ABC/Image Group LAT.J. Osborne, one half of sibling duo Brothers Osborne, has publicly discussed being gay for the first time.
“There are times when I think I’ve marginalized this part of me so that I feel better about it…and I realize that it is a big part of who I am: The way I think, the way I act, the way I perform,” he explains in a new interview with TIME. “God, think about all the times that we talk about love, and write about love. It’s the biggest thing we ever get to feel. And I’ve kept the veil on.”
T.J.’s coming out marks a historic moment for the genre, as he is now the first openly gay artist ever to be signed to a major country label.
“You know that thing — stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything? That sounds like something someone in country music would say. But if you stand for something and it’s not what they stand for, then they hate it,” the singer adds.
T.J.’s brother and band mate, John Osborne, also voices his support for his brother in the new interview, saying that T.J.’s happiness and ability to live authentically is more important than any career milestone.
“If I had to have all my money and success erased for my brother to be truly fulfilled in life, I wouldn’t even think about it,” he declares. “Not for a second.”
On Wednesday, T.J. took to Instagram to speak to his fans directly. “I’m very proud to put this out there. I wanted to let you all know that have gotten to know me over the years that the person you know is me, and now you just know more about me,” he declares in a video.
He adds that coming out will help him be more transparent and authentic in all aspects of his music and life. “I know it’s gonna help my relationship with my fans, with my family, and honestly, it’s gonna help my relationship with myself,” T.J. says.
Brothers Osborne’s most recent studio album, Skeletons, came out in October 2020. It features lead single “All Night.”
Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty ImagesBy CLAIRE PEDERSEN and ANTHONY RIVAS, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — The former coach of Klete Keller, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer who is now charged in connection to the siege at the United States Capitol, said he wishes he had been “more proactive” in talking to Keller “about his life after swimming.”
“I think we do a very poor job of preparing people for life after their fame in athletics,” Mark Schubert, who recruited Keller to the University of Southern California’s swim team in 2000 and was the head men’s swimming coach during the 2004 Olympics in Athens, told “Nightline” co-anchor Juju Chang. “These athletes, although they’re considered pros, if they’re lucky, they make enough [money] to make ends meet for that year.”
He went on, “You know, as a coach, we’re very interested in helping them to perform their best and be the best they can be, and maybe lose sight of what we should be looking at. And that’s the whole person and what’s going to happen afterward and it’s certainly a learning experience for me.”
Schubert said he was “shocked” when he saw that Keller had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6, when supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the building during a joint session of Congress to certify the electoral votes and Biden’s win in the 2020 election.
“My first thought was knowing that he has struggled trying to get a profession, trying to be a successful family man. All of those things came to mind and just made me feel very sad,” Schubert said.
Keller was charged a week later with obstructing law enforcement engaging in official duties, unlawfully entering Capitol grounds and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds.
Video taken during the Capitol siege, in which rioters are seen tussling with Capitol police in the Rotunda, showed a tall man seeming to wear a U.S. Olympics jacket getting pushed back with the crowd. After the video circulated online, former teammates and coaches identified the man in the video as Keller, according to swimming news site SwimSwam and The New York Times.
The video was cited in the criminal complaint against Keller, who is 6 feet, 6 inches. The man in the video “appears to be one of the tallest individuals in the video depicting individuals in the Rotunda,” the complaint said.
Since that day, Schubert said he’s spoken to Keller more than once and that it has “he felt like he let his friends and supporters down intensely.”
“I reached out to him just to let him know that I cared about him and was there — anything I could do,” Schubert said. “He was very sad, and I said, ‘Look, please, you did a bad thing. You’re a good person and I’m here to support you.”
“That first phone call, there was a lot of tears. Basically, he was in tears the entire phone call,” Schubert went on to say. “I’ve talked to him since, [I] know his feelings haven’t changed. But, I think he’s working hard to help himself with his emotional situation. He has a lot of issues.”
Keller experienced “a lot of challenges” after his athletic career ended, Schubert said. He struggled to keep a job, went through a divorce and, at one point, lived out of his car for a year, he told USA Swimming in 2018.
Schubert said Keller was generally quiet but very fun with his teammates. “He was kind of a jokester,” Schubert said before reminiscing on a bet Keller made with a fellow teammate to see who could gain the most weight between the end of the 2000 Olympics and New Year’s Day.
Keller won medals in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 Olympics, anchoring the 4×200 freestyle relay. In Athens, he held off Australia’s Ian Thorpe in the final 100 meters of their anchor legs to win the gold for his team, which included swim star Michael Phelps. Many people doubted Keller in swimming a relay but “he proved to everybody he’s an amazing relay swimmer,” Schubert said.
Schubert also said he “couldn’t believe the decision making” that led to Keller’s appearance at the Capitol and that he’s “fearful” for the former athlete’s future.
