Jennifer Aniston stepped into the moderator’s seat in New York City on Wednesday, publicly interviewing her boyfriend, Jim Curtis, as he celebrated the release of his new book, The Book of Possibility.

The 57-year-old Friends alum joined the 50-year-old author onstage at Kaufmann Concert Hall at 92NY Residence, where a packed audience watched the pair’s easy rapport and playful back-and-forth, according to photos and video obtained by the Daily Mail.

After their 30-minute conversation, the event opened up to fan questions, leading Aniston to share that Curtis was helping her confront a “deep fear” simply by having her lead the discussion.

The candid moment came when she was asked to name “one possibility” she was choosing that day.

Aniston answered that she was “choosing to overcome a very deep, deep fear of public speaking.”

Then, asked how she handles stress, the star answered, ‘I think I’m doing really well. Deep breaths and meditation.’ 

Aniston emphasized, ‘Truly. It is five deep, deep breaths. Focus. Take a moment.’

Meanwhile, Curtis opened up about his personal struggles during the one-on-one talk.

He shared the difficulty of coming to terms with his health in his early 20s, when doctors found lesions on his spinal cord, leading to partial paralysis and chronic nerve damage.

‘I’m not saying here that if the doctor tells you to do something, you should get up and leave,’ he explained about getting a grave diagnosis.

He said, ‘What I’m saying is you don’t have to live as the victim. You don’t have to live in your suffering. It can become your power.’

His advice for getting through a health ordeal is to ‘accept it and love it.’

However, he wasn’t always honest about why he walks with a limp.

‘I would say I got into a motorcycle accident,’ Curtis admitted. ‘I was so shameful that I had a medical condition. I was broken in some way. I thought the motorcycle accident was at least a little macho.’

Over the course of 25 years, he said he was able to ‘overcome’ his insecure thoughts with ‘self-acceptance and self-love.’

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Upon the conversation’s conclusion, Aniston thanked the audience and warmly embraced her boyfriend in front of the packed theater before exiting the stage. 

Aniston went Instagram official with Curtis to mark his birthday last November.

At the time, she professed her love for her beau as she shared a black and white image of her hugging him from behind.

She captioned the loved-up photo: ‘Happy birthday, my love. Cherished ❤️.’

The hypnotist also posted snapshots from his birthday party on his Instagram account across two posts.

One caption read: ’50 and feeling good! Birthday recap part 1. Thank you for all the wishes and love. So grateful for you my friends, family and community.’

Another more romantic one, including a wider shot of the photo Jennifer posted, had the sweet note, ‘If this is a dream I don’t want to wake up. ❤️.’

On Wednesday, insiders shared insight on the current state of the couple’s romance to Us Weekly. 

The source claimed that Aniston and Curtis have ‘moved beyond the excitement of a new relationship and are developing a genuine partnership.’

The pair are said to have ‘an ease about them that’s infectious’ and that that ease stems from them feeling ‘accepted’ by one another.

‘It comes from feeling accepted rather than needing to impress each other,’ the insider explained. 

‘They are more trusting and less guarded. They are just as comfortable discussing difficult subjects as they are being vulnerable with each other. It’s grown from an exciting connection to a dependable partnership.’

The insider also shared that Aniston’s friends are impressed by how ‘naturally’ her and Curtis’ ‘lives have blended together despite coming from totally different worlds.’

Pals are also convinced that the secret to the couple’s romantic success is because Curtis ‘is not part of the industry’ and does ‘his own thing.’

A former California mayor has been sentenced to prison after prosecutors said he spent months grooming a 17-year-old foreign exchange student before sexually abusing her.

Robert Brian Bassett, 58, received a sentence Wednesday of four years and four months in state prison after entering no-contest pleas to three felony child sexual abuse charges.

Authorities described the case as a devastating abuse of power and a profound betrayal of trust.

The teen had been staying at Bassett’s home in Biggs from April to November 2023 while participating in a foreign exchange program, living thousands of miles away from her family. Bassett was meant to provide her with a safe host home.

Instead, prosecutors said, he manipulated and groomed the girl over several months and sexually abused her more than once while she was still 17.

Bassett was also serving as mayor of Biggs at the time, a small Northern California town of roughly 2,000 people. Prosecutors cited the girl’s vulnerability, Bassett’s grooming and his abuse of her trust as aggravating factors, leading the judge to impose the maximum sentence.

