Could Nicole’s baby bump keep her out of jail?

As a famous-for-being-famous celebrity, Nicole Richie is used to getting press for club-hopping with pal and “Simple Life” co-star Paris Hilton. She’s used to getting attention for her shockingly prominent collarbones, her drug use and revelations about eating disorders — and more recently for her Dec. 11 DUI arrest.

(Her court appearance for the latter has been postponed to August 16, so that her defense team can bring in an expert witness to dispute the toxicology reports — this, despite the fact that Richie forthrightly told police officers that she had smoked marijuana and taken a prescription painkiller before climbing behind the wheel of her SUV and driving the wrong way down a freeway. Never one to mince words, that girl.)

So it was no doubt a surprise for Richie to pick up a recent copy of Us Weekly with the screaming cover line “Nicole Richie: Yes, She’s Pregnant!” Inside, the magazine featured page after page of fawning coverage of Richie and her baby-daddy Joel Madden of the popular-at-Hot-Topic band Good Charlotte.

“She’s in a really good place … working on her album and her accessories line. I know she’s happy,” gushes one unnamed source. Madden’s brother Josh notes, “I would love for them to get married!” Non-famous pregnant women have to settle for occasionally being offered a seat on the bus. But for celebs, having a baby on the way translates to a nine-month Get Out of Bad Press Free card.

Ultimate image makeover
Is pregnancy the ultimate image makeover? Stars who want to be taken seriously often adopt external changes (dying their hair brown, wearing glasses even if they don’t need them) or profess to having internal ones (Britney Spears’ red Kaballah string phase, Paris Hilton’s jailhouse Bible). But nothing, apparently, turns the cynical, recycling-bin-rooting tabloid press into whimpering sob sisters like a pregnant celebrity. Snide blind items about lengthy visits to the ladies’ room at Hyde suddenly become mewling dispatches from Petit Tresor and other high-priced baby boutiques, where the mom-to-be’s choice of color for blankets and onesies (“Yellow? Does she not know the baby’s gender? Or is it a SECRET???”) becomes headline news.

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For Richie, whose main claim to fame stems from being one of the few people in Hollywood who can stand next to Paris Hilton and make Hilton look like the talented and accomplished one, there’s a new narrative in place. And based on that Us Weekly cover story, it boils down to: “Sure, she’s made mistakes. But Lionel Richie was sort of an absentee dad in her teen years, so who can blame her? Thank heavens she’s settling down and having a baby. And if she doesn’t start eating for two, at least eating for one will be an improvement.”

This brand of celebrity redefinition is nothing new, of course. When Katie Holmes was carrying Suri, there was a temporary moratorium on jokes about Tom Cruise violating Oprah’s couch (unless you worked for the blisteringly funny Defamer.com). Denise Richards’ pregnancy glow was bright enough to envelop her then-husband, Charlie Sheen, making him look like the Mike Brady of Malibu. The very state of pregnancy became so chic when Julia Roberts was with twins that you would have thought the runways in Paris and Milan would be choked with models in their third trimester. 

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A visit from the stork could translate into more than just flattering photos in the Star, of course. Borrowing a page from “Chicago’s” Roxie Hart, Richie could very well leverage her fecundity into a reprieve from jail time when she has to face that judge in August. While being pregnant isn’t enough to keep a woman from going to jail, the judge may well decide to avoid a Paris Hilton–style media circus by letting Richie off with probation or at least deferring her jail time until after she gives birth.

Ironically, it’s only because of the occupancy of Richie’s womb that her court case is getting this much attention in the first place. For better or worse, she’s never had the level of public fascination or indignation that Hilton generates, so an un-pregnant Richie would probably have faced sentencing with much, much less coverage.

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