Leighton Meester’s upbringing was nothing like that of her Gossip Girl character Blair Waldorf: the actress was born to a mother who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling marijuana.

As Us Weekly reports in its latest issue, on newsstands now, her mom Connie was pregnant with Leighton when she entered federal prison in Texas. At 29, she gave birth while she was just beginning her sentence following a conviction for her involvement with a drug ring that smuggled 1,200-pound shipments of marijuana into the United States from Jamaica. Her father, Doug, also served time for being part of the smuggling operation. Today, Doug works in construction and Connie is a screenwriter.

“Anything that her mother and I did that was questionable occurred before she was born,” Doug, who split from Connie in 1992, tells Us.

Meester’s rough start gives her perspective today.

“It makes me very nonjudgmental and open-minded,” the 22-year-old tells Us. “And I think it just makes me appreciate the things that I have now.”

Gossip Girl director Michael Fields tells Us: “She’s talked about it a little bit. She’s not a person who is trying to hide it.”

Now, Meester and her mom - who was released in 1986 after serving only 16 months - have a solid relationship.

“She’s always there for me no matter what,” Meester tells Us. “I swear, that woman knows everything.”

Connie returns the affection. “She’s very gifted, she’s very talented, she’s very intelligent,” the 51-year-old tells Us. “I love her dearly.”

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The Gossip Girl star, Blake Lively keeps it nice and short during her appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City on Thursday afternoon. She dropped by to promote her hit CW drama.

Blake Lively Arrives at the “Late Show with David Letterman”

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Kelly Rutherford, Nicole Fiscella, Taylor Momsen and Leighton Meester join Costume Designer Eric Daman

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Chace Crawford says he can sometimes get uncomfortable with the racy undertone of his CW hit Gossip Girl.

“Is that a weight on my conscience?” Crawford says in a new interview with London’s The Independent. “Well, yes, I think it is. I come from a moral background, and I can see the power of the show, and imagine my old school teachers cringing, or my grandparents thinking, ‘Oh, my God,’ when they see me, say, having sex on a barstool. But you have to remember, this is not a reality show. It’s supposed to be pure entertainment.”

He says the show isn’t “making an instruction manual telling [teens] how to drink and do drugs, or have sex. We’re just laying out how it is.

“My character is very conflicted, and even in the episodes where he’s having sex then dumping girls, there’s often regret,” Crawford says of his role as preppy stud Nate Archibald. “You know, there are repercussions to certain sorts of behavior that come full circle.”

Sometimes he says he’ll put a limit on how much skin he’ll show. Recently, he convinced producers to let him keep his shirt on.

“I never actually said I disliked having my top off; it was just that on that occasion it didn’t make sense,” he explains. “Nate was supposed to be waking up, hungover, on his buddy’s couch. So why would he be in his boxer shorts?

“I don’t actually mind taking my clothes off most of the time – it’s why I go to the gym,” he says. “As an actor, you pick and choose your battles.”

Achieving fame so fast “can be a double-edged sword,” Crawford admits. “But right now, I couldn’t ask for more, and I certainly never complain about it.”

He says he laughed off rumors that he and co-star Ed Westwick are having a fling. (Crawford was also romantically linked to JC Chasez, though both vehemently deny gay rumors.)

“It’s kind of funny,” Crawford tells the paper. “I guess some people assume there’s a seed of truth to it. People think where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

He says he wasn’t sure who started the rumors — and doesn’t care.

“I just don’t even want to speculate on that. It’s just one of those things that rolls off my back,” Crawford says. “There’s not one seed of truth to it, so it’ll just go away in the end.”

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Blake Lively

Actress Blake Lively and her Maltepoo Penny walk to the soundstage at Silvercup Studios the other day in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in New York City. Blake was wearing a blue dress and she was on her way to film a new scene for ‘Gossip Girl’.

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Gossip Girl might not be back until September 1st, but that doesn’t mean that The CW and us have to wait to get some Gossip Girl action.

Seriously how hot and fun are these posters! My favorite is the top one where they do a shout out to the Parents Television Council. I wonder how the PTC is going to react to these posters, since the are so freakin’ uptight I don’t they they will get it! Is it September 1st yet?

xoxo 

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Blake Lively Kisses Penn Badgley

Happy Couple Blake Lively And Penn Badgley

Blake Lively frolics on the set of ‘Gossip Girl’ with her co-star and real life boyfriend Penn Badgley while filming a scene on ‘The Mall’ in Central Park the other day in New York City. The two make a great couple and seem to get along very well together. Nice to see a great relationship in TV land for a change.

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Want some gossip on Gossip Girl’s Gossip Guys? Are rumors that Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford are dating true?

