Entertainment
Kat Dennings Reveals Her Real Name

Kat Dennings knew early on she wanted a cool stage name.
During the Thursday, March 13 episode of the Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce podcast, the Shifting Gears star, 38, shared that she wasn’t even 10 years old when she decided to drop her given name: Katherine Victoria Litwack.
“My real last name is Litwack — that’s all you need to hear,” the actress said.
“At 9, I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. This is not going to work,’ ” the 2 Broke Girls alum told Kelce, 32.
Applauding her younger self, Dennings added, “She-slash-I was very ahead of her time.”
“It was a CEO situation. I was like, ‘This can’t be displayed on a poster,’ ” the actress joked.
She explained how she adopted that last name for her moniker, recalling her mother Ellen Litwack’s good friend Lloyd Alexander, who wrote children’s fantasy books such as The Chronicles of Prydain series.
Jon Kopaloff/Getty
“Randomly, he was my mother’s best friend,” she said. “So I went there every week until I was 15 years old, and they were like my grandparents, he and his wife. And his wife’s name was Janine Denni, she was French.”
The foreign last name left a young Katherine fairly impressed.
“And I thought it would be a super sick idea if I took her name and made it different,” she said. “Literally, that was the thinking. That’s as far as it went. So Dennings is from her.”
Dennings also explained that choosing her first name wasn’t as simple as abbreviating her own. The actress credits Christina Ricci’s Kat in the movie Casper as her “favorite character at the time” as the inspiration.
“So I was like, ‘Okay, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it,’ ” she said, adding, “It’s insane.”
A few years later, she was already landing significant roles on shows like Sex and the City, however, they didn’t always come easy.
HBO
Earlier this year, Dennings spoke exclusively to PEOPLE about how casting directors called her “fat” and not “pretty” when she was just 14.
“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” she said in the January 2025 interview. “There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back.”
“It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I’m like, ‘How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane,’ ” the Dollface actress said. “For example, I was 12. I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.’ ”
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Dennings admitted, “For some reason, it didn’t break my spirit.”
Instead, she decided to continue acting despite the criticism.
“I was like, ‘I’ll show them,'” she added laughing.
Shifting Gears airs on ABC Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
Entertainment
Bad blood at CNN years after Chris Cuomo broke ‘bro code’ and ‘stabbed’ Jeff Zucker ‘in the front,’ insiders say

It’s been over three years since Chris Cuomo was axed from CNN — but bruised feelings remain at the network over his ouster, and the departure of his onetime boss, Jeff Zucker.
Cuomo reignited the CNN feud during a recent episode of Patrick Bet-David’s podcast by slamming his former cable news bestie, Don Lemon, for not having his back when he was fired.
Sources, however, tell Page Six it was Cuomo who broke the “bro code” when he allegedly backstabbed his old boss, Jeff Zucker, and girlfriend Allison Gollust, who were engulfed in a scandal at the time.
“Jeff put him in primetime. Jeff protected him and Chris sold him out,” a source told Page Six. “He stabbed [Zucker] in the front [by] trying to take the network down,” they added.
Multiple sources said they believe Cuomo was the whistleblower behind Zucker and Gollust’s relationship being exposed, despite it being “the worst kept secret in media,” as one person said.
Cuomo described the accusation as “absurd” in a statement to Page Six. (He’s currently in a $125 million legal battle with CNN).
Meanwhile, the affair led Zucker to resign as head of CNN, while Gollust — who once worked for Cuomo’s brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — eventually stepped down as CMO.
We’re told some CNN staffers are still sore at Cuomo, who they believe, “tried to take down network,” by filing suit when he got the boot.
“It felt vindictive. Jeff and Allison were beloved. Chris was not. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one person say a good thing about him,” one media insider told Page Six.
Another source familiar with the situation told us, “No one at CNN speaks to [Cuomo],” after he tried to “sully anyone’s credibility and reputation.”
A source told us the situation also ended his friendship with Lemon, who told Mediaite last year he still loves the NewsNation host.
Cuomo blasted the accusations as “absurd” and told us, “I have many friends from CNN. It was a great place.”
“The rest of this is absurd and will come out in litigation. If Jeff Zucker or Don Lemon want to have an honest conversation with me, they know how to find me,” he said.
Zucker and Lemon did not comment.
An insider familiar with the situation then dismissed Cuomo’s comments as “absurd,” and a “naked play for attention.”
Cuomo and Lemon previously hosted “The Handoff” podcast as a spinoff of their once-popular nightly handovers on CNN, between their past shows, “Cuomo Prime Time” and “Don Lemon Tonight.”
Despite previously proclaiming how real their bromance was, Cuomo said in the podcast interview that the banter was just Zucker’s idea, due to his concern about how Lemon would open his show.
In 2022, Zucker wrote colleagues in a memo: “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years… I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result, I am resigning today.”
Entertainment
Drew Barrymore Meets Woman with ’50 First Dates’ Disorder

