Rita Cosby, Clairvoyant Libel Defendant

Rita Cosby's bona fides include "an exclusive interview with Slobodan Milosevic while he was imprisoned at The Hague; an exclusive interview with Yasser Arafat when his compound was under siege"; "a rare, private meeting with Pope John Paul II" and interviews with "more than a dozen world leaders and four U.S. presidents."

That's according to the Amazon.com author bio for her book Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith's Death. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Now it turns out that the reporting behind the book was just as classy and sophisticated as its subject. Briefly, Cosby claims in the book that Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern, two of the players in the Smith saga, were lovers. Only -- whoops! -- she didn't bother to call them for comment. Her explanation: "I knew what the answer would be. I knew the answer would be something that I couldn't trust."

Birkhead says he's going to sue the pants of Cosby and her publisher, Grand Central. It sounds like he has a pretty good case. (NBC must have thought so, because it killed a Today segment on the book.)

By the way, Cosby interviewed a lot of those statesmen and presidents as an anchor for MSNBC. So while it may not be the Paris Hilton network, it has a fair claim to being the Anna Nicole Smith network.