Entertainment Today

Scary day at Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland today, where an armed man held hostages before being shot dead by police. Suspect James Lee, who was killed by police, had a history of run-ins and rants against the cable giant.

Here are five other times Hollywood institutions came under frightening attack:

1. The Post-9/11 Anthrax Scare. Just days after the 2001 terror attacks, the Manhattan offices of ABC, NBC and CBS were jolted anew by the discovery of letters laced with the potentially deadly toxin. Those infected included the infant child of an ABC News staffer. An apparently unrelated anthrax threat rattled A-list types in 2008. 

2. The Pat Robertson Letter Bomb. In 1990, a letter bomb addressed to the televangelist exploded in the mailroom of his Christian Broadcasting Network. One person, a network security guard, was injured.

3. The CBS Gunman.  In 2002, the network’s famed Television City complex in Los Angeles was evacuated, and taping on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful halted, after an armed man barged into the mailroom. A police standoff ensued, and ended only when the suspect shot himself.

4. The CNBC Blackout. In 1998, the business network went dark for about 90 minutes after its New Jersey studio was cleared due to a bomb threat. No explosive devices were found.

5. The Planet Hollywood Explosion. In 1998, a terror group targeted the Cape Town, South Africa, outpost of the Bruce Willis-, Arnold Schwarzenegger- and Sylvester Stallone-founded restaurant chain. One person was killed in the blast.

________

MORE: Five Mysterious Hollywood Deaths

To catch a thief, young Hollywood edition.

Most nightclubs would be thrilled to have the kind of celebrity lineup an L.A. County grand jury was treated to in June when Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Rachel Bilson and their fellow victims of an ambitious team of homegrown burglars showed up to testify about their individual, yet collectively unsettling, experiences.

Lindsay left the night of the break-in and never came back. Bilson slept downstairs for a month. Audrina Patridge hid in the closet. Orlando Bloom was appalled that they went through his underwear. Hilton has “majorly” stopped hiding her key under the mat.

According to newly unsealed court documents, here’s how they felt when their space was invaded:

The accused perhaps pioneered their technique at Hilton’s gated-community home, which was hit in December 2008, before the same happened to her fellow scenesters.

The now-embattled heiress testified that she probably didn’t set her alarm because she used to feel “so safe” in her residence, “like no one could ever get in.” She still lives i in the Mullholland Drive-area manse, but she has since upgraded her security system and now “never would ever” leave her key under a doormat.

Lohan took time out from her own pending legal troubles to testify that she was only away from her rented L.A. house for a few hours on Aug. 23, 2009, when she came back to find everything “pretty much disheveled.” (Not to be confused with the attempted break-in the previous May.)

She said she remembered running back into the house to grab something before she left for good, and she couldn’t remember whether she set the alarm or not.

Suspect Nicholas Prugo showed up on her surveillance camera, though, clearly enough for a friend of Lohan’s to recognize Prugo while they were out in Hollywood one night.

“I just felt, to be honest, so violated and uncomfortable that I literally packed as much stuff as I could because…it was just the fact that someone came into the only private space that I have in my life at this point,” Lohan said. “So I left that night and I still have not gone back to that house.”

Bloom, whose house was hit in July 2009, while he was in New York, called it “an awful, awful violation.”

“It’s a very weird thing,” he explained. “You know, [Miranda Kerr's] property, my property, my underwear…you know, everything. Personal items…things that I cherish and treasure…You don’t know until it happens, but it’s an awful thing to go through.”

Brian Austin-Green, whose handgun was stolen from the house he shared with now-wife Megan Fox in September 2009, said he never saw a sign of forced entry and suggested that the perps got in through a “large” doggy door in the kitchen.

Like the others, Bilson testified that she saw no signs of forced entry and, while she did have an alarm system, it wasn’t on at the time of the break-in.

“My mom checks on my house when I’m out of town, and we have always sort of lived a very…trusting lifestyle,” she explained when one juror asked why the alarm was turned off.

