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What took so long?

After taking a shot at the Gosselins, the Law & Order brain trust has now set its sights on a certain late-night dog, plotting a ripped-from-the-headlines scenario based on David Letterman's personal life.

The casting call has just gone out for the episode, which per The Wrap will revolve around a "well-known celebrity talk-show host, married with children," who has engaged in "a series of short-lived affairs with some of the employees on the show and up until now has managed to keep them off the radar."

Until, that is, the host is approached by an email- and photo-equipped blackmailer who demands $3 million in hush money.

Sounds familiar enough. But it wouldn't be Law & Order without a twist, and this one's a doozy...

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UPDATE: Josh Duhamel's rep continues to adamantly deny claims of an affair, telling E! News, "These allegations are nonsense."

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Josh Duhamel seemingly put a stop to this, but it appears that Nicole Forrester is just getting started.

"We did hook up, we had lots of sex, and we had a really, really good time," the stripper and mother of two said in an exclusive interview with The Bert Show on Atlanta's Q100-FM.

"And then the next morning, when I left, you know, he kissed me on the cheek. Really sweet guy."

And a really married guy, too, of course.

Duhamel's rep has vehemently denied Forrester's story about having a one-night stand with the Transformers hottie. Mrs. Duhamel, aka Fergie, was with her hubby last night in Atlanta, where he's filming Life As We Know It.

But Forrester says she has saved text messages and "a lot of evidence" that she had a tryst with the actor.

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HECTOR MATA/AFP/Getty Images

David Copperfield would rather make this vanish, but he'll take what he can get.

A federal judge in Seattle has granted a six-month delay in a civil suit filed by a former Miss Washington USA contestant, accusing the magician of raping her on his private island in the Bahamas.

Per the Seattle Times, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour stayed the case at the behest of Copperfield's attorneys so that investigators can first finish up a criminal probe into the woman's claim.

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John Paul Filo/CBS

David Letterman might have thought that taking a week off from Late Show duties would at least temporarily decrease the bad publicity. Clearly, he thought wrong.

This time around, he has former scorned employee Nell Scovell to thank for bringing the subject of his indiscretions back under the microscope.

Scovell, one of the few female writers ever to be hired at Letterman HQ (or, for that matter, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien HQ), is speaking writing out about her time working for the Top 10 boss via a short essay for Vanity Fair that paints her late '80s tenure on his NBC Late Night show as one marred by uncomfortable tension, hostile environments and sexual favoritism.

Scovell starts weaving her tale exactly where people want her to: in the gutter.

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Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Getty Images, Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Can you blame Samantha Geimer for wanting the whole Roman Polanski thing to just go away?

The 45-year-old wife and mom, who at 13 was sexually assaulted by the filmmaker, is again pleading with the California justice system to drop the 32-year-old case against Polanski—this time for the sake of her physical and mental health.

All the media attention, first when Polanski petitioned to have the case dropped last year and again since his arrest in Switzerland last month, "has caused her to have health-related issues," attorney Lawrence Silver stated in documents filed with the state's Second District Court of Appeal.

"The pursuit has caused her performance at her job to be interfered with and has caused the understandable displeasure of her employer and the real possibility that Samantha could lose her job," Silver added.

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CBS

This just in from the home office:

Stephanie Birkitt, the woman at the center of David Letterman's sex scandal, is not barred from the The Late Show set as TMZ and other media outlets have been reporting.

"Stephanie is on a paid leave of absence. TMZ's reporting that she is banned from the building is incorrect," a rep for the host's Worldwide Pants production company tells E! News.

No word whether she's hiking the Appalachian Trail, but while she's MIA,  Letterman has escaped any kind of official reprimand. He remains on air, cracking jokes at his expense and raking in boffo ratings.

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Enough about the other woman—or women, as it turns out. David Letterman now needs to turn his attention to the woman.

The Late Show host, who launched a thousand editorials last week about sex in the workplace, comic timing and big, fat egos when he revealed that past indiscretions had come back to haunt him in the form of an extortion plot, has finally offered up a public apology to his partner of 23 years, wife Regina Lasko.

During tonight's taping, Letterman admits that she has been "horribly hurt" by his actions, and that he has his work cut out for for him to patch things up at home.

Of course, first he joked that he got into his car this morning and "the navigation lady wasn't speaking to me."

"There's a possibility that I'll be the first talk show host impeached," he continued. "It's fall here in New York City, and I spent the whole weekend raking my hate mail. It's cold, too—chilly outside, chilly inside my house."

Letterman then mock-started making cracks about Bill Clinton, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer (apparently they all have something in common), stopping himself every time.

"This is only phase one of the scandal," he reminded the audience. "Phase two, next week I go on Oprah and sob."

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Is David Letterman a master manipulator?

That's the word from the lawyer for accused blackmailer Robert "Joe" Halderman, who made the rounds on the talk-show circuit this morning.

"I look forward to cross-examining David Letterman," Halderman's legal eagle, Gerald Shargel, told Today. "If you only hear David Letterman's side of the story, take it at face value, and say, 'Turn off the sets, that Halderman's guilty'—I think that's plain wrong."

Spinning on behalf of his client, who pleaded innocent Friday to charges of grand larceny, Shargel said the Emmy-winning 48 Hours Mystery producer had an excellent reputation in the industry and that allegations that he tried to cash a bogus $2 million check from Letterman to pay off some debts made "absolutely no sense."

"In the history of extortion attempts, there's never been, as far as I know, someone paying by check," the attorney said.

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CBS

There's a famous moment in Mad Men where ambitious Pete Campbell, who's figured out Don Draper isn't who he says he was, spills his boss's Dick Whitman secret to Sterling & Cooper's senior partner. The senior partner mulls the disclosure, and then dismisses it.

"Mr. Campbell," says Bert Cooper, "who cares?"

David Letterman's real-life sex scandal is nothing at all like Don Draper's fictional identity crisis.

And yet, just maybe, our reaction should be the same at Bert Cooper's.

Who cares?

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She may have known her current events, but we doubt Stephanie Birkitt could have predicted the future.

It turns out that the 34-year-old New Hampshire native, a former assistant on The Late Show With David Letterman, is the woman at the center of CBS employee Robert Halderman's alleged plot to extort $2 million from Letterman in exchange for keeping quiet about past affairs.

Multiple news outlets have identified Birkitt—or "Smitty," "Vicky" or "Monty," depending on which skit you saw—as the funnyman's onetime paramour.

According to reports, Birkitt recently lived with Halderman, and the so-called packet of damning documentation he presented to Letterman included copies of pages from Birkitt's diary and correspondence between her and her former boss.

Aka "the best boss" she ever had.

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