Buffy's Eliza Dushku reveals milestone in shock new career nearly 10 years after walking away from Hollywood

Eliza Dushku graduated with her master's degree in clinical mental health counseling from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday, June 6.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer star, 44, shared a video clip of her receiving her degree on stage and walking off with it.
She also shared several photos to her Instagram Stories including one photo posing with her classmates all looking very happy to be done with their studies.
'Graduating with my master's degree (!!) feels like more than an achievement—it feels like a deep calling realized,' her caption began.
'True growth, energy, and passion—manifested. After nearly a decade of inner work and building a new life, I'm so grateful for this moment in time.
'To my highest self—for taking this wild leap away from everything I knew and making it happen. To my boys + ♥️—for the little sacrifices made & love you gave, each day to honor and support this dream.'
She then went on to thank her 'family, friends—new and old—my colleagues/classmates, professors/teachers, and community.'
'I give thanks: for rooting me on, encouraging me day in and day out, and affording me the grace, strength, and space to step fully into these past years of clinical training.
'Today, I stand grounded and ready to support others on their journeys of becoming—through self-discovery, healing, and transformation.
'The connectedness I feel in holding safe, compassionate space for those who seek the undertaking is such lifeblood now,' her caption concluded.
The post also featured a photo of her young kids' handwritten notes, which read 'Good Job Mommy' and 'I Love You Mom.'
Alongside her husband, real estate developer Peter Palandjian, Eliza is funding groundbreaking research and clinical trials on the potential of psychedelics, according to 2024 interview in Boston Magazine.
'I had the means to shift directions and choose a course in my life that focused on healing myself so that I could help heal others. I would be remiss if I didn't now share the transformation and the peace and the passion that I have,' Dushku said.
'This is just absolutely so clearly my real calling, my real purpose,' she continued at the time.
Dushku hasn't been seen on screen since 2017, when she appeared in Netflix's The Saint and played J.P. Nunnelly in CBS's Bull.
That year, she stepped away from Hollywood after accusing her Bull co-star Michael Weatherly of sexual harassment.
In the wake of the allegations, which Weatherly has denied, Dushku was written out of the show and told that her role as a series regular had been abruptly canceled.
Mediation with CBS resulted in the network agreeing to pay Dushku a confidential settlement of $9.5million - roughly the amount she stood to earn if kept on the show for four seasons.
Weatherly apologized for his behavior toward Dushku in a statement to the Times, saying: 'During the course of taping our show, I made some jokes mocking some lines in the script.
'When Eliza told me that she wasn't comfortable with my language and attempt at humor, I was mortified to have offended her and immediately apologized.
'After reflecting on this further, I better understand that what I said was both not funny and not appropriate and I am sorry and regret the pain this caused Eliza.'
Dushku first rose to fame in 1998 when she was cast as Faith, the rebellious Slayer, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Her standout role as Faith, which she portrayed until 2003, earned her a devoted fanbase and solidified her status as a rising star in Hollywood.
Dushku also starred in the hit cheerleading film Bring It On (2000), which became a cult classic.
In her personal life, Eliza married Peter in 2018, and the couple has since welcomed two children.
The family has since made a home in Boston, Eliza's birthplace, where they are enjoying life away from Hollywood.