Bilson, whose possessions were plundered while she was on vacation in May 2009, recalled that she was “crying and, you know, a little horrified” when her mom called to tell her that the O.C. star’s L.A. home had been burglarized.

“It’s really a feeling of violation and invasiveness,” she said, describing the scene in her bedroom when she returned home: “Everything was out on the floor, drawers were pulled out, just totally scattered, and everything was in disarray.”

Bilson said that she only got a few things back, including clothing belonging to her “boyfriend at the time” (wait, she and Hayden Christensen were already on the outs in June?!), but never again saw her mother’s engagment ring, given to her when she was 16, and various other “irreplaceable things that were sentimental.”

“I wouldn’t stay in my bedroom for about a month,” she said, choosing instead to sleep downstairs.

Things sucked high up in The Hills, too, according to Audrina Patridge, whose house was hit in February 2009. She had recently returned from a trip to Australia and she testified that her still unpacked luggage was wheeled right out of her bedroom in full.

“I locked myself in the closet,” Patridge said, testifying that she immediately called her sister, telling her, “I think someone broke into my house.”

The smarter-than-some reality-TV star—who was ultimately able to identify two of the suspects from surveillance video recorded on her property—said that she threw on a robe and drove to a nearby gas station, where she stayed until police had arrived.

Here’s another rundown of the burglar bunch’s massive haul:

• Cash
• Clothing
• Designer handbags, shoes and accessories (Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, etc.)
• Jewelry and watches
• Handgun
• TV sets
• DVDs
• Laptop
• High-end makeup and perfume
• Luggage
• Paintings
• Photographs
• Orlando Bloom’s rug

All of the celebs who testified identified photos of stuff found in the suspects’ possession as their personal belongings.

Pretty Wild star Alexis Neiers, who crossed paths with Lohan in jail while she was serving 30 days for her role in the Bloom break-in, pleaded no contest to first-degree residential burglary but has since denied any wrongdoing.

Another six suspects have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

________

Check out our Fashion Police gallery to see clothing that remains safely in the stars’ possession.

No, there is no such thing as a “good” divorce. But through their words and restraint, Elin Nordegren and Tiger Woods are proving that splits don’t have to go bad, either.  

Here are five other celebrity couples who classed up ex-coupledom:

1. Sandra Bullock and Jesse James: Like Nordegren and Woods, these two made the best of a Bombshell. Their divorce was discreet; their rancor not so much that they can’t be happy (separately) in the same city. So, basically, they’re now who we thought they were back when they weren’t who we thought they were.

2. Demi Moore and Bruce Willis: Do you remember why this pair divorced in 2000? Neither do we. All we know is they’re just maybe the celebrity divorce’s all-time success story. He does photo-ops and vacations with her, their three daughters—and Ashton Kutcher. She and Kutcher (married since 2005, by the by) attended his and model Emma Hemming’s 2009 wedding. Explained Willis once: “I love Demi, and I know she loves me.”

3. Mel Gibson and Robyn Gibson: This split had all the makings of an epic battle, what with one big, fat pile of money of Mad Max’s millions at stake. But since Robyn Gibson filed for divorce last year, the only headline these two jointly have made is when she did him a solid in his (other) courtroom matter with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva.

4. Hugh Hefner and Kimberly Conrad Hefner: Why would the pioneering Playboy stay married to a woman he’d been living apart from for more than a decade? For the same reason a lot of well-meaning ordinary Joes do: the kids. Hefner finally filed for divorce last year, after some squabbling over a house, sure, but also safely after the couple’s youngest son turned 18.

5. Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal: They weren’t ever married. They weren’t ever perfect. But, despite going their separate ways in the late 1990s, they were together when it counted, for her fight with cancer. “I talked to her every day,” O’Neal told Vanity Fair after Fawcett’s death last year. “We pulled apart, but we never popped loose.”

________

PHOTOS: Big Celebrity Splits