Johnny Whitaker, the former child star best known for his role in the beloved 1960s sitcom “Family Affair,” made a recent appearance at a California recycling center, now at the age of 66. Whitaker’s career in show business began at the tender age of three, and by six, he was captivating audiences as an orphan boy on the CBS series that enjoyed a successful five-season run.

After “Family Affair” concluded, Whitaker continued his foray into acting, notably starring as the titular character in the 1973 musical film “Tom Sawyer.” In this role, he shared the screen with a young Jodie Foster, who was yet to achieve her later fame.

Whitaker’s acting portfolio also includes his stint as the original actor to portray Scotty Baldwin on “General Hospital.” His character is introduced as a child and evolves throughout the series, reflecting the character’s life journey from youth to maturity.

Despite his early success, Whitaker’s career immersed him in an environment where substance abuse was prevalent. He found himself attending Hollywood parties at just 16, a lifestyle that led him down a path of addiction. However, he ultimately overcame these challenges, achieving sobriety and reinventing himself as a drug counselor, as reported by Fox News.

However his career as a child star also plunged him into what he described as an ‘environment where drinking and using drugs was acceptable,’ with him attending Hollywood parties at 16 and becoming an ‘addict’ before eventually sobering up and starting a new life as a drug counselor, via Fox News.

He cut a casual figure when he resurfaced this week in Santa Clarita – just north of Los Angeles County – wearing a loose-fitted t-shirt with sweats and slippers.

Johnny Whitaker, aged about eight, is pictured in a 1967 publicity shot for his star-making sitcom Family Affair along with Anissa Jones, who played his twin sister

After the show ended, he also played the title character in the 1973 musical movie Tom Sawyer opposite a young pre-stardom Jodie Foster

Whitaker lent himself a touch of relief from the beating California rays with a baseball cap that cast a shadow over his complexion and his silver beard. 

Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys in 1959, he was discovered while singing with his sisters in their church choir at the age of three.

His big screen debut came with a local used car dealership commercial, and by 1965 he had landed his role of Scotty Baldwin on General Hospital.

Whitaker’s first movie was the 1966 comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, a Cold War satire with a top-flight cast including Alan Arkin, Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Theodore Bikel and Brian Keith.

When Keith then scored the lead role on the upcoming CBS sitcom Family Affair, he remembered his experience working with Whitaker and recommended him for a part.

Keith starred as Bill, a wealthy New York City bachelor who suddenly inherits his orphan nieces and nephew when their parents die in a car crash. 

Whitaker and Anissa Jones played six-year-old twins Jody and Buffy respectively, with Kathy Garver as their 15-year-old sister Cissy and the English character actor Sebastian Cabot as Bill’s valet Giles French.

The heartwarming series proved a hit with viewers across five seasons that aired from 1966 to 1971, kick-starting Whitaker’s career as a child star.

He cut a casual figure when he resurfaced this week in Santa Clarita – just north of Los Angeles County – wearing a loose-fitted t-shirt with sweats and slippers

Whitaker lent himself a touch of relief from the beating California rays with a baseball cap that cast a shadow over his complexion and his silver beard

Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys in 1959, he was discovered while singing with his sisters in their church choir at the age of three

During the run of Family Affair, he had already guest-starred on Bonanza and featured in a Hallmark movie of the 1940s children’s novel The Littlest Angel.

In 1973 he landed his best-known film role as the lead in the musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

He has since noted that ‘I hadn’t read the book before I was cast, since it was more of a junior high school novel, and I was just getting out of elementary that year,’ in an interview with the blog From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Writers.

His co-stars included a 10-year-old Jodie Foster – three years away from her Taxi Driver fame – in the role of Tom’s girlfriend Becky Thatcher.

‘Well, Jodie Foster and I studied French together, and then I gave her her first onscreen kiss – it wasn’t French kiss,’ he joked to interviewer Scott D. Stewart while recounting the filming decades later on TikTok.

‘But then she turns gay, not my fault!’ he quipped, laughing good-naturedly. ‘But she doesn’t answer my calls today. I guess there was something wrong with the kiss.’ 

He had previously worked with Foster on the 1972 movie Napoleon and Samantha, a little-known adventure picture also starring a live lion. 

In 1973 and 1974 he also starred on the beloved Saturday morning children’s television series Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, which had a supporting cast including Margaret Hamilton, The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

(from left) Anissa Jones, Brian Keith, Kathy Garver, Sebastian Cabot and Johnny Whitaker are pictured in a 1966 publicity shot for Family Affair, which ran for five seasons on CBS

Whitaker is pictured as Tom Sawyer with a 10-year-old Jodie Foster – three years away from her Taxi Driver fame – in the role of his girlfriend Becky Thatcher

He had previously worked with Foster on the 1972 movie Napoleon and Samantha, a little-known adventure picture also starring a live lion

He left acting in 1974 and then – having been a Mormon from childhood – attended Brigham Young University in Utah and served as a missionary in Portugal.

