He's come a long way since his days as Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" and his first marriage to Madonna. But Sean Penn is back in the tabloids.

The actor and his actress wife Robin Wright Penn are getting a divorce. As celebrity marriages go, this one lasted quite a long time — 11 years. There aren't any details of the split circulating yet, but you can bet there will be eventually. Will this one become the first celebrity mess of 2008, or will it be handled gracefully? Who gets what? What was in their prenup?

New year on the way in a few days, but same old celebrity divorce questions to ponder.

Click here for more.

Now, on the surface, it doesn't sound like she's really doling out any earth-shattering revelations. But she has a lot of common sense tips she can offer about everything from financial management and the legal process to post-divorce privacy issues. In fact, she even goes by an alias — Samantha Woods.

Apparently her divorce was messy and expensive, so she's got a pretty good idea of the worst of what you might encounter. She doesn't want her ex knowing what she's doing now with her consulting business, hence the pseudonym. In the digital age, that's actually something a lot of people might be interested in. If you don't want your ex finding you or tracking your activities, there are steps you can take.

But to me, the most encouraging thing about Woods is the example she sets for what your life can be like after your divorce. We talk a lot here at FWW about the various phases of divorce, and you get a pretty clear picture of that when you look at Woods. She had a phase of her life when she was married at a young age and raised kids. Then she had a phase where she navigated the breakup of her marriage. And now her marriage is over and she's become an entrepreneur.

It's nice to see an example proving things can change for the better during and after a divorce, even if it's tough to see the forest through the trees at the time.

Click here for more.

Divorce is not a simple process for anyone, but it can take a really long time if you're rich. That's pretty much the main point to pull out of the latest story on pro golfer Greg Norman's divorce.

Now, we've written about this before. But just in case you're new to the story, Greg and his ex-wife Laura Theresa Andrassy are scheduled for another hearing in early November. They're still haggling over who will end up with the tax liability for one of their jets. Yes, that's jets, plural.

And then Laura's attorneys are going to try to make Greg pay her more money because he's been dragging his feet on coughing up the cash he's supposed to give her. As if he's really going to notice it when he finally does pay her. Let's be honest, though. Laura hasn't exactly been destitute, unless you ignore the $725,000 Greg gave her that she and her attorneys burned as they worked out the details of the settlement.

One day I hope I have money problems like these.

Click here for more.

Here’s another story that shows things aren’t always so rosy in religious families. We’ve written a couple of times about the mis-matched ministers, Juanita Bynum and Thomas Weeks.

Well, here’s a story out of Alabama about a pastor whose wife walked out on him and their two kids six months ago. Actually, according to a report in the Mobile Press-Register, Beth Smith is still seeing her children on a regular basis, and sources say she is a good mother.

But in March, she hocked her wedding ring while attending a religious convention in Louisiana and bought a bus ticket to New York without telling her family anything. To say the least, details like that make her sound unstable. She was living in a women’s shelter in New York when authorities finally located her in July and brought her back to Alabama.

Her husband, Rev. Jason Lee Smith, has filed for divorce and it seeking custody of the kids, who are 10 and 7. Beth Smith’s attorney said there was conflict in the marriage and that the couple had grown apart. And he talked about the toll that keeping up appearances can take when you’re married to a religious leader. Indeed, if you start to question the life you’re living, that’s a difficult place to be. But walking out on your family? She’s going to have a tough time explaining that away.

Click here for more.

It’s not often that you see stories of flat-out, honest-to-goodness deception. But here’s one of them. A woman in England got swindled out of her divorce settlement by nothing more than a few very transparent lies, and now the guy responsible is headed to jail.

Britain’s Plymouth Herald reports that Pervez Alvi, a bankrupt businessman, convinced Anne Gale to give him nearly half of her divorce settlement (about $200,000) so he could lease three pubs that the two of them and their significant others would run. Gale, who eventually remarried, didn't figure out that Alvi was stringing her along until it was too late. Alvi asked her for a check and told her to leave the payee line blank. And she actually complied. So Alvi just dumped the funds into an account in his wife’s name. And by the time Gale realized what was happening, most of the money was gone.

I’m not sure which one of them deserves more of my disdain. The guy is obviously a creep. And she did something extremely foolish. Here are words to live by: When you’re writing a check for a large sum of money (I do that every day, don’t you?) you probably want to fill the whole thing in yourself. Fortunately, the court is going to make Alvi pay it all back. And he’s going to spend 18 months in jail. It’s nice to see justice served.

Click here for more.

There’s more news out of Pittsburgh in the saga of billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce and his battle with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A judge this week refused to order the Post-Gazette to return previously sealed documents related to Scaife’s messy divorce from his wife, Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife. It’s a fun story from the standpoint of the First Amendment implications, but also because Scaife owns the rival newspaper in Pittsburgh, the Tribune-Review.