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The victim told the court that she continues to suffer from what happened — and from the knowledge that someone she trusted betrayed her.

The case began to unravel after Bassett was arrested July 9, when police served a search warrant at his Biggs home. Investigators eventually contacted the victim in her home country, where she disclosed the abuse.

Bassett served on the Biggs City Council and acted as the town’s mayor from 2022 through December 2024.

While he initially maintained his position on the council after stepping down as mayor, he ultimately resigned from the City Council in early 2025 amid a past extortion investigation.

Following a subsequent criminal investigation into actions during his mayoral term, Bassett reached a legal plea deal.

As part of this agreement, two additional felony charges were dropped.

He was sentenced to over four years in state prison, and after prison, Bassett will be required to register as a sex offender for 10 years.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court has upheld a lower court decision giving a father the final say over whether his daughter attends her mother’s evangelical church, resolving a dispute between the parents over the child’s religious upbringing.

In a ruling issued Tuesday, the state’s highest court left in place a Portland District Court judge’s order in a 2024 conflict between Matthew Bradeen and Emily Bickford involving their daughter, who was 11 at the time, according to The Maine Monitor.

Bickford had brought the child to Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, an evangelical congregation in Westbrook, several times a week.

Bradeen objected, describing the church as a “dangerous and harmful environment” and arguing that its teachings had contributed to his daughter’s anxiety. He said she experienced a panic attack after hearing messages about the Rapture, the Christian belief that believers will be taken to heaven during the end times while nonbelievers remain on Earth to face the apocalypse.

The lower court sided with Bradeen, finding that messages the child received at the church were “psychologically damaging” because of how it characterized her father, a ruling the state’s high court affirmed on Tuesday, according to The Maine Monitor.

The lower court ruling granted Bradeen the right to decide whether his daughter attends services at Calvary Chapel, participates in church activities or interacts with church members other than her mother.

The court also said the parents must “continue to share parental rights and responsibilities” when it comes to their daughter’s exposure to other religious groups.

If the two disagreed on their daughter’s religious exposure, the court ruled that the father has the final say. The court said the allocation of final decision-making authority stemmed from the parents’ inability to jointly make decisions about the child’s religious upbringing, not from disagreement with the mother’s religious beliefs.

Bickford’s lawyer, Mathew Staver, told The Maine Monitor he intends to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bickford and her legal team have 90 days to appeal the decision to the nation’s highest court.

Staver’s law firm, Liberty Counsel, which describes itself as a Christian ministry focused on religious freedom, has been involved in other religious freedom cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a 2022 case in which the court sided with a private religious group that Boston officials had prohibited from flying a Christian flag.

In the dispute between Bradeen and Bickford, Liberty Counsel argued to Maine’s high court that the 2024 order violated the mother’s First Amendment rights through its “open hostility” toward religious beliefs and by barring her from influencing the 
“Religious upbringing of her child as she sees fit,” the outlet reported.

“What Maine has done in this decision is put the Supreme Court of Maine at odds with the courts of a number of other states,” Staver said. “I think it will be a case that will be very significant and catch the attention of the Supreme Court because of how far-reaching it is with regards to the First Amendment exercise clause.”

Bradeen’s lawyer, Michelle King, called Tuesday’s decision “well thought-out and reasoned,” saying Bradeen was happy with the outcome, according to the outlet.

“Anytime you’re in court, it’s stressful,” King said. “But this case has definitely garnered a lot of media attention, and I think that’s always difficult for parents.”

Part of the case centered on a service in which the pastor singled out Bradeen by name, The Maine Monitor reported.

As legal proceedings for the original dispute were ongoing, Bickford brought her daughter to a service at Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, where pastor Travis Carey led a six-and-a-half-minute prayer focused on the case, referring to the parents and child by name almost 30 times, saying Bradeen is “in need of salvation” and calling the proceedings “an attack on God’s Word,” according to the report.

The Maine Supreme Court said Bickford did not make any attempt to pull her child from the service, and she later described it as “appropriate.”

Bickford “is unwilling to recognize, much less mitigate, the risk that these messages alienate the child from Bradeen or otherwise cause her harm,” the court wrote.