His post-acting work included managing Diff’rent Strokes star Dana Plato, working at his sister’s talent agency and acting as a computer consultant for CBS – the network that had run his star-making sitcom Family Affair years earlier.

From 1984 until 1988 he was married to a woman named Symbria Wright, who left him for ‘the man who gave me my bachelor party,’ he said.

His failed marriage was one of the contributing factors to his drift from his religion and his plunge into 10 years of ‘sex, drugs, rock and roll’ that resulted in his excommunication from Mormonism, he told the local Utah new station KSL.

Whitaker’s family staged an intervention in 1997 and he enrolled in a 12-step program, remaining sober ever since, he confirmed in a 2025 interview.

Now a drug counselor, he founded the nonprofit Paso Por Paso for Spanish-speaking recovering addicts in 2003, and he was rechristened into the Mormon church in 2019.

In 2002 he guest-starred on one episode of a Family Affair reboot, opening the door to a smattering of returns to the screen in the ensuing decades.

His latest showbiz jobs include an episode of the game show Cram in 2003, an independent family film called A Talking Cat!?! in 2013 and five episodes of a revival of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters in 2016 and 2017.

A Chicago rideshare driver reached out to ABC7’s I-Team after claiming she was unjustly deactivated from her platform. According to advocates, her situation is not unique.

In response, the I-Team investigated and uncovered local data showing an increase in driver deactivations.

The driver, Aiesha Knowles, explained that her temporary license was incorrectly labeled as fraudulent, leading to a loss of income.

This “deactivation error” prompted Knowles to question the criteria used to flag drivers. However, Uber clarified that artificial intelligence was not responsible for the mistake.

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“I love the flexibility because I’m a single mother. It allows me to earn money while my child is at school,” Knowles shared.

Knowles relies on her job as an Uber driver so when she was yanked off the platform she was devastated.

“They came back and said your account has been deactivated for fake documentation,” Knowles said.

The documentation in question was a temporary driver’s license downloaded from the Secretary of State’s website that she says was submitted twice to Uber.

“They denied it again,” Knowles said. “It’s very real.”

Knowles now has her permanent license, but that has not helped either.

“I called Uber probably eight times, and the first three representatives told me that it was flagged by their, they use an AI system to confirm everything, and it was flagged by that,” Knowles said. “And since I called in, that they would submit it for someone to look at.”

She says she was told she couldn’t show her license in-person, but could appeal electronically.

“With the appeal they said we have to await 24-72 hours to get back to you and I did that too,” Knowles said. “Denied.

She says it was taking a toll on her finances.

“I have not been able to pay my car note and a great deal of my bills since January,” Knowles said.

Just days after the I-Team’s inquiry, Uber reactivated her account. They even gave her cash, estimates of what she could have made during the three months she was off the platform.

Uber insists that a “human”, not AI ultimately reviewed the issue and “mistakenly determined the document was fraudulent,” adding that “Uber has numerous checks in place to help prevent bad actors from using fraudulent documents to gain access to our platform. Unfortunately, this driver’s paper provisional license was mistakenly flagged as fraudulent. We’ve been in touch with her to apologize and welcome her back to the Uber platform.”

“The deactivations are extremely destabilizing,” said Lori Simmons with the Chicago Gig Alliance. “I mean we’re talking about people that often are working to get their money for rent that they need tomorrow, or today even.”

Simmons represents thousands of rideshare drivers and gig workers with the “Chicago Gig Alliance” and says she’s hearing from several drivers who say they too were wrongly deactivated.

“I would say it happens with all types of documents but the ones that we see the most are insurance cards,” Simmons said.

Simmons says it’s then up to the driver to prove their innocence.

“There’s no way to prove that it’s not fraudulent, and there’s nobody to talk to even if you could prove it,” Simmons said.

The I-Team reviewed all rideshare deactivations registered with the city of Chicago’s Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and found that deactivations are rising for the alleged use of fraudulent information or documents. In 2024, they accounted for just under 20% of deactivations. In 2025, almost 32%. And so far in 2026, more than 41%.

The data doesn’t distinguish between valid and erroneous deactivations.

Uber did not comment further on the I-Team’s data, and Lyft has not yet gotten back to ABC7.

Knowles says she’s excited to be back on the road and making money again.

“If it was not for the I-Team, I would be on the verge of losing everything,” Knowles said.

