Kim Zolciak's daughter Ariana receives sentencing THREE years after DUI arrest
Kim Zolciak 's daughter Ariana Biermann has finally received her sentencing following her 2022 DUI arrest.
The media personality, 23, was involved in a 'minor fender bender' at the time - but denied that she had been drinking leading up to the incident. However, she admitted to using a marijuana vape the night before.
A hearing recently took place last week on May 23 amid her criminal case and she entered a plea deal - with charges officially being dropped, per InTouch Weekly - which was first to report the news.
She pleaded guilty to both reckless driving as well as possession and use of a drug-related object.
However, the star will have to serve 24 months on probation and if she commits any violations, Ariana could possibly serve time in jail.
From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop.
Biermann's probation details also include that she will have to undergo both drug and alcohol tests 'from time to time.'
She must stay away from alcohol and drugs - unless prescribed to her by a medical professional - and also complete an evaluation for substance abuse.
Ariana will need to do 40 hours of community service, pay over $2,000 in fines and also take a Victim Impact program.
The class helps 'drunk and drugged driving offenders understand the lasting and long-term effects of substance impaired driving,' per the Victim Impact Panels website.
If Biermann completes the above as well as passes her drug and alcohol tests, her probation has the possibility of ending early.
The star's lawyer Justin Spizman told InTouch: 'Ms. Biermann maintained her innocence since her arrest.
'We are pleased that the State of Georgia eventually decided to dismiss the impaired driving charge and offer Ms. Biermann the opportunity to plead guilty to a traffic ticket.'
Spizman added, 'Despite her desire to fight this case, she took advantage of the opportunity to put this matter behind her and focus her energy on all the positive endeavors in her life.'
Leading up to the hearing last week, Ariana had been facing six misdemeanor charges.
In August 2022, Biermann was arrested at the age of 20 following a 'minor fender bender' in Forsyth County, Georgia.
She had been joined by boyfriend Hudson McLeroy at the time who was also arrested for alcohol-related charges.
According to TMZ, officers had reported telling Ariana that they could smell alcohol on her breath - despite her claims that she had not been drinking.
However, the media personality did admit that she had 'smoked a THC vape pen the night before but did not drink.'
Biermann underwent a field sobriety test and law enforcement had alleged that she had a 'noticeable sway.'
At the time of the arrest, Ariana faced three separate charges including misdemeanor DUI driving under the influence of alcohol, misdemeanor improper/erratic lane change and underage alcohol possession/purchase of alcohol.
Her lawyer had told TMZ: 'Ariana was involved in a minor fender bender. When police arrived on scene, the investigating officer immediately initiated an investigation for DUI.'
The attorney added, 'Despite Ariana's constant invocation that she was upset and anxious from the minor accident, the officer incorrectly concluded she was impaired by alcohol. That was not the case.
'She wholly denies these allegations and intends to fight these charges because she is not guilty of them.'
Ariana's sentencing comes just days before she is set to star in the upcoming Bravo reality series titled Next Gen NYC - which will begin airing on June 3.
The new show will follow children of former Housewives - such as Kim Zolciak and Teresa Giudice.
Episodes will 'follow a tangled web of friends raised in the spotlight - or at least close enough for good lighting - as they stumble into adulthood one brunch, breakup and spontaneous decision at a time,' per an official synopsis.
Along with Ariana, other stars that will appear in the series includes Gia Giudice, Riley Burruss, Ava Dash, Brooks Marks, and more.
In a short preview snippet of the first episode, the media personality commented on her parents Kim Zolciak and Kroy Biermann's ongoing divorce.
The former sports player recently filed for divorce for a third time - shortly after the estranged couple finally sold their Atlanta mansion for $2.75 million amid financial woes.
And while recently talking to Bravo's The Daily Dish, Ariana have a positive update on her mom Kim as she moves on following the split from Kroy; seen above with Kim Zolciak and sister Brielle
'My mom is Kim Zolciak. Do we still say Biermann? I'm not sure this week,' she humorously stated.
'My mom did [The] Real Housewives Of Atlanta. And my dad played football for a while. And now they're getting a divorce. It's been very messy, so I was really ready, ready to get out of Atlanta.'
And while recently talking to Bravo's The Daily Dish, Ariana have a positive update on her mom Kim as she moves on following the split from Kroy.
'My mom's new house is amazing. She's so happy. She was living in the basement of our old house...so I think for her, it's almost like a really nice, fresh start.'
Biermann continued, 'Where she can be in her own space and kind of just heal from everything that's gone on in the past couple of years.'