In the 2024 lower court order, Maine District Court Judge Jennifer Nofsinger wrote that the harm caused to the daughter did not result from “a belief system that is rooted in the Bible,” but rather, from the mother’s “inability to co-parent” regarding religion and the fact that she had given control of decisions about her daughter’s best interests to the church, and its language had denigrated the father.

“The court found that the child was harmed by Bickford’s decisions to expose the child to messages that characterized Bradeen as an ‘enemy’ who seeks to ‘persecute’ the child and her faith, and by Bickford’s unwillingness to prevent the child from receiving those messages or to take any other steps to reduce the risk of alienating her from Bradeen,” the Maine Supreme Court wrote in its decision on Tuesday upholding the lower court order.

The final finding “reflected simply that it is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent or the other parent’s authority figures.”

The court ruled that the order was based on the parents’ inability to co-parent on religion, not on the substance of Bickford’s religious beliefs, finding it necessary for one parent to be given the power to make final decisions over the other.

NEW YORK CITY — A woman described by authorities as apparently emotionally disturbed was shot and killed by New York City police Monday afternoon after she allegedly stabbed two people in Times Square in what officials called a “random and unprovoked” attack.

Police identified one of the victims as 32-year-old Erin Piacenti of Chester, New Jersey, who later died at a hospital. Piacenti was an employee at Bank of America, which said in a statement that it was “shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our colleague.” The company added, “Our hearts go out to her family and all of her loved ones.”

According to a GoFundMe page, Piacenti and her husband had welcomed a baby girl five months ago. Monday marked her first day back at work following maternity leave.

Piacenti and her husband were both 2021 graduates of Fordham Law School. School officials said they were “heartbroken to learn of the tragic and senseless loss of our alumna.”

A second victim, a 68-year-old man from Rhode Island, was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries, officials said. He has since been listed in stable condition.

The victims were stabbed within 20 seconds of each other near 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

The 68-year-old had just exited the subway and was waiting to cross the street with his wife when the suspect pulled two knives from a bag, waved them and then allegedly stabbed him in the abdomen “in what appears to be a random and unprovoked attack,” Tisch said at a press briefing.

The suspect then went up Seventh Avenue toward 42nd Street, where she approached the second victim, who was similarly stabbed in the abdomen in an apparently random, unprovoked attack, Tisch said.

The suspect allegedly then fled north toward the NYPD substation, authorities said. Witnesses flagged down officers who confronted her for four minutes and “gave her numerous commands to drop the knife,” which she refused, Tisch said.”

During the encounter, she told the officers, ‘I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you.’ She repeated, ‘I will kill you,'” Tisch said.

Officers deployed Tasers before two officers discharged their service weapons, Tisch said.

The suspect, identified by police as 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros of Queens, was pronounced dead at a hospital. She had a “documented mental health history,” Tisch said. Police officials stressed the woman appears emotionally disturbed and the incident is not terror-related.

Two knives were recovered from the scene.

“I want to thank the NYPD officers who stepped in and prevented a horrific attack from becoming even worse,” NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani said during the press briefing. “This is what the men and women of this department do every single day to keep our city safe.”

The NYPD will conduct an internal investigation, and body-worn camera footage will be released to the public, the mayor said.

A June 15 GoFundMe campaign, reportedly created by a man who identified himself as Daveigh Chase’s boyfriend, brought renewed attention to the former child actor’s alleged health crisis.

Within 24 hours, reports said the 35-year-old actress, widely recognized for her performance in the horror hit The Ring, had died.

According to those accounts, Chase had become severely emaciated and was struggling with AIDS and substance abuse after years marked by addiction and homelessness.

In the aftermath, attention quickly turned to Roy Hernandez, 38, the man described as her boyfriend, after members of Chase’s family and her former manager accused him of attempting to benefit financially from her death.

They also raised questions about why Hernandez sought donations through a crowdfunding page, arguing that Chase had access to a SAG trust account that could have paid for her medical care.

They also accused him of leading her deeper into a world of drugs.

Now, in an exclusive sit-down interview, Hernandez has hit back at those accusations, speaking for the first time on camera about his relationship with Chase, their final days together and the circumstances surrounding her death.

Sporting a cursive ‘Daveigh’ tattoo above his eye, Hernandez also revealed that he proposed to Chase before her death – and that she said yes.

He told the Daily Mail why he believes he, not her family, should inherit her $400,000 estate.