The platform says it’s reviewing what went wrong in this case and will make appropriate changes to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Uber says some reviews incorporate AI, but that all fraud reviews are done by humans.

Kurt Cobain was discovered with a fatal gunshot wound to his head on April 8, 1994, at his residence in Seattle, Washington.

The Seattle Police Department took charge of the investigation and found a suicide note alongside a gun in Cobain’s hands and a heroin kit nearby. This led them to conclude that the 27-year-old Nirvana frontman had died by suicide.

In a recent update related to his contentious book, Case Closed: The Cobain Murder: The Killing and Cover-Up of Kurt Cobain, investigative journalist Ian Halperin, known for his bestselling works, alleges that a former Seattle police detective confided in him that the investigation into Cobain’s death was mishandled.

Halperin shared that he had a conversation with the ex-officer about 18 months ago, quoting the source as saying, “I have felt a sense of righteous indignation for years. Finally, I decided to speak out to address a serious wrongdoing.”

According to Halperin, the former detective claimed that Cobain’s heroin levels were so elevated that it would have been physically impossible for him to fire the gun himself.

‘There were no fingerprints on the gun, and the last five lines of his alleged suicide did not match his own handwriting,’ the source said, according to the book.

‘Just on that, the case should not have been labeled a suicide. A proper investigation should have been conducted, a thorough investigation to find out how, in fact, Cobain died. It was never done.’

When asked about a potential mishandling of Cobain’s death, a SPD spokesperson told the Daily Mail: ‘Kurt Cobain died by suicide in 1994. This continues to be the position of the Seattle Police Department.’

Kurt Cobain died on April 5 from a shotgun wound to the head. His body was found three days later by an electrician installing security lighting at the house

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) took over the investigation, finding a suicide note, a gun in his mouth and a heroin kit at the scene of the greenhouse above a graage, which investigators used to determine the Nirvana frontman, 27, had taken his own life

The former SPD office also claimed there was ‘poor management,’ with Halperin writing that the source said they were among several people within the department who believed the entire investigation was ‘one big cover-up.’

Halperin wrote that the source worked under Norm Stamper, the Seattle Chief of Police from 1994 to 2000, who has expressed regret over how Cobain’s case was handled, stating in 2015 that he ‘would reopen this investigation’ if given the opportunity.

While not directly accusing anyone, Stamper previously suggested that investigators should not have immediately discounted the possibility of murder.

Halperin’s source echoed Stamper’s concerns, saying: ‘Too much politics was involved. Not enough facts. Many people were able to advance themselves at others’ expense. As a result, many cases were treated unfairly.’ 

Halperin wrote that when asked why the unnamed former detective questioned the suicide ruling, the source cited several concerns about the investigation. 

Similar concerns have been raised in previous years by other law enforcement figures who later reviewed the case.

In a previous interview with the Daily Mail, retired Seattle Police Captain Neil Low, who was asked by his chief to audit the Cobain case in 2005, said he believed investigators failed to properly treat the death as a potential homicide.

‘I just am not buying that Kurt did that to himself,’ he said, describing the investigation as ‘botched.’ 

However, in a newly released update tied to his controversial book Case Closed: The Cobain Murder: The Killing and Cover-Up of Kurt Cobain , author Ian Halperin claims that an unnamed former Seattle police detective privately told him the investigation into Cobain’s death was mishandled

According to Halperin, the unnamed former detective claimed: ‘His heroin levels were way too high, which would make it impossible for him to shoot himself in the head.’ Pictured is a heroin kit found at Cobain’s death scene 

However, Low was not involved in the original investigation and reviewed the case years later. 

The SPD has repeatedly maintained that Cobain died by suicide in 1994, a conclusion that remains its official position.

Cobain died on April 5 from a shotgun wound to the head. His body was found three days later by an electrician installing security lighting at the house.

Ian Halperin has released the interview of the unnamed former Seattle Police officer as an update to his book

At the time, the King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide by a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun, as the weapon was found in his arms and a suicide note in a nearby potted plant.

According to Halperin, his source said: ‘I was a detective for many years, and in this case it’s quite easy to put two and two together.

‘The killers incapacitated Kurt by forcing him to take a large dose of heroin. Then, they shot him in the head. To me, there’s no other explanation. I studied this case thoroughly.’

The unnamed officer reportedly highlighted Stamper’s statements, telling Halperin: ‘[Stamper] called for the case to be reopened, saying it wasn’t properly investigated. 

‘Stamper has 34 years of experience in law enforcement. He wouldn’t say something like that unless he had hard facts and proof.’