Scaife’s attorneys argued that the only reason the Post-Gazette obtained the documents was due to an error that made them publicly available on the Web for a few days in August. Prior to that, the papers had been sealed by the court. But the judge declined to hold the Post-Gazette responsible for a computer mistake made by Allegheny County prothonotary's office.

Indeed, the documents were available to anyone who might have gone looking for them during that time. As luck would have it, the Post-Gazette had a reporter doing what all good reporters do: poking around.

So it’s a win for the Post-Gazette and the First Amendment. Scaife is well known as a supporter of conservative causes, so he’s squarely in public figure territory. But there’s still no word on how the divorce is shaking out. According to the documents, there’s custody of a dog hanging in the balance. Obviously we can count on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to keep us informed.

Click here for more.

We know you’ve all been waiting for the latest in the saga of Juanita Bynum and Thomas Weeks, the dueling evangelical ministers.

Bynum had filed for divorce from Weeks after he allegedly assaulted her in August, and she also has a restraining order against him. But there’s apparently nothing restraining her from turning her divorce into a career-boosting opportunity.

Bynum, who is a singer and televangelist, has been on the front page of the New York Times and made radio and TV appearances, including one on Good Morning America. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says she has declared herself the face of domestic violence. Now, there can never be an over-abundance of discussion on that important topic. But with any public figure, especially one who makes his or her living on TV, you have to question the motives when they go public with their personal stories.

But it’s tough to question a domestic abuse survivor. For now, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. If he beat her and she wants to talk about it to keep it from happening to other women, that’s a good thing. I think we’ll be able to tell if she’s just using it to forward her career.

Click here for more.

Last week we wrote that Richard Mellon Scaife, well known for his support of conservative causes, is in the process of splitting up with his wife. Scaife is the mega millionaire publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, which plays a distant second fiddle to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The details of Scaife's divorce were reported in the Post-Gazette, which obtained court documents that had previously been sealed.

Scaife wants the Post-Gazette to return the documents so they can be sealed again. But it's a little late for that. The Post-Gazette has already reported that Scaife is going to pay his wife more than $700,000 a month, and that the couple is having a nasty dust-up over custody of a dog.

Now, let's be honest, the Post-Gazette is probably relishing the opportunity to report the intimate details of Scaife's divorce. It's not every day that you get to embarrass a competitor.

Still, the Post-Gazette's management also has a point: Scaife's attempt to limit their coverage runs counter to what you'd expect from someone runs a newspaper. Scaife is a public figure, which makes the details of his divorce newsworthy. And the Post-Gazette poignantly argues that Scaife's Tribune Review was one of several media outlets that worked to gain access to the late Sen. John Heinz's estate records when John Kerry — who is married to Heinz's widow Theresa — was running for president in 2004.

It sounds like the documents were made public due to an oversight. But even if that's true, the cat's out of the bag. And as a dog lover, I'm eager to know how this all shakes out.

Click here to read more.

It turns out Al and Peg Bundy may have been even worse parents than anybody thought. Okay, that’s a stretch, but come on … if we can’t have fun with celebrity news here at FWW, what’s the use?

We’re referring, of course, to the ever-argumentative couple on the long-running FOX sitcom Married ... With Children. And while Al and Peg’s marriage seemed to endure everything, the actors who played their kids haven’t had such luck in real life.

We wrote here a few weeks ago about how Christina Applegate, who played Kelly Bundy, finalized her divorce. Well, David Faustino, who played Kelly’s creepy brother Bud, is getting a divorce too. He filed for divorce earlier this year, but now his wife, Andrea, wants to take it to trial to determine spousal support and division of property and attorney fees.

David and Andrea didn’t have any kids, so you’d think this one could be cleared up pretty quickly. And it’s not like Faustino has made much of himself since Married ... With Children went off the air 10 years ago. He tried to be a rapper. He’s been on Celebrity Boot Camp.

But those residuals from “Married With Children” reruns and DVD sales are probably pretty good.

Click here for more.

The writer who brought us “The Starter Wife” is developing a comedy-drama series about divorce for NBC.

Novelist Gigi Levangie Grazer’s “The Starter Wife” was adapted into a mini-series that aired on USA Network earlier this year. A Reuters report on Levangie Grazer’s deal with NBC didn’t mention when the new show would air or what its title would be. But based on its premise, the show sounds like it’ll be worth watching.

It’ll tell the story of a 30-something couple with two kids that’s getting a divorce, but still living together. Levangie Grazer knows the subject well. She’s in the process of her second divorce, splitting up with Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. The show will deal with a lot of the issues we write about here at FWW, namely how to divorce in peace and how to co-parent through a divorce. As Levangie Grazer said in the Reuters story, acrimonious divorces are "so 1990s."

I’m interested to give this one a shot. Here’s hoping NBC doesn’t give it a quick hook and pull the plug on it before it finds its footing. A show like this could give a lot of people a little sense of comfort. Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a reminder that there are lots of people out there dealing with the same things you are.

Click here for more.