She also had kind words for Kroy. Upon tying the knot with Kim back in 2011, he adopted both Ariana and Brielle, 28 - whom Zolciak welcomed during a past relationship.
The former couple also share four children: KJ, 13, Kash, 12, and twins Kaia Rose and Kane Ren, 11.
'I hope he's doing amazing. I think it's really a tough situation right now, between the family, and it goes through its waves. But he lives in his own house as well.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
15 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
ICE adopts new mission with potential impact on illegal immigrants
President Donald Trump has set immigration enforcement officials a lofty new target of conducting 3,000 arrests every single day in an ambitious effort to ramp up his deportation agenda. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the new goal is only temporary and the number of daily arrests expected under the Trump administration will continue to rise. 'Under President Trump's leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day,' Miller told Fox News' Sean Hannity. Trump's border czar Tom Homan (pictured) backed the ambitious new benchmark on Thursday morning, insisting: 'We've gotta increase these arrests and removals. The numbers are good, but I'm not satisfied. I haven't been satisfied all year long.' During Trump's first 100 days back in office, ICE officials arrested 66,463 illegal immigrants. More than 65,000 illegal immigrants were deported. Some 17,000 deportees had criminal convictions or charges ranging from driving under the influence to assault or weapons offenses. ICE has boasted removing gang members, murderers and child rapists. But the administration has faced significant pushback and legal hurdles with challenges to the legality of some of the deportation schemes, particularly those which saw foreign aliens sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison under the wartime Illegal Aliens Act. Other migrants have been banished to third party nations with little to no legal pathway to challenge their deportations. ICE deported 17,200 people in April alone - roughly 4,000 more than the number conducted in April 2024, under former president Joe Biden. There have been reports for months that Trump has been unsatisfied with the progress of agents on the ground, who have discovered that tracking down illegal migrants - particularly criminals - is more difficult and a slower process than they initially expected. Across the United States in immigration courts from New York to Seattle last week, Homeland Security officials began ramping up enforcement actions and carrying out mass arrests in an effort to boost their numbers. Three US immigration officials said government attorneys were given the order to start dismissing cases when they showed up for work Monday, knowing full well that federal agents would then have a free hand to arrest those same individuals as soon as they stepped out of the courtroom. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared losing their jobs.
Reuters
24 minutes ago
- Reuters
Coogler's 'Sinners' brings cinematic spotlight to Clarksdale, Mississippi
CLARKSDALE, Mississippi, May 30 - Clarksdale didn't just provide history and blues for director and writer Ryan Coogler's hit movie about art, Jim Crow and vampires. One of the Mississippi Delta town's musicians contributed to the "Sinners" script. After a special screening in the town, which has no cinema, Coogler told the audience gathered in a community hall about the first time he described the movie's plot to a group of Clarksdale blues musicians he had asked to contribute to the score. He said he hesitated when he got to the part about the vampires. He went ahead. Then, Grammy winner Bobby Rush filled the silence. "I had a girl once that was a vampire," the musician joked. The line was given to Delta Slim, played by Delroy Lindo, a piano-playing character who brings both comic relief and depth to the movie. Thursday's screening and discussion came after Tyler Yarbrough, a community organizer and movie buff in Clarksdale, wrote an open letter asking Coogler and Warner Brothers to bring the movie to a town where people drive 80 miles (130 km) to Memphis, Tennessee to get to a cinema. Warner Brothers outfitted the Clarksdale Civic Auditorium with a big screen, projector and sound system. There was even popcorn. "Sinners" has been widely acclaimed by reviewers and moviegoers, who praised the film for its stars' performances, its showcasing of African American art, and its wrestling with painful history and big ideas. According to Variety, by the end of its opening month of April "Sinners" had grossed $122.5 million in North America and $161.6 million worldwide. At what was billed as a community screening, it was apparent the community was not just the geographical entity of Clarksdale. The audience came together around art and American history, including Jim Crow, the legal and often brutally policed racial hierarchy that subjugated Black people in America's South. Shelby Simes arrived at 7 a.m. from nearby West Helena, Arkansas, earning first place in a line that had grown to hundreds by the time the doors opened about an hour before Thursday's 11 a.m. screening, the first of six scheduled over three days. Simes said Coogler's film, which she had already seen seven times, was particularly important at a time when what many see as the truth about the Black American experience has been criticized by President Donald Trump as "improper, divisive or anti-American ideology." "They're taking books off shelves," Simes said. "They're not teaching us properly in the schools." She said with "Sinners," which is fiction but offers a realistic portrayal of the Jim Crow era, Coogler and his team made the past tangible. "I love how they were able to create a path to talk to our ancestors," she said, echoing the reaction