This is Halperin’s second book on the death of the legendary rock star, with ‘Love & Death first published in 2004.

Halperin made a name for himself in 2009 when he published ‘Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson,’ which correctly predicted the singer’s health decline and death. 

the King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide by a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun, as the weapon was found in his arms and a suicide note in a nearby potted plant (pictured)

Halperin said he hired handwriting experts to analyze the suicide note found at the scene, saying: ‘They said the last five lines were not written in the hand of Kurt Cobain, which is the only thing that really dealt with suicide’

He told the Daily Mail that the copycat suicides are what motivated him to investigate Cobain’s case.

‘I’ve been in discussion with some of the families of the copycat suicide victims, and they deserve justice. If Kurt was murdered and didn’t commit suicide,’ he said.

The author began investigating the case, finding evidence collected at the scene did not point directly to an open-and-shut suicide case.

He noted that Cobain’s toxicology showed he had injected roughly three times what would be considered a lethal dose for a typical user.

‘Even for the most severe heroin addict, the amount found would have been lethal, estimated to be roughly 70 times the dose for an average person,’ said Halperin.

‘No human being could withstand that, and they would likely die within seconds. That’s according to experts, not my own opinion.’ 

He also said he hired handwriting experts to analyze the suicide note found at the scene, saying: ‘They said the last five lines were not written in the hand of Kurt Cobain, which is the only thing that really dealt with suicide.’

‘You know, again, and there were no latent fingerprints found on the gun. Dead men don’t wipe their own fingerprints,’ he added.

However, it was Stamper’s admission that Halperin cites as ‘proof’ that the case should be reopened. 

Stamper was featured in the controversial documentary ‘Soaked in Bleach,’ an unauthorized film that scrutinizes Cobain’s death. 

‘We should in fact have taken steps to study patterns involved in the behavior of key individuals who had a motive to see Kurt Cobain dead,’ Stamper said in the 2015 documentary.

Surveillance footage captured a chilling scene in Ohio, where a man wielding a knife allegedly declared his intention to kill a homeowner “in the name of Allah” during a late-night incident.

This alarming event took place in the early hours of Easter Sunday in Warren County. It began when the suspect was seen apparently praying in a family’s driveway. He then approached the house several times, prompting the concerned father to step outside.

The suspect, identified as 23-year-old Anthony Long, was apprehended and charged following the incident, according to a report by FOX 19 Now.

Tiffany Miller, the mother in the affected family, took to social media on Monday to recount the terrifying experience, calling it a “deeply frightening and dangerous situation” that could have escalated into something far worse.

After midnight on Sunday, a suspicious individual approached an Ohio residence. (Tiffany Miller)

The incident began when the suspect reportedly drove into the family’s driveway with his headlights off, Miller said. 

Surveillance footage from the home then appeared to show the man kneeling in the driveway and praying before approaching the home.

Long first knocked on the front door, but received no response as the family was asleep, Miller said. 

Minutes later, he returned, pounding on the door even louder in a second, more aggressive attempt. 

Miller said the family woke up expecting their daughter to return home, but were shocked to find a stranger at their door in the middle of the night.  

A male suspect was seen praying on his knees before approaching the Ohio home on Sunday. (Tiffany Miller)

“I woke up and walked up thinking my daughter was locked out and, nope, it wasn’t her,” she said. “It was a man I didn’t know. We did not respond, and again he went back to his car.”

The man reportedly remained in his parked car as one of the family’s daughters finally arrived home, prompting Miller’s husband to go outside and confront the suspect.

“Hey bud, you knocking on the door?” the father, Andy, was heard asking. 

“I’ll kill you in the name of Allah,” the suspect immediately replied. 

The alarmed father then began retreating while shouting for their daughter to drive away.

Miller said the suspect then pulled a knife on Andy, attempted to approach the home again, and ultimately drove off in pursuit of the daughter, who had already fled the scene.

The homeowner retreated from a suspicious man early Sunday morning following an alarming encounter. (Tiffany Miller)

“The man immediately exited his vehicle, began making explicit threats to kill him, repeatedly invoking religious language, and started moving closer in an aggressive manner,” Miller said. 

No one was injured in the incident, according to the family.

“This was a terrifying encounter, and we are grateful no one was harmed last night,” Miller said. 

Anthony Long was taken into custody around 3:18 a.m. Sunday. (Warren County Sheriff’s Office)

Long was booked into the Warren County Jail, according to the Warren County Sheriff’s Office.

Long faces four charges, including aggravated menacing, trespassing, and criminal damage, all classified as misdemeanors of varying degrees.

He is also facing multiple bail amounts totaling more than $75,000, most of which must be paid in cash.