ABC Refuses to Pay $10K for Botox Mom Hoax

ABC is refusing to pay $10,000 for fake photos of "Botox mom" Sheena Upton injecting her 8-year-old daughter with the anti-wrinkle medicine, saying the mother's admission it was all a hoax kills the deal. "We had agreed to pay a $10,000 licensing fee to a UK freelancer for the pictures, but obviously in light of everything that's happened, zero money has been sent that way," an ABC spokesman tells the Hollywood Reporter. The network also says it is investigating how its original news team did not catch the fraud.

Upton 'fessed up that the British tabloid the Sun paid her to say she was "Kerry Campbell" and that she injected her daughter with Botox to fight wrinkles and do well in girl beauty pageants. While ABC's Good Morning America, like most news outlets, says it refuses to pay for news, it does engage in a wide array of workarounds, such as, in this case, paying photo "licensing fees" to agents, which also grants access to the hot news subject. For more information about the "river of cash" that is the $3-billion gossip-news industry, click here. (More Botox stories.)