Celebrity Mound

STAR Jones is being dissed in Detroit for not showing up at a 2006 Super Bowl weekend charity event – but the woman making the claim is a financial train wreck who never coughed up the dough to pay for the celebrity gig.

Bankrupt Motown businesswoman Sharon DuMas-Pugh, director of a nonprofit called Full & Fabulous, told Detroit TV station WXYZ this week that Jones promised to give an “empowerment” talk to overweight girls but blew it off. Instead, she claims, Jones used charity-supplied plane tickets to “come to town for book signings and a fashion show with Holly Robinson Peete – on our dime.”

But according to the event contract obtained by Page Six, DuMas-Pugh agreed back in April 2005 to pay Jones’ standard $25,000 speaking fee and pay for first-class airline tickets and a five-star hotel room. A $10,000 deposit was due that August. Just weeks before the Super Bowl, DuMas-Pugh still hadn’t come up with any money – and Jones agreed to extend the deadline.

“This was something I was really looking forward to doing, so I gave them as much time as I could, because I thought they were making an effort. But they clearly had breached the contract,” Jones told The Post’s Jeane MacIntosh.

DuMas-Pugh, who started her group 25 years ago, isn’t exactly a financial whiz. IRS records show that her charity, which solicits donations via its Web site, has never filed a tax return, though it’s required to by law.

And after running up $74,000 in debt, DuMas-Pugh declared personal bankruptcy in 2005. In the filing, she claimed to be “unemployed,” making just $3,500 a year as a “casual” consultant. Her charity co-director also has filed for personal bankruptcy.

In late January 2006, DuMas-Pugh, who was charging $100 a head for Jones’ keynote luncheon speech, finally came through with the deposit. Jones then gave the group until the day before the event to get the rest and boarded the plane for Detroit. But the money never materialized.
“So,” says Jones, “I did not show up. That part is the truth.”

Now DuMas-Pugh says she’s going after Jones for $20,000, and Jones says she’s hurt by what she calls an attempted “shakedown,” adding, “I am devastated that these young women were misled, [but] they were misled not by me but by their own director.”

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Star Jones Reynolds says in a new interview that her dramatic weight-loss was due to gastric-bypass surgery, and that she dodged questions about it for years because she was “scared of what people might think of me.”

Reynolds, 45, says she was “intentionally evasive” when people asked how she’d dropped 160 pounds in three years. The former “View” co-host opens up about her weight loss and self-esteem issues in a story featured in the September issue of Glamour magazine, on newsstands Aug. 7.

“Everything about me was already so public (mostly my own doing – talk about dumb!), so of course everyone wanted to know what I had done,” she writes. “I was also terrified someone would have a tragic result after emulating me without making an informed decision with her doctor.”

“But the complete truth is, I was scared of what people might think of me,” she continues. “I was afraid to be vulnerable, and ashamed at not being able to get myself under control without this procedure.”

Keeping her decision private made her a hypocrite, she says, because she had been so outspoken about her firing from ABC’s “The View” last year.

Reynolds, who weighed 307 pounds at her heaviest, says her “out-of-control behavior” began around her 40th birthday in 2002. Feeling lonely, she turned to food for comfort and gained 75 pounds over the course of 17 months. She had the procedure in August 2003.

“I used to look in the mirror and take pride in my figure, but that was when I was legitimately a full-figured woman,” she says. “I’d gradually gone from full-figured to morbidly obese.”

Reynolds opted for surgery after a friend expressed concern about her weight. It was a success, she says, though she found she was “still consumed with the same anger, shame and insecurity as before.”

Her husband, banker Al Reynolds, encouraged her to begin psychological therapy in the summer of 2005. She learned, among other things, that she “couldn’t control what others thought,” she says. She began to heal by talking openly about her weight loss to strangers.

Star Jones Reynolds says she will address speculation about her dramatic weight loss in a story for Glamour magazine.

“I wrote an article because I really wanted to go as in-depth as possible about the way I’ve changed physically over the last 10 years on the air,” Reynolds, 45, said recently while promoting her new Court TV (soon to be truTV) talk show. “And I thought that that would be the most effective way to answer everybody’s questions.”

Her article, “Getting Over Myself,” will be featured in the September issue, on newsstands Aug. 7, a representative for Glamour said Monday.

Reynolds, who has said she had medical intervention for her weight, said she has no qualms about viewing photos of when she was very heavy.

“I actually like seeing the old pictures because what it says to me is, `You never allow yourself to get there again,’” she told reporters, according to AP Radio News. “It was dangerous to me. Very dangerous. I was killing myself.”

Reynolds, who married banker Al Reynolds in 2004, decided to use her maiden name as the title of her afternoon talk show, which premieres Aug. 20.

“Star Jones Reynolds makes dinner for her husband every night. She’s the wife. I’m the working woman,” she said.

Court TV has said Reynolds’ show will be about criminal justice issues that intersect with the pop culture world. It’s a return to her roots for Reynolds, a lawyer who began her TV career as a legal commentator on Court TV in 1991. She was an original co-host on ABC’s “The View,” starting in 1997, where she became acquainted with the glitz and glamour of show biz. She left the daytime talk show last year.

Reynolds says she would like to talk with Rosie O’Donnell, another former “View” co-host, who has criticized her for skirting the subject of rumored stomach surgery.

“I don’t have any reason to not want to sit down and chat with her,” Reynolds said. “She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s in your face – that’s the kind of guest you want on the show.”

Star Jones Reynolds – who has been keeping a low profile since leaving “The View” last year when her nemesis Rosie O’Donnell was hired – will be back on the small screen during the May sweeps in an episode of NBC’s “Law & Order: SVU.” Star, who actually started out as a prosecutor, will play a lawyer consulted on a case. Ludacris also has a role in the same episode.

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