of other Black viewers. Michael Johansson, who has worked with community members to memorialize lynchings in the county where the University of Mississippi is located, said it made sense for Coogler to weave vampire folklore into his storyline. "The horror genre is appropriate for the damage, the cruelty, the barbarism of what has been done to Blacks in this nation," said Johansson, who came from Jackson to see the movie on Thursday. Andrea Driver, who supports library sciences students at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, was touched on a personal level. She cried when she saw that a young character had survived horror and reached old age. "He somehow carried that experience with him for years and didn't perish, didn't take his own life. I don't know that I could live with those memories my whole life," she said, saying it spoke to the experience of many Black Americans. Poet C. Liegh McInnis, who was born and raised in Clarksdale, noted the hometown audience recited the Lord's Prayer along with a character during a tense moment in the film. He said Coogler had drawn from history, folklore and religion. "I love the fact that Coogler gave us a three-dimensional film," he said. "Sinners" is set at a time when Clarksdale was a bustling agricultural center in which Black residents were exploited. Many fled north, bringing the blues to cities such as Chicago and Kansas City. While Coogler set his movie in Clarksdale, he filmed it in neighboring Louisiana, in part because Mississippi lacked infrastructure such as the soundstages he needed. Clarksdale Mayor Chuck Espy said the attention "Sinners" had brought could help revive his majority Black town of about 14,000, where 40% live under the poverty line. He hoped to capitalize on Clarksdale's status as a cultural capital by expanding performance and educational opportunities. Coogler saw a future for Clarksdale because of the entrepreneurial spirit that led residents to reach out for Thursday's screening, and its cultural resources. "The thing that you guys have is a thing that can't be taught," he said.
BBC News
29 minutes ago
- BBC News
Why climbing the stairs can be good for your body and brain
While it is tempting to take the lift or escalator rather than use the stairs, even scaling just a few flights a day could give your health and mind a boost. As expeditions go, it was a gruelling one. In just under 23 hours on 3 September 2021, Sean Greasley climbed and descended 8,849 m (29,032ft) – a distance that would have taken him to the top of the highest mountain on Earth. By the end, he was dripping in sweat and could barely walk. And he did it all in the relative comfort of his own home. Greasley holds the world record for the fastest time to ascend and descend the same height as Mount Everest on stairs, achieving it in 22 hours, 57 minutes and two seconds. While Greasley achieved this on the staircase at his home in Las Vegas, there are others who take stair climbing to other extremes. Tower running, for example, involves racing up enormous flights of stairs inside iconic buildings and skyscrapers. There is even a Tower Running Association and an official tower running global ranking for the elite athletes dedicated to this unusual sport. Most of us are unlikely to achieve such giddy heights, yet even climbing a few flights of stairs in our daily lives might be something to aspire to. According to research, climbing stairs can have surprising benefits for both your physical health and your brain without needing to hurtle up two steps at a time or break records. Climbing stairs has been found to improve balance and reduce the risk of falling for older people and improve their lower body strength. Other studies also find that climbing a couple of flights of stairs can positively affect our cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, memory, and potentially creative thinking. As a "low impact" form of exercise, even short bursts of stair climbing can help improve cardiorespiratory fitness and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. The improvements in aerobic fitness from climbing stairs at home can even be equivalent to those gained using stair machines at the gym. It's this everyday simplicity that is stair-climbing's greatest strength. Stairs are everywhere – we encounter them at home, at work and in public. Choosing to take the stairs instead of hopping on an escalator or riding in a lift provides us with an incidental form of exercise that can have an outsized impact on our health. "It's an exercise that nearly everybody can perform because they have access, and they do it on the daily basis," says Alexis Marcotte-Chenard, a postdoctoral research fellow in heart, lung and vascular health at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada. Marcotte-Chenard has been researching how to use exercise and nutrition to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, including the effects of "exercise snacks" – brief, spaced-out periods of vigorous activity lasting one minute or less that are performed throughout the day. Stair climbing, he says, is a promising exercise snack as it can be easily adjusted in difficulty by varying pace and requires no complex equipment or cost. "When you do exercise snacks, you don't need any fancy equipment, you can just use your own body, you can use stairs," says Marcotte-Chenard. "And if you're doing physical activity throughout the day, you don't have to dedicate an hour for your workout." Research into exercise snacks, also nicknamed "snacktivity," or "VILPA" (vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity), is on the rise as researchers search for the best exercise solution to combat sedentary habits and physical inactivity which currently puts approximately 1.8 billion adults worldwide at risk of disease. But what makes stairs such an effective physical workout? First, climbing