ABC/ Ida Mae Astute

Even if she had never met Chris Brown, Rihanna knew how domestic abuse could turn into a vicious cycle.

"I always anticipated it happening. At night I wouldn't want to sleep, because I was too afraid it would happen," the singer said in the portion of her ABC News interview that aired on 20/20 tonight, referring to her father hitting her mother when she was a child growing up in Barbados.

"She never went to the hospital, but he broke her nose.," Rihanna continued. "She would never go to the hospital...Domestic violence is not somebody that people want anbody to know, so she would just hide it in the house. I always said to myself, 'I'm never going to date somebody like my dad, never.'

"I always said that."

And yet she not only dated someone who hit her, she went back to him after the fact.

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ABC snagged Rihanna, leaving MTV... with Chris Brown.

But the network and the fallen R&B star made the most of the opportunity tonight with a half-hour special that gave Brown a chance to reflect even more upon his endlessly reflected-upon crime.

So did he have anything new to say this time?

Well, Brown's position has been to not discuss what exactly happened the night he assaulted his then-girlfriend, turning him into a celeb-gossip pariah before the sun had risen the next day.

But Rihanna did go into detail about the attack, however, and MTV gave Brown the opportunity to respond to what Rihanna was dishing out to Diane Sawyer.

"While I respect Rihanna's right to discuss the specific events of February 8th, I maintain my position that all of the details should remain a private matter between us," he said in a statement to MTV today.

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The Kate-Gosselin-Sets-It-Straight train rolled into Remorseland today.

The reality-TV star whose show has been postponed out from under her admits in her latest interview that she isn't proud of the Jon & Kate Plus 8 moments she spent berating hubby Jon Gosselin or otherwise bossing him around.

"I was very hard on him and I would never deny that," she said tonight on the TLC special Kate: Her Story. "I felt very much like a lot of weight rested on my shoulders."

"I was wrong to treat him that way," she added. "Was it good, healthy and wonderful? No. Am I proud of those moments that were captured? No."

Those moments were the ones that initially had the fans playing for Team Jon in the early days of their breakup—before new Jon reared his ugly (yet now apologetic) head.

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Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair likes to think of itself as a highbrow culture magazine with its fancy Annie Leibovitz covers, but if there's one thing no publication can afford to ignore, it's Twilight. So for the December issue, the mag went Tiger Beat meets J.Crew catalog with a stunning 12-page piece on Robert Pattinson (ahhhhhhhh!).

The photos are amazing. Look, Rob Pattz reads books! He can really wear a sweater! He eats his lobster like this! He gets so overwhelmed! He'll hang out in bed with you all day! And, of course, he writes epic ballads at his grand piano on the beach! Swoon.

As for the actual words written about our dear sparkle vampire, it's mostly about what an overwhelmed, self-conscious wreck Rob is right now. "I'm trying not to drown," he says. 

And then there's writer Evgenia Peretz's description of a bumbling teen idol: "He is often apologizing—for being boring, for the 'douchey' terrace that's attached to his hotel room, for telling you a story you might have read somewhere else already...he'll dismiss his work in any way he can."

But most Pattz fans are well aware of Rob's self-deprecating nature and that's when it's time to play up the maybe, maybe-not relationship with Kristen Stewart.

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Evandro Inetti/ZUMAPress.com

One of Hollywood's most vociferous liberals, Sean Penn, is back doing his favorite thing: riling Americans with his controversial travels. (Or is his favorite thing getting nominated for Oscars? It's a toss-up.)

The two-time Academy Award winner has embarked on a short trip to Cuba as a journalist on assignment for Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post.

Rumor has it he's there to interview Fidel Castro; however, his rep tells E! News the actor has no set plans to meet with former Cuban leader.

But that's not to say they won't meet up...

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Apparently Jon Gosselin's reflection is different from the image he's been seeing on TV for four years.

"I had an epiphany one day," he said tonight on Larry King Live, a hot spot for all things Gosselin these days. "I looked in the mirror and I said, 'I don't want to be this person anymore.' "

That was one of the explanations the disgruntled reality-TV dad offered up as a reason for why he, after once defending the integrity of the show completely, has now ordered TLC to quit filming him and his kids, prompting the network to suspend production.

"I'm sorry I said that," he said, referring to his past on-camera comments about what a great time the kids were having on the set. "If I would have said opposite of that—breach of contract."

"I meant it and I felt that way," he added. "Now looking back..."

According to Jon, his change of heart is not because the show will be called Kate Plus 8 when/if it returns in November—a name change he had no prior knowledge of, he says.

