(The court eventually ruled that Olmos could not be alone in a room with Stella.) Most maddeningly for Keitel, Bracco hadn’t mentioned any of this to him, even though their legal agreement called for her to “reasonably consult” on matters crucial to their daughter’s welfare worse, he charged that, more worried about the effects of bad publicity on her own and Olmos’s careers than about Stella’s safety, she’d “covered up” the “payoff” in a “conspiracy of silence.” Keitel also learned that Olmos, while absolutely denying the young girl’s allegations, had paid her family at least $150,000 to sign releases promising not to prosecute, and to keep quiet about the matter.

Keitel, who’d given custody of his (now) 12-year-old daughter, Stella, to Bracco when she’d left him for Olmos in 1991, learned in 1993 that Olmos had been accused the year before of having fondled a 14-year-old family friend and sometime baby-sitter of Stella’s. The Keitel-Bracco mismatch, which also involves actor Edward James Olmos, Bracco’s current husband, has been blundering on for most of the decade- “Since my bar mitzvah!” quips the droll Dranoff-and has recently devolved into a kind of blue- collar Roshomon and Woody-Mia mess. Bracco flung herself back in her chair, tossed her luxuriant dark hair, and declared: “Margaritas for everyone!” She did it with panache, so that for a moment, Judge Margaret Garvey, an urbane blonde jurist in Rockland County’s Family Court, wasn’t sure she’d seen it but Bracco, every bit as tough as Keitel, then barked out of the side of her mouth: “So ya don’t think I can protect your daughter, huh, Har-vey?” Whereupon Judge Garvey banged her gavel and admonished Sandy Dranoff, Bracco’s attorney, to control his client.

Not three minutes into her latest custody-battle appearance against her ex-boyfriend, Harvey Keitel, Lorraine Bracco, erstwhile film star, feminist, and suburban mom, had flipped him the bird.

Stella keitel