the alleged harassment took place in the home where Mr. Lohan and his fiancée, Ms. Major, were filming a proposed reality show called “Celebrity House NY.”

Ms. Major’s incident report, which was not publicly available, found its way onto TMZ, and the Web site’s photographers just happened to encounter her as she left her lawyer’s Manhattan offices.

“It does lead you to wonder,” the official said, after Ms. Major dropped the complaint.

TMZ and Radar have unearthed so many confidential criminal and health documents about the Lohans that Judge Keith L. Schwartz of Los Angeles Superior Court marveled in frustration, “They ought to maybe hook up with the C.I.A.”

‘Enticing to Steal’

The computer screen flashed as David Perel, the managing editor of Radar Online, worked from his darkened home office in Delray Beach, Fla. Reporters were filing a torrent of items — one about the amputation of the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor’s right leg; another about Charlie Sheen cavorting with escorts; and an interview with the former baseball star Lenny Dykstra in which he defended himself against a sex-film star’s accusations that he paid for her “companionship” with a bad check.

“This is a slow day,” Mr. Perel observed.

Mr. Perel has played a big role in the gossip industry’s evolution. He started as a reporter at The National Enquirer in 1985, rising to editor in chief before joining Radar, which is owned by the same company.

When Mr. Perel began at The Enquirer, he said, “We were never, ever outbid on a story — there was no such thing.”

Today, competitors willing to pay for photographs or information come from all corners. Gossip magazines have proliferated over the past several years, with additions like the United States edition of the British gossip magazine OK! and In Touch Weekly.

Network news divisions sometimes pay interview subjects “licensing fees,” ostensibly for photographs or video. ABC News, whose rules allow payment for material used on air but not for interviews, acknowledged paying the family of Casey Anthony, a murder suspect, $200,000 for home video and pictures. A lawyer for Ms. Anthony said in court that the money went toward her defense against charges that she had killed her 2-year-old daughter.

Online sites like TMZ and Radar are credited with giving the industry a turbo engine. Neither would divulge how much they pay, and they both have played down the frequency with which they do it. People who have worked with them said fees ranged from a few hundred dollars to several thousand — and much more for bigger scores.

Posting more than 30 exclusive items a day is common. “We’re trying to build what they call addicts online,” Mr. Perel said.

TMZ, owned by Time Warner, created the model in 2005, upending the entertainment news business by proving that a huge audience exists for continuous gossip updates. Its founding followed the emergence of savvy “celebutantes” like Paris Hilton, who were happy to invite selected paparazzi to track their every move — whether it led to a shopping spree or an arrest for drunken driving.

“It was based on reality TV,” said Stephen Lenehan, a veteran of the photo agency business. “You could live with the celebrities minute by minute.”

TMZ upped the ante when it began posting documents from the confidential police and court files of celebrities. TMZ has said it draws the line at paying police and other official sources, crediting old-fashioned reporting.

Yet one of its first blockbusters was the leaked report on Mel Gibson’s arrest on drunken-driving charges in 2006 that recounted his anti-Semitic, misogynistic rant. Authorities investigated a sheriff’s deputy who they suspected had been paid for the report, but they did not press charges. Both the deputy and TMZ have denied any transaction occurred. TMZ declined to comment for this article.

Coincidentally, Radar Online had an early successes with another case involving Mr. Gibson, revealing tapes of an argument between him and a former girlfriend, copies of which had been under court seal. Perhaps it is only fitting that the 2007 California law making it a crime for law enforcement personnel to sell confidential information is known as Mel’s Law.

A self-described “celebrity privacy rights” advocacy group, Stoparazzi, wants more assertive laws. In interviews with ABC’s “Nightline” and others, the group’s president, Terry Ahern, has denounced public employees who leak private information.

During an interview with The Times, Mr. Ahern criticized Web sites that offer money for story tips. “Every one of these Web sites says ‘Cash for information,’ ” he said. “You’re enticing people to steal.”

Yet a phone number listed on Stoparazzi’s Web site was the same number listed on Hollywoodtip.com, which declares: “We pay CA$H for Valid, Accurate, Usable Tips on Celebrities.” California state records show that the company that owns Hollywoodtip, P.S.S. Inc., is owned by Mr. Ahern.

Several people familiar with Mr. Ahern’s operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he sold photos and information about celebrities to major distribution agencies under several names. They said they believed he created Stoparazzi to gain the confidence of marketable stars. One of those people shared financial records detailing tens of thousands of dollars paid to P.S.S. for tips on celebrities.

Mr. Ahern denied selling celebrity information and said the tips Web site was started by a partner he would not name. “The site is up, but it is never used,” he said in an interview. “I forgot we even had it.” (The site went dead after the interview.)

He said he did have a photography business, Gorgeous Shots, which works with celebrities to ensure “every shot is gorgeous.” Those raising questions about him, he said, were rankled by Stoparazzi’s mission because “they don’t like people trying to fight for celebrities’ rights to privacy.”

Feeding the Machine

In this overheated gossip marketplace, where the need for fresh fodder routinely turns bad behavior into “news,” the Lohans are prototypes of new Hollywood characters — celebrities famous for being infamous.

