A. J. Benza
Alfred Joseph Benza, known as A. J. Benza, is an American gossip columnist and TV host born on June 2, 1962, in Brooklyn. He grew up in West Islip, Long Island, with two sisters. After high school, he studied journalism at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University and began writing for Newsday, eventually becoming a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News.
His work in gossip led to TV appearances, including E! Entertainment’s The Gossip Show in the mid-1990s, and he later showed up on talk shows like Geraldo, Hard Copy, The Montel Williams Show, and The Maury Povich Show. He was fired from the Daily News by editor Pete Hamill.
Benza then hosted Mysteries and Scandals, a show about celebrity crimes and scandals, which ran from 1998 to 2000. He popularized the catchphrase “Fame, ain’t it a bitch,” which later became the title of his memoir. In 2001, he had a short-lived late-night E! talk show, A. J. After Hours, which was cancelled due to low ratings. That same year, he had a confrontation on The Howard Stern Show with Stuttering John Melendez, resulting in a temporary ban from Stern’s show; he returned in 2004.
In film, Benza acted in P.S. Your Cat is Dead! (2002) and played L.C. Luco in Rocky Balboa (2006). He also hosted Cold Turkey II on ION Television in 2006 and co-hosted the first five seasons of High Stakes Poker on GSN, later replaced in season six. He publicly criticized GSN executives in a blog open letter.
When PokerGO relaunched High Stakes Poker in 2020, Kaplan and Benza teamed up again in the commentary booth. Benza has acting and reality TV credits beyond gambling, including a role in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa and appearances on VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club. He also pursued writing and producing, including the memoir 74 and Sunny (2015), about his Long Island childhood, and the film So B. It (2016), which he executive produced. He was involved in other ReelzChannel projects, Demons in the City of Angels and Case Closed with A.J. Benza, and appeared in the Amazon Prime series Gravesend in 2020.
Benza has written columns for Star Magazine and RadarOnline and hosts a daily podcast called Fame Is A Bitch, where he talks about Hollywood gossip, culture, and personal stories. He is married to Virginia Folk since 2003, and they live in Los Angeles with their two children, Roxy and Rocco.
In 2003, Benza learned about Harvey Weinstein’s affair with Georgina Chapman and offered to provide gossip to help divert attention. This began a partnership intended to protect Weinstein’s name. When sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein became public in 2017, Weinstein contacted Benza about helping with the situation, offering up to $20,000 a month to investigate the claims, but he did not follow up.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:05 (CET).