Amid the whirlwind of the latest scandal to engulf him, Mel Gibson sent a round-robin text message to a select group of his Hollywood friends over the weekend, announcing that he had changed his mobile phone number.
Given the mood of anger in Hollywood over his most recent alleged racist rant, it's hard to imagine that his new phone has been exactly red hot with communications of warm reassurance.
Following claims Gibson used the n-word in a series of ugly recorded confrontations with his ex-lover, Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his baby daughter, the showbusiness community is not in forgiving mood.
Just to add to Gibson's problems, Hollywood's most high-profile female lawyer has waded in to demand he seeks anger management treatment.
If that were not enough, there were even suggestions that Gibson could be charged with making a terrorist threat to his ex-lover. It is claimed he told Grigorieva during one phone call after their split in April: "I am going to come and burn the f***ing house down.
At the same time, the LA Department for Child and Family Services has revealed they are planning to investigate whether Gibson should lose his rights to custody of Lucia, his eight-month-old daughter with Grigorieva.
What an utter disaster for Gibson, 54, last week issued with a restraining order by his 40-year-old ex, who is reported to have recorded his four-letter outbursts.
The existence of the tapes has emerged in what has become one of the most bitter separations in Hollywood history.
But now Gibson has gone on the offensive, with members of his circle claiming he is the victim of a sting orchestrated by Russian-born Grigorieva in a bid to win a massive pay-off to buy her silence.
And their claims coincide with an intriguing rumour doing the rounds of those in the know in Hollywood. It is said the determined Grigorieva deployed a microphone hidden in a pair of diamond earrings to tape the damning evidence against her famous lover.
While this is hardly an excuse for Gibson's own appalling behaviour, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the subject of cold hard cash is central to the row which now seriously threatens his once stellar career.
Old-digger
Meanwhile, sources in the US say that the break-up had been relatively amicable until Grigorieva hired a new lawyer last month who allegedly told her she is entitled to more money from her multi-millionaire ex.
Just to make matters worse, the pneumatic-lipped Grigorieva is also said to have compiled a dossier of photos and medical records which chronicle violent confrontations with the Australian-raised actor.
Whoever is telling the truth, Gibson is a man whose personal satnav appears to have set him on a course towards inevitable self-destruction.
This latest scandal comes four years after he was forced into issuing a humbling apology over another racist outburst.
Meanwhile, there are claims from some surrounding Grigorieva that she was left angry and bemused during their three-year relationship by his refusal to live with her and their daughter, preferring to remain alone in his Malibu compound.
After a series of rows about money, Gibson called off a planned Christmas Day wedding and is said to have bowed to pressure from friends who have long considered his fiercely ambitious new lover to be an old-digger.
According to sources, the dark-haired Grigorieva, who has dated a string of older, rich men, refused point-blank to sign a pre-nuptial agreement offered to her by Gibson, which would have paid her $5 million (Dh18.36 million) a year for 10 years should their planned marriage fail.
Gibson's older children, who range in ages from 30 to 11, are understood to have complained that the twice-married Grigorieva, who was born into poverty in the Ukraine, had been trying to distance the actor from them.
Weird treatments
Grigorieva, who also has a 13-year-old son by former James Bond star Timothy Dalton, is said to have been attempting to persuade Gibson to give her a say in his financial dealings, including his large portfolio of international properties.
No wonder the stress of their volatile relationship seems to have taken its toll on Gibson. And in a bid to regain his equilibrium, the actor who is also negotiating a £300 million (Dh1.65 billion) divorce from his first wife, Robyn, has turned to a series of ever more weird treatments.
The novelist Walter Kirn, who was recently invited by Gibson to interview him for American Men's Journal, describes one particularly odd recent encounter with him when they met in a New York loft for a game of poker. Gibson, Kirn says, arrived and immediately unzipped a small black case containing a mysterious plastic tube from which he squeezed a noxious yellow ointment that he proceeded to rub over his forearms.
The actor told him the substance, called Selegiline, was derived from cows' brains. "Mel claimed that it cleans the neurotransmitters and sharpens mental focus," Kirn adds.
In fact, Selegiline — one of many potions and lotions Gibson carries with him everywhere in a bulging rucksack — is a powerful drug that is used to treat depression, Parkinson's disease and senile dementia.
Kirn, the author of Up in the Air, which was made into an acclaimed movie starring George Clooney last year, says Gibson told him the drug was helping him with the "male menopause". Strange stuff. But then Gibson has long been held hostage by the personal problems that have dogged him throughout his hugely successful, 30-year Hollywood career.
A chastened Gibson, meanwhile, is said to have spent the weekend deep in prayer with his personal confessor, Catholic priest Father Clement Procopio. "It's hit Mel very badly," an LA casting director, who has known Gibson for 20 years, told me this week.
"The knives are out for him. He just about escaped with his career when he blurted out that stuff about Jews, but this could really finish him."
If that turns out to be the case, the troubled and deeply unpleasant Gibson will have only himself to blame.