Lindsay Lohan, who first impressed critics in 1998 by playing 11-year-old twins in “The Parent Trap,” had a bright acting future but began struggling with drugs, alcohol and the law, often in public view. Now she is on the gossip sites daily, alternately as a comeback-in-waiting and a onetime prodigy gone wrong. She has had several legal cases going on at once, the latest being her arrest in February on jewelry theft charges, to which she recently pleaded no contest. During her arraignment, the Los Angeles courthouse was surrounded by 12 satellite trucks, 150 reporters and 4 helicopters hovering overhead.

Ms. Lohan’s lawyer, Shawn Chapman Holley, who served on O. J. Simpson’s defense team, said the media circus surrounding Mr. Simpson’s murder trial was quaint in comparison. “There’s this unbelievable hunger for a constant flow of information about these people,” Ms. Holley said. “So everybody has to feed this machine all the time.”

Often, that ends up being Ms. Lohan’s father. A former commodities trader who was jailed in the 1990s in a securities fraud scandal, he has made a second career hawking morsels about his family, himself and others in the celebrity sphere in which he travels.

When asked in an interview about his attempt to “monetize” his harassment charge last summer, Mr. Lohan answered, “You have to.”

“It’s a business,” he said, adding, “If they want to write stories about me, why shouldn’t I get paid to tell the truth?”

He said the incident with Ms. Major “had nothing to do with the show” they were filming. As for law enforcement suspicions that the couple exploited the case for maximum exposure, Mr. Lohan said he would “not confirm or deny what was part of the media and what wasn’t.”

Ms. Major, who has made a similar assault complaint against Mr. Lohan that is pending in California, declined to comment, saying only: “I’m going to keep my personal life private, but it was never about money.”

Mr. Lohan has managed to attain enough B-list fame to land a slot in the coming season of “Celebrity Rehab” on VH1, for anger-management treatment. He was paid six figures, he said, for roughly three weeks of filming.

On any given day, Mr. Lohan can be seen on Radar or TMZ promoting his rock song, “A Father’s Love,” about his daughter; writing to Mr. Sheen on his need for rehabilitation; or appearing in a video with Ms. Major getting his-and-her Botox injections.

In late 2009, he gave Radar a recording of a conversation with his daughter about her depression and isolation that he said he released to pressure her to get help. At the time, Mr. Lohan told The New York Post that he was not being paid for the tapes but suggested that he might have been for an accompanying interview.

In an interview with The Times in February, to which he was accompanied by a former Penthouse model, Mr. Lohan would not discuss specific transactions but said the fees were “chump change” compared with his earnings from other endeavors. “I trade a hedge fund,” he said. “I went to jail for insider trading.”

He has extended his role beyond his own family, joining the ranks of “story brokers” who negotiate gossip-for-pay deals.

Records in a lawsuit between TLC and one of its former top reality stars, Jon Gosselin of the show “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” provide a peek at the flow of cash that finances “exclusive” content.

Mr. Gosselin, an information technology specialist before he and his wife at the time became reality stars with their large brood, met Mr. Lohan in 2009 and lamented that he was struggling to land lucrative interviews, according to depositions shared with The Times on the condition that their source not be disclosed.

Mr. Lohan said in a deposition that he set up Mr. Gosselin with a talent broker who has “helped my daughter out tremendously.” The broker, Mr. Lohan said, arranged paid interviews and appearances for Mr. Gosselin in exchange for a 20 percent commission. Mr. Lohan was also paid. The broker, Michael Heller, did not dispute the account.

Mr. Gosselin generated interview offers worth at least $365,000 that year, according to the depositions. That did not include fees for appearances and other events that, Mr. Lohan testified, “are paid in cash, not checks, so there won’t be a record of some of them.”

According to the legal papers, Mr. Gosselin was offered $100,000 by E! Television and received roughly $40,000 from In Touch, at least $120,000 from “Entertainment Tonight” and about $100,000 from ABC News. That was in addition to the $25,000 he and his wife made per episode.

The Hidden Money Trail

If Mr. Lohan is something less than an A-lister and Mr. Gosselin is a notch or two below, it is hard to know how to categorize Jenelle Evans. To the police in Oak Island, N.C., she was another person suspected of breaking the law for the gossip business.

Ms. Evans was an anonymous high school student until her pregnancy won her roles on MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom 2.” This March, she was involved in a fight in which she wrestled a young woman to the ground and pounded her face. Ms. Evans and a friend accused each other of selling the SplashNews photo agency a tape of the fight, which then showed up on TMZ.

Greg Jordan, assistant chief of the Oak Island Police Department, which arrested Ms. Evans for public fighting, said they had begun investigating whether the fight was instigated to profit from Ms. Evans’s minor celebrity and whether the outlets that handled the tape could have been culpable.

“There are laws against paying other people for doing criminal acts,” he said, adding that the fighting case had been taken over by county prosecutors, who have not indicated they are looking into any media involvement. A lawyer for Ms. Evans, Dustin Sullivan, said that his client did not sell the tape but that he believed others did. He called on the authorities to continue investigating the role of media outlets.