In regards to the people who took part in the siege, Schubert said he believes “they really didn’t know what they were getting into and got caught up in a very terrible thing.”
“I know he feels a lot of regret as to what the situation became,” he said, “and I think he feels a lot of regret for having been recognized as an Olympian. He’s very proud of his accomplishments and feels like that took a lot away from that.”
Schubert added that he gave Keller advice that he hopes the former athlete will follow.
“I think when we have somebody that we’re close to, and we recognize that they’re suffering from depression and anxiety and issues like that, we need to encourage them,” he said. “We can’t make a decision for them but we need to encourage them to get help. That’s all we can do.”
ABC/Sami Drasin(LOS ANGELES) — Just after the tragic news that Saved By The Bell‘s Dustin Diamond lost his battle with cancer, his former co-star Mark-Paul Gosselaar is opening up about the untimely passing.
Speaking with Tamron Hall, Gosselaar, who portrayed heartthrob Zach Morris on the ’90s sitcom and its current reboot, shared that the entire cast — which includes Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley and Lark Voorhies — were “shocked” to hear the unfortunate news.
“Well, it’s always tough when someone passes away,” Gosselaar said. “I think it’s even more so when the individual is someone you know and the age of Dustin — it was only a few weeks ago that we heard about his diagnosis and for it to happen so quickly is shocking. Myself and the rest of the cast, we will get together at some point and sort of express our feelings, but yeah, it happened so quickly that we’re all just pretty shocked about it.”
Diamond, known as Screech, succumbed to lung cancer earlier this month, just a few weeks after his diagnosis was confirmed. The actor, who was being treated in Florida, was 44.
Gosselaar added that he and his former co-star had lost touch over the years, but not because anything bad happened.
“A lot of people may not understand that you can work with somebody for years — you can be very close, you see this person every day for an entire season of shooting and then once things wrap, the camera stops, you just drift apart,” he explained. “There’s no reason other than just things happen in life and before you know it, years have passed and I think that was what happened with Dustin with the rest of the cast. There was a time when I wasn’t talking with anybody on the cast.”
ABC/Randy Holmes(LONDON) — Johnny Depp scored a victory on Thursday in his bid to appeal the UK High Court’s ruling that The Sun newspaper did not libel the actor by referring to him as a “wife beater” in a 2018 article.
Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Underhill on Monday granted Depp and his legal team an estimated two-hour hearing to take place between March 15 and March 31 to present further evidence to support their case, according to documents obtained by Deadline.
“The issues raised by both applications are best resolved at a hearing,” he wrote.
Amber Heard’s legal team will need to file reasons for opposing the appeal by February 21 while Depp’s team will be able to respond by February 28.
The Fantastic Beasts star is looking to overturn the previous decision that he was not libeled by the Sun.
The initial ruling deemed the phrase “substantially true” in relation to his relationship with ex-wife Heard. The verdict was damaging for Depp, who has repeatedly denied abuse allegations.
Depp’s lawyers have claimed the actor “did not receive a fair trial” and that the ruling was “plainly wrong.”
They called the paper’s description of their client a “reputation-destroying, career-ending allegation.”
narvikk/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ERIN SCHUMAKER, IVAN PEREIRA and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 103.9 million people worldwide and killed over 2.25 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Here’s how the news is developing Wednesday. All times Eastern:
Feb 03, 9:38 am Fauci says ‘absolutely not’ to Super Bowl parties
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser on COVID-19 to U.S. President Joe Biden, said people should “absolutely not” host or attend any Super Bowl parties this weekend.
“Watch the Super Bowl on TV, enjoy it, have a party in your house with your family with the people who are there,” Fauci told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Wednesday on Good Morning America.
“You don’t want parties with people that you haven’t had that much contact with, you just don’t know if they’re infected,” he added. “So as difficult as that is, at least this time around, just lay low and cool it.”
Fauci, who is also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that the country is still seeing a “considerable number of cases” each day and there’s cause for concern over the new, more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus that were recently detected on U.S. soil.
When asked whether he thinks the Super Bowl could become a superspreader event, Fauci said he hopes not.
“I believe that they are trying to keep people separated enough in the stands wearing masks so they don’t have that proximity,” he added. “If you’re outdoors and you’re several feet apart — 6, 7, 8, 10 feet — you could be OK, as long as people abide by that and don’t slip.”
Feb 03, 8:08 am US reports over 114,000 new cases
There were 114,437 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Tuesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Tuesday’s case count is far less than the country’s all-time high of 300,282 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.
An additional 3,532 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Tuesday, down from a peak of 4,466 new deaths on Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins data.
COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend last month.
A total of 26,435,563 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 446,901 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.
Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of the pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up over the summer.
The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before topping 300,000 on Jan. 2.
So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized two COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. More than 32 million vaccine doses have been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
ABC/Image Group LAT.J. Osborne, one half of sibling duo Brothers Osborne, has publicly discussed being gay for the first time. 