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Mackenzie Phillips' admission that her father, '60s rock icon John Phillips, raped her when she was 19 and that the incestuous relationship did not stop there has brought a variety of responses from her extended family.

The One Day at a Time star read excerpts from her memoir, High on Arrival, on The Oprah Winfrey Show today, where she also talked about the drug problems and depression that have plagued her for most of her life.

Phillips says that she finally put a stop to the sex 10 years after it started when she became pregnant and, suspecting that John could be the dad, she had an abortion.

"It was one of those moments where you're either going to live or die," she told Oprah. "I don't mean death. I mean, wake up dead. Dead to feeling. Dead to reality."

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Last night while President Obama was telling jokes and talking business on Letterman, the real late-night party was over on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, where Ricky Gervais taught us all a new game.

It's called Awful Jim Jam and involves that strategically placed hole in men's pajamas and then, well, Mr. Gervais does a much better job at explaining it than we ever could:

"You can play it with your wife or girlfriend or mom, I don't know where you live. You pull out a little bit of skin, you don't give anything away and you go to your girlfriend, 'C--k or ball?'"

Sounds fun? The British comedian also gave Conan an ugly makeover for his rickygervais.com blog, where Ricky keeps all his own ugly photos, and cried. You know, just a typical late-show appearance promoting a new movie (that movie happens to be The Invention of Lying, btw).

And yes, there's more of the Gervais-Conan experience after the jump...

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Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

It was radio interview day for Taylor Swift, who was making rounds promoting her single "You Belong With Me" reaching No. 1, being on People's list of Best Dressed Celebrities or her album going platinum.

The happy-times list goes on like so. In fact, the only thing she wasn't promoting was the Interrupting Kanye Incident.

During her interview with the MJ Morning Show on Tampa Bay's 93.3 (audio is here), T.Swift made her desire not to talk about Kanye very clear. The first time MJ asked her to describe what happened that fateful VMA night, Taylor explained:

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Megan Fox is an expert on a lot of things: the power of the vagina, bisexuality, saying dumb stuff, modern-day teen idols—you know, just about everything. So let's ask her about advice on high school mean girls. After all, she's really identifiable to young, normal girls everywhere.

At a press junket for Jennifer's Body, the actress doled out this advice on dealing with bullies, and it doesn't involve murder, so that's good for everyone:

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ABC/ DONNA SVENNEVIK

To say La Toya Jackson idolized her late brother would, it seems, be putting it lightly.

"I don't think we'll find a person as talented, a person who thought the way he thought," she tells Barbara Walters of Michael Jackson in a 20/20 interview airing tonight. "A person with the heart that Michael had.

"People aren't that way anymore. He was special. He wasn't God, but he was certainly godlike. He was the closest thing to a god that I knew."

It's safe to say La Toya, who signed her brother's death certificate and later became the legal guardian of his body, doesn't feel the same way about Dr. Conrad Murray.

"Something went wrong," she said when asked if the doctor killed her brother. "Something went wrong."

As it happens, several somethings appeared to have gone wrong, not least among them Murray's hide-covering decision to call Prince Michael into his father's room to witness his hopeless attempts at resuscitating the pop icon.

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Kate Gosselin gets a virtual hand-holding session with Meredith Vieira, is invited to cohost The View and serenely tells Larry King about the vault where she keeps her juicy secrets.

So what does Jon Gosselin get? His ass handed to him, of course.

Whether it was his heart-pounding, "soul mate" connection with 22-year-old Hailey Glassman or his possible reality-TV project with Michael Lohan and K-Fed, ABC News' Chris Cuomo raised an eyebrow at every turn as he single-handedly went to bat for skeptics everywhere during tonight's Primetime: Family Secrets on ABC.

"My heart pounds, I get sweaty—I don't know," Gosselin said of girlfriend Hailey Glassman, who he insists he was not involved with before his separation.

"I feel like I love her more than I did Kate," he said of the woman he somewhat despises nowadays. "I get encouragement from her, I get respect from [Glassman]. Two things that a man needs. This is someone, I mean, like soul mate—like people joke about that. But I'm not joking about that." 

Could that just be the rebound effect? inquired Cuomo.

"Hailey and I have talked about that," the 32-year-old father of eight replied. "I have so much to lose in this situation. I could lose custody, I could lose my kids, I could lose—but I feel like with her that I'm not going to lose them. It's just going to get better." 

Of course, all this romantic bliss fits right in with Cuomo's midlife crisis theory.

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