The team of federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Los Angeles are asking similar questions when they suspect that confidential health records are sold for gossip fodder. Anthony R. Montero, a special assistant United States attorney with the health care fraud unit based in Los Angeles, said the number of leaks was “significant, but we actively investigate all the matters.”

Last year, prosecutors won a guilty plea from a former U.C.L.A. Medical Center researcher, Huping Zhou, who was found to have illegally gained access to private medical files, many of celebrities, more than 300 times. But investigators could find no evidence to support their suspicion that he was doing it for pay from gossip outlets. Mr. Zhou is appealing his case.

Similarly, the Los Angeles police have yet to solve a high-profile, embarrassing leak: an official photograph obtained by TMZ showing the singer Rihanna’s bruised face after she was beaten in February 2009 by her boyfriend at the time, the singer Chris Brown. In September 2009, the department put two officers it suspected in the leak on administrative leave, but they have not been charged and continue to collect full pay, their lawyers said.

The Los Angeles Coroner’s Department has investigated two major leaks — the actress Brittany Murphy’s preliminary autopsy report in December 2009 and Michael Jackson’s preliminary death certificate.

“Here’s what we’re facing: the offer for pictures of Michael Jackson in our building was worth $2 million the day after he died,” said Ed Winter, the deputy coroner. “We had to shut down public access to our building. We had people literally climb the back fence trying to break in and get what they could.”

The federal law enforcement team established the clearest link between private records and a gossip outlet two years ago by following the trail of Farrah Fawcett’s medical file.

After The National Enquirer report that Ms. Fawcett’s cancer had returned, investigators tracked the leak to a low-level employee at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, Lawanda Jackson, who disclosed her involvement with the paper as part of a plea agreement.

According to an official involved in the investigation, Ms. Jackson described a courtship in which an Enquirer reporter established a level of trust before offering money for information. The official said The Enquirer initially asked Ms. Jackson to find out whether celebrities were in the hospital and then moved on to requests requiring more intrusive forays into medical files, paying each time.

The Enquirer paid Ms. Jackson $4,600 for information about Ms. Fawcett’s cancer, court records show. That and other payments — investigators say they believe that Ms. Jackson reaped many thousands of dollars over the years — were deposited into an account that the authorities said they would not have found without her help.

The official said agents were investigating The National Enquirer’s conduct, although no charges had been filed when Ms. Jackson and Ms. Fawcett died, effectively ending the case. Ms. Jackson’s husband, Victor, said that while he had advised his wife against it, she had a simple reason for working with The Enquirer: “Easy money.”

A $10,000 Payday

Dawn Holland, a $22,000-a-year worker at the Betty Ford Center, has a similar explanation.

The drug and alcohol addiction treatment center, tucked away in Rancho Mirage, Calif., some 120 miles east of Los Angeles, takes its patients’ privacy seriously. Visitors must sign a statement acknowledging that it is illegal to publicly share anything witnessed there. In its nearly 30-year history, the center had never lost control of a patient file — until it brushed up against the Lindsay Lohan story.

Ms. Lohan was there last fall as part of her sentence for violating probation in a drunken-driving case. One night when Ms. Holland tried to administer a breathalyzer test, Ms. Lohan refused and threw a phone at her, Ms. Holland alleged in an internal report, resulting in a criminal battery investigation that did not lead to charges. That report, part of Ms. Lohan’s confidential file, wound up on TMZ.

Ms. Holland quickly told Radar that TMZ had paid her at least $10,000 for an interview and the report, which drew the interest of the federal investigators.

Ms. Holland said in an interview that TMZ paid through a bank account of her lawyer at the time, Keith Davidson, who has other clients who have appeared on TMZ. Ms. Holland said Mr. Davidson told her that he learned about her case from people at the site.

She said that TMZ had called her incessantly after the incident, and that she finally agreed to talk after the treatment center suspended her. “My back was up against the wall,” said Ms. Holland, who was later fired.

“If I could turn back the hands of time, I would not have done it,” she said, adding that she did not realize that leaking the report might violate federal law. (No charges have been filed.)

Ms. Holland hired a new lawyer, Owen L. McIntosh, after questioning the strategy she said Mr. Davidson had persuaded her to pursue. It included ceasing cooperation with authorities against Ms. Lohan and a deal to meet with Ms. Lohan to make peace, and then sell pictures of the moment for up to $25,000. Mr. Davidson said that he could not talk about the case, but that he advised all clients with criminal exposure not to cooperate with the authorities.

In any case, the arrangement was being pushed by none other than Mr. Lohan.

“I was talking to Lindsay, I said, ‘Honey, someone’s got to get in touch with her — your lawyer or somebody — to help her get an interview,” he said of Ms. Holland. “I said, ‘If I have to set it up, I’ll do it for her.’ ”

The plan never went forward, and it is unclear just how open Ms. Lohan was to her father’s advice at the time. A few weeks later she apparently cut off contact with him. This was reported by her mother, Dina — in a Radar “exclusive.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.