- Nesh Pillay, who struggles with short-term memory loss as documented in the Prime series, 50,000 First Dates: A True Story, shared her struggle with Drew Barrymore, who played a woman with the same disorder in the film 50 First Dates
- Pillay said it started with “a series of head bumps” until one day, she couldn’t remember that she had a daughter Sinead
- While “I cannot retain my memories, I can make memories,” Pillay said, adding that she’s “grateful” that she exists
Drew Barrymore — who famously played Lucy Whitmore, a woman with short-term memory in the 2004 comedy 50 First Dates — interviewed a woman with the real disorder who shared her life in the Prime documentary, 50,000 First Dates: A True Story.
“I always thought that it was an improbable sort of storyline. It turns out that maybe it isn’t,” Barrymore, whose character woke up every morning unable to recall the previous day, said when welcoming Nesh Pillay to the April 23 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.
Pillay, 35, told Barrymore, 50, that, from a young age, “I’ve had a series of head bumps.”
Amazon MGM Studios
“My memory was just worse. Then, three years ago, I woke up from a nap, felt a little bit funny. By the end of that day, I started asking JJ [Jakope], my fiancé, questions like, ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What are we doing today?’ Just being confused. By the end of that day, we went to pick up my daughter, and I remember thinking, ‘No. I don’t know how to take care of a child. I don’t have a daughter.’ “
As she explains in the documentary, Pillay thought her fiancé was her Uber driver. She told Barrymore that, over the next few days “my memory regressed to the point that … [it] reset about once a minute.”
“My family took me to the doctor. At first, they were like, ‘This has to be related to her former brain injuries, but she should be fine in a couple of days.’ I wasn’t, so they took me to a different hospital. The assumption was, ‘Well, we don’t know what’s going on, so she must be faking.’ It was not until filming this docuseries, truly, that I was connected to the neuroscientist Morgan Barense … [that we] finally got some very real answers about what’s going on with my brain.”
As she explained, “The different centers of your brain are connected through neural pathways. Like highways almost. And a lot of mine are damaged. The other thing is brain atrophy. If you look at my brain, it’s a lot smaller. There’s a lot of empty space in there, which means that brain tissue is dead. We’re still kind of figuring out if it’s actively dying. There’s no answers. It’s very confusing. I spend a lot of time questioning reality. Like everything I perceive, I kind of go to my therapist and my parents and my journal to piece together what is real life.”
CBS/pillay.nesh/Instagram
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She also shared that she and her fiancé separated when her memory was “resetting very often” — and sounded off on the imbalance that often occurs “when women’s stories are told.”
“It’s always really a man’s hero journey,” Pillay said. “It’s like a love story and, ‘Ugh this man stayed with her.’ “ But, she added, her documentary isn’t about romantic love. “It’s familial love. It’s sister love. It’s friend love. It’s self-love. And there are all of these other important types of love for women that we really need to be prioritizing. For me in this, I didn’t want the message to be: ‘And then they lived happily ever after.’ I’d rather create something real that connects with people than something pretty or perfect.”
She shared that while “I cannot retain my memories, I can make memories” — and that’s something she focuses on.
“I exist. I’m very grateful for that. For as long as I get to be alive and be present and everything I get to experience, I am endlessly grateful.”
Entertainment
Camryn D’Aloia, Renee Portnoy, more

Dave Portnoy is off the market! After the Barstool Sports founder confirmed that he’s dating Camryn D’Aloia, Page Six decided to slice into his dating history. Watch the full video to learn more about the ladies of his past.
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