After months of communications, Hernandez finally agreed to be interviewed last week. We met in LA’s Elysian Park, a special spot he said he and Chase used to visit ‘to escape.’

Hernandez recalled meeting Chase for the first time in 2021 at a mutual friend’s house.

He said he had no idea Chase was a celebrity, noting she had short hair at the time and had not acted in a movie since 2016.

‘We hung out the whole night,’ Hernandez recalled.

Within two months they were a couple.

Their relationship began at a time when Chase’s family claim she was already deeply troubled.

They say she was addicted to drugs and homeless, living on Skid Row and moving between tents across LA.

Hernandez, however, paints a radically different picture of the life they shared.

‘She was always happy,’ he said. ‘She made me really happy.’

He insists they were never homeless, saying they lived together for five years in his RV by choice.

Hernandez described a nomadic life of road trips with their two dogs and visiting his mother in East LA when the couple needed a home cooked meal and shower.

In 2024, he proposed to Chase and said she accepted. In February 2026, he had her name tattooed above his eye.

Hernandez rejected the suggestion that he was responsible for Chase’s drug use, or that he stood by her while her health deteriorated.

He claimed he never took drugs with Chase or saw her using during their relationship.

‘Anybody who knew us out there, they would know,’ Hernandez said of the family’s accusations. ‘Especially when it came to me, they would know that I would never let that happen. It’s 100 percent not true.’

Hernandez admitted he knew Chase used to ‘smoke’ drugs, including fentanyl, before they began dating. Chase had told him she used them to cope with painful memories from her past.

‘She was trying to forget her past and what she went through. She said it made it easier for her,’ Hernandez claimed.

He was referring in part to an alleged 2021 incident in which Chase said she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by an unidentified man in a Los Angeles hotel. She never reported the alleged assault to police.

Hernandez said that, rather than enabling Chase’s addiction, he spent much of their relationship trying to keep her away from drugs and protect her from the things she was struggling with.

But the picture of Chase in the months before her death was starkly different.

In footage filmed in 2025, Chase appeared severely emaciated and in extremely poor health. The actress’s father, John Schwallier, says the video makes Hernandez’s account difficult to believe.

‘[Roy] had to have known how sick Daveigh was because in that video, she looked to be only 80 pounds,’ Schwallier told the Daily Mail.

Cathy Chase has also described her daughter as extremely frail in the footage, saying she was ‘nothing but skin and bones.’

Hernandez insists Chase was fed and cared for, but says she would sometimes hide food and resisted going to hospital until it was too late.

But Chase’s decline had begun years before she met Hernandez.

Her mother Cathy said her downward spiral began after a motorcycle accident around 2016 in which Daveigh injured her back.

She was prescribed powerful painkillers, which Cathy said marked the beginning of an addiction that eventually progressed to stronger drugs.

From 2018 to 2024, Chase was in and out of jail on drug possession and other charges. 

Cathy said that when she first visited her daughter behind bars in 2019, she barely recognized her, attributing the dramatic change to the hold drugs had taken over her life.

But Hernandez suggested that her relationship with her family and experiences during her childhood also played a role in her decline, as well as the pressures of growing up in Hollywood.

Hernandez said Chase rarely spoke about her father and claimed she had told him that she believed her father was dead because that was what her mother had allegedly told her.

Chase’s relationship with her parents is now at the heart of the bitter legal dispute over who should access her estate.

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Hernandez said that while Chase was in jail, her mother once suggested that she give her money to her younger brother because she was ‘over here doing nothing with it.’

‘I would just tell her, “Don’t listen to your mom,”‘ Hernandez recalled. 

Chase died with an estate worth around $400,000, including residuals from commercials, films and television shows that she had apparently never collected.

At a hearing on Wednesday in a Downtown LA courtroom, Chase’s parents and their attorneys told a judge that they planned to move forward with competing petitions over control of her estate.

Her former manager, John Ryan, is also involved in the legal battle. Last week, Ryan filed a declaration to the court supporting a fiduciary to take over as administrator of Chase’s estate. 

Ryan and his company is also seeking money he claims is owed to him while he served as Chase’s manager. 

During our interview, Hernandez also laid his claim to her estate, presenting himself as the person who was closest to Chase during the final years of her life.

He claims Chase told him she wanted her money to go to him or to animal charities, and that she did not believe either of her parents deserved it.

‘She and I never really cared about the money,’ Hernandez claimed.