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On artist Lucy Sparrow's left wrist, beneath a huge, diamanté-studded imitation Rolex crafted from felt, is a tattoo that reads: 'Don't forget to eat your lunch and make some trouble.' The 38-year-old had it done after leaving the Promis Hay Farm clinic in Kent last year, where she was treated for anorexia so severe she came close to losing her life. Now, it serves as a daily reminder to her: 'To make your art, you need energy,' she says. Quirky, joyful and wildly ambitious, Sparrow's work has made her a leading light of a new generation of British artists. Her immersive installations, built to look like real shops and filled with thousands of everyday items, from baked beans and McCain oven chips to Rimmel make-up, all painstakingly hand-stitched from felt, have won rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. At Buckingham Palace, where she installed a felt picnic spread to mark the late Queen's Platinum Jubilee, King Charles, no less, asked her how she made her salt and vinegar crisps so realistic. (She replied she hand-painted each one with PVA glue and then let them dry outside in the sun.) In the US, celebrity admirers include Drew Barrymore and Mark Ruffalo, the latter even queueing patiently for her exhibition at New York's Rockefeller Center to tell her how much he loved it. Yet behind her soaring career, Sparrow was hiding the eating disorder she'd been battling for decades. 'I've been through periods of recovery in my life, where it's been secondary to other things, but it's always been there in the background,' she says. 'Then last year, I stopped being able to eat altogether.' Today, she's curled up with her felt replica banana, which she named Sebastian. Wearing a pinafore dress and white tights, Sparrow appears childlike. Which seems appropriate for the maker of soft, fuzzy, nostalgia-infused pop art. But she's also both smart and brave, speaking with candour about her ordeal. 'I want to tell my story,' Sparrow says. 'There's a saying in the support meetings I go to: 'Secrets grow in the dark and shrink in the light.' The more we bring them out, the less power they have. I've hidden it for so long, but I don't want to be ashamed of it any more.' Sparrow grew up in Bath, where her mum taught her to sew at four and bought her felt to make her own toys. 'I was instantly obsessed with making replicas of objects,' she says. 'I knew from when I was tiny that I wanted to be an artist.' Academically gifted, she won a scholarship to a prestigious private school, but in its high-pressured environment her mental-health struggles began. 'It was an extremely privileged world, and I was looked down upon,' she says. 'But I was also very grateful to be there and worked really hard, so it was incredibly intense.' First, her anxiety manifested as obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. 'I was terrified of germs, and I'd bleach my hands and boil my toothbrush,' she says. By the age of 13, this was spilling over into restricting the food she ate, including 'meat, eggs, anything that could make me sick'. When she noticed herself losing weight, 'I started falling down into this abyss,' she says. 'It was nothing to do with how I looked; with anorexia, all you want to do is destroy yourself, to disappear.' As her weight plummeted, the school instigated regular weigh-ins, which she cheated with stones in her pockets and by downing litres of water. She attended an eating disorder clinic as an outpatient and underwent weekly NHS therapy with her family. She describes the approach back then as, 'Very accusatory. 'This is all your fault, you must not want to get better.' It made me feel so alone, because I wasn't doing it on purpose. The closest thing I can liken it to is being possessed by a demon.' Eventually, at 16, she weighed just 4st 7lb and doctors at the clinic where she was an outpatient told her she might have as little as two weeks to live. If she dropped even the tiniest amount more, she would be sectioned and force-fed. 'I knew I didn't want to die,' she says. Instead, she dropped out of school, enrolled at the local tech college to study art and slowly, gradually, began to eat again. 'My weight was restored, but mentally I was still ill,' she says. 'I was running on manic energy, my OCD was off the charts and self-harming became my outlet.' She managed six months at University Arts Bournemouth before realising that she couldn't continue. Then, knowing she wanted to make art full time, she took a radical step to earn enough to support herself: for five years, she worked as a stripper in nightclubs in Brighton and London. She called herself Roxy and looked 'very alternative, with my glasses on', chatting to customers between dances. It had another, unexpected, benefit: 'It actually stopped me self-harming and starving myself, because I had to show my body.' In 2014, she broke through as an artist with The Cornershop, which began as a Kickstarter campaign and went viral after opening in an abandoned shop in London's East End. Each of the 4,000 felt items on the shelves were for sale, with prices starting at £1 for a lottery ticket and Sparrow herself staffing the till. 'I couldn't believe there were queues around the block,' she says. 'I sold the shop 40 times over.' Since then, her projects have included a faux sex shop in London's Soho in 2015 titled Madame Roxy's Erotic Emporium; in 2019, Lucy's Delicatessen at New York's Rockefeller Center; and, in 2021, a fully stocked pharmacy, The Bourdon Street Chemist, at London gallery Lyndsey Ingram. Sparrow describes making her art as 'escapism, Prozac-like: a wonderful gentle hug'. It has always been the one thing capable of calming her busy mind. Last year, however, her refuge contributed to her relapse. She was working 18-hour days and travelling a lot; then, when her two-year relationship with a restaurateur ended, she isolated herself. 'Almost overnight, I thought, 'I'm going to go fully back into my eating disorder, because I have no one to stay normal for,'' she says. 'I didn't have proper treatment as a teenager, and the relapse was a long time coming. It was always going to happen when a major life event tipped it over the edge.' Sparrow quickly lost a dangerous amount of weight, terrifying her loved ones. 'I could normally shake myself out of it and force myself to eat, but I lay in bed, my heart racing, and I realised I'd completely lost all control,' she says. 'It had me by the neck.' She found the private clinic Promis Hay Farm online and checked in, a decision that would save her life. For ten weeks, Sparrow had intense therapy, funded by the success of her art. 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Next month her new installation, The Bourdon Street Chippy, an immersive fish and chip shop comprising more than 65,000 pieces, opens back at the Lyndsey Ingram gallery in Mayfair. Each item will be available to buy, with prices as reasonable as ever – although pieces from her previous collections sell for tens of thousands at auction. Her recovery has been steady, but Sparrow will never take it for granted. 'I'm not saying it's easy or enjoyable,' she says. 'But my goal is to be so recovered that I can tell people going through this level of hell that there is a way out.'

The Guardian

29 minutes ago

• The Guardian

America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away

Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.

The Sun

39 minutes ago

• The Sun

TV presenter celebrates nepo-baby daughter's graduation – but can you guess her famous mum?

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