“These endless rumors are absolutely untrue,” his rep tells Us Magazine.com exclusively.

I don’t know how that rumor started, but it will be interesting to see if they will end here?

xoxo 

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boomp3.com

Penny, the dog of Gossip Girl star Blake Lively exacted her revenge for what the dog perceived to be a rather lackluster finale for the freshmen CW series. Lively exclaimed, “Look at what you did to mommy’s outfit? Why would you do that to mommy’s outfit?” Penny just jumped around and barked insistently as Lively tried to find out why her dog acted out. Lively asked her dog if she was upset about having to be on the set of Gossip Girl, which received no barks. Then Lively asked if her dog felt uncomfortable about being crated in the bathroom whenever Lively left the house. The dog barked in a way to indicate that was sort of the problem, but not the biggest problem. Lively then asked if Penny objected to the direction that show was going in for the next season, which got the biggest bark from Penny. Picking Penny up from the ground, Lively explained to the dog that she doesn’t have any control over that and she will not “pull a ‘Heigl” any time soon.

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MICHELLE Trachtenberg , the new villainess on “Gossip Girl,” full-on fainted Tuesday night in the middle of the party she was hosting at the new Sunglass Hut store in SoHo. Like some Victorian heroine with the vapors, the lush-lipped actress, in a glamorous Diane von Furstenberg dress, swooned at 8 p.m., but gamely partied on until the bash ended an hour later. In fact, she was seen later, much later, at 1Oak.

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Leighton looks a little tired filming this scene.

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Just in time for their TV series’ comebacks, Kristen Bell and Matthew Fox open up to Women’s Health in the current May issue!

Kristin Bell is hot, hot, hot right now – as the mischievous narrator on the hit TV series, “Gossip Girl,” which made its long-awaited comeback last Monday to her hit movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” which stole the #2 spot at the box office opening weekend pulling in over $17 million.

On being the mischievous narrator of the CW’s “Gossip Girl”:

“I channel that voice everybody’s had in their head since grade school. It’s the critical voice that pops up when you see somebody who’s wearing mom jeans, you know what I mean? It’s a defense mechanism–that’s what cattiness and gossip are. You’re worried that someone is thinking something bad about you, so you think it about them first.”

On dating Dax Shepard and dealing with the paparazzi:

“It amplifies the feeling that everything I do is looked at, and it makes me hyper-aware and insecure. You’re on display when you really don’t want to be. That’s why I’ve become more reclusive. At my house with my friends, I don’t need to deal with that stuff.”

“…I really like [the video game] Mario Kart, and I have to remind myself, ‘You are in real traffic!’ It’s scary because the photographers run red lights. So by making them chase me, I could cause an accident, and nothing is worth risking that. I could complain about this all day, but everybody’s job has downfalls. Some people are in an office and their butts fall asleep in their chairs; this is just what I have to deal with.”

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Leighton looks a little cold out there filming.

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“GOSSIP Girl” star Blake Lively couldn’t be more opposite than Serena, the pampered socialite she plays on the show. Lively hit downtown Cuban eatery Café Habana on Saturday, where she patiently waited on line with everyone else for more than a half-hour for a table. In the meantime, she happily signed autographs for fans sitting at the bar. Lively and her two pals ended up chowing down in the back. Model Helena Christensen also walked up to the eatery, but the line was so long, she kept on walking.

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As we’ve been told time and time again, life often imitates art. And while we’d refrain from calling Gossip Girl “art,” Leighton Meester has allegedly been  using her on screen characters controlling and manipulative tendencies behind the scenes as well. Nan Zhang, who played suspected Gossip Girl scribe Jenny, has disappeared from the New York set. Though creator Josh Schwartz is blaming the sole minority character’s displacement on Zhang’s ridiculous decision to focus on school, those on set are pointing their fingers in Meester’s direction:

“‘She was pushed off the show,’ says a snitch. ‘Leighton didn’t like her, and she went.’”

As Gossip Girl fans know, Leighton’s character Blair Waldorf rules the private school, and Meester portrays the girl we all hated during high school flawlessly. But Zhang’s alleged decision to pursue homework instead of Hollywood just sounds fishy, especially considering the age-old conspiracy theory that minorities always get kicked to the curb first in horror movies. Though Meester’s rep is obviously claiming there’s absolutely no truth to what sources told the New York Daily News, we have to wonder if playing a serious bitch on-screen has finally gone to Leighton’s head. After all, she’s been pounding the Hollywood pavement for years before finally getting her big break, only to be usurped by the show’s breakaway star, Blake Lively. Could a Serena Van Woodsen Goes Back To Rehab, Never Heard From Again storyline be far away?

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