‘I know she probably would’ve wanted me to have it, but that’s what we had talked about previously. She wanted to take the money and go on trips, to take us away from here.’

Hernandez has yet to file any documents to the court seeking to obtain any funds from Chase’s estate.

He claimed Chase was afraid to collect money she was owed from film and television residuals because she feared her mother would find out about it.

‘I told her I would go help her [get the checks], but she would say her mom would “go crazy,”‘ Hernandez said.

‘If anyone knew she had it, she thought her mom would probably go looking for it and try to take it from her.’

Hernandez insists the ugly fight over money shows the broken home life that Chase dealt with.

‘That just made me realize more what Daveigh was going through when she was young,’ said Hernandez.

He said that whenever he suggested calling her mother, Chase would refuse.

‘Now I kind of know why.’

The Daily Mail has contacted Cathy Chase for comment.  

Chase’s parents have told the Daily Mail that Hernandez’s account of their daughter should be scrutinized. He also has had his own run-ins with the law.  

Hernandez pleaded no contest to a 2024 firearms possession charge and was sentenced in March 2026 to three days in jail. 

When asked about his criminal past, Hernandez refused to comment.

Hernandez said Chase was ‘up and down’ during the last two weeks of her life in June, which she spent in hospital.

He recalled watching her struggle to communicate, with dried blood and sores filling her mouth.

It was during her final days, Hernandez says, that they came up with the idea for the GoFundMe.

The day before Chase died, Hernandez claims she was coherent enough to discuss what would happen when she left hospital.

He said they discussed setting up a GoFundMe to raise money that would allow her to live comfortably after she was discharged.

Hernandez claims he has not received any of the $4,500 money that they raised.

The next morning, however, Chase’s condition suddenly worsened.

Doctors told Hernandez that she had only hours to live.

‘The next day is when they called me and they told me in the morning that she had like only hours,’ Hernandez said, fighting back tears.

‘I was like, “What do you mean? She was perfectly fine when I left!”‘

Her full autopsy report remains pending, including toxicology results.

It is also unclear when Chase contracted HIV or when her diagnosis progressed to AIDS.

When asked about his health, Hernandez replied: ‘I’m OK.’

Questions also remain over how long Chase had been seriously ill before she was admitted to hospital and whether more could have been done to intervene as her weight and health declined.

Hernandez claimed Chase refused to get treatment even when he and his mother encouraged her to go. 

‘I could only tell her so much. You can’t force somebody to go if they don’t want to go,’ he said.

Sitting in the park where he and Chase had spent so much time together, Hernandez recalled the last words she said to him before she died.

‘She told me, “I’m not afraid,”‘ he said.

‘She said, “You’re not afraid either, right?”‘

‘I told her, “No, you’re right. I’m not afraid.”‘

At least 15 people were taken to hospitals Wednesday after authorities reported a “potential chemical exposure incident” at an Iowa prison.

Crews from the Newton Fire Department and the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office were called to the Newton Correctional Facility at about 12:30 p.m. following reports of a possible chemical exposure, according to WHO13.

“Emergency protocols were activated today at Newton Correctional Facility following a potential chemical exposure incident on-site,” Iowa Department of Corrections Chief of Staff Paul Cornelius said in a statement provided to the outlet.

Up to 15 people were transported to four hospitals in central Iowa, a Newton fire official told KCCI. The exact number of people affected, however, had not been confirmed as of Wednesday evening.

Officials also had not released the patients’ conditions, and it was not immediately clear whether those sickened were incarcerated people, prison staff members or a combination of both.

“The cause and nature of the exposure are actively being investigated,” Cornelius said.

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“Out of an abundance of caution, the area has been secured, and relevant safety and emergency response procedures were implemented immediately.”

Officials from UnityPoint Health said four people were transported to a hospital in Grinnell and four others were taken to Iowa Methodist in Des Moines with non-life-threatening injuries, according to KCCI.

Meanwhile, nine additional patients were transported to medical facilities between Des Moines and Newtown, a MercyOne spokesperson told the outlet. 

Cornelius added that any further updates would be provided “as verified information becomes available.”

Newtown Correctional Facility, composed of a maximum-security and medium-security facility, sits on around 1,500 acres of land several miles south of Newtown. 

The facility holds roughly 1,000 inmates.

The Iowa DOC did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.