stairs is an easy way to elevate your heart rate – an important part of getting physiological benefits. But there are unique benefits of stair-climbing compared to other forms of exercise. "It increases your heart rate and your oxygen consumption more than if you do fast walking just because it's harder to go against gravity," says Marcotte-Chenard, "And then, if you talk about the muscle, it's mostly the lower body, and we know that lower body strength is a good indicator of overall health and longevity." Climbing stairs can increase thigh muscle size and strength, and also requires use of the abdominal muscles for stabilisation going upwards. You may not even have to sprint up the staircase to get the benefits. Whilst taking two steps at a time can be more difficult, requiring greater work by the muscles around your ankle and knee, the research is split about whether you actually burn more calories going up one step at a time. And there is another reason to choose the staircase over the stair machine at the gym – going downstairs. The muscles at the front of your thighs contract in two different ways: when walking upstairs they will shorten, known as concentric contraction, and when walking downstairs they lengthen, known as eccentric contraction. Although concentric contractions require more oxygen, burn more calories during the exercise itself and are considered more difficult, repeating eccentric contractions is more likely to result in bigger and stronger muscle growth. This is because eccentric contractions cause greater muscle damage during exercise and so more calories are burnt long-term during repair and recovery. The benefits don't end with muscular thighs either. Researchers have found that stair-climbing results in surprising improvements in cognitive ability. More like this: Andreas Stenling is an associate professor psychology at Umeå University, Sweden, who primarily researches the longer-term relationships between physical activity and health. He and his colleagues studied the immediate effects of stair-climbing on different cognitive abilities in young adults. "Inhibition and switching were the two main cognitive functions we focused on here," says Stenling, "Cognitive switching, sometimes called mental flexibility, is how easy we're able to switch between cognitive tasks," he says. "So, going from one task to the other without having to reset your cognition, so to speak. Inhibition is about blocking out irrelevant information while you're engaged in the task." Stenling explains that we know that these cognitive functions are important for learning, cognitive word tasks, abstract thinking, and being able to keep your thoughts on one thing. Stenling and colleagues found that their stair-climbing exercise significantly improved participants' "switching" abilities, which is also considered the most difficult of the cognitive tasks tested for. They also tested for changes in mood, finding that participants felt happier and more energetic after stair-climbing. Another study published by researchers at the Yamaguchi University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan also found that people who climbed two flights of stairs displayed more focused problem solving than those who took the elevator. Intriguingly, there weren't any improvements in problem solving when they climbed five or eight flights of stairs, suggesting the effect is not dependent upon the number of stairs. Another study by the same group also found that walking downstairs led to an increase in creative thinking, generating 61% more original ideas than those who travelled using a lift. So if you are looking for a burst of inspiration on a problem you are trying to solve, a quick jaunt up to the next floor and back may be all you need. There is much interest in the mechanisms which link exercise to cognitive benefits, but little conclusive research. Stenling suggests, however, that the improvements could be linked to the cardiovascular system and the increase in blood flow to the brain, as well as growth hormones such as Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which seem to be impacted quickly by exercise in general. Researchers including Stenling are also keen to explore whether there may be any delayed effects from stair climbing. Most studies focus on the cognitive effects immediately after climbing some stairs. One recent study found, however, that there were some improvements in memory from stair-climbing that carry over to the next day when paired with good sleep quality. But while the concept of taking 10,000 steps a day is ingrained in the public mind as the benchmark for daily exercise, is there a similar target we should be aiming for when it comes to stairs? Before we answer that, it is perhaps worth noting that the 10,000 step count number doesn't have a terribly strong basis in scientific research itself and some studies suggest the benefits tend to plateau after around 7,500 steps. The better known figure actually originates from an advertising campaign coinciding with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which took off because the number 10,000 in Japanese (万) resembles a person walking. The research is similarly sparse when it comes to putting a target on stair climbing. But the studies that do exist suggest that climbing more than five flights of stairs daily (equivalent to 50 steps) is associated with a lower risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), which is the build-up of plaque in the arteries. Marcotte-Chenard and his colleagues are optimistic that exercise snacks, specifically stair-climbing, could provide a good solution to breaking sedimentary habits at work. In a study assessing the psychological responses of office employees undertaking stair-climbing in the workplace, Marcotte-Chenard and colleagues found that 71% of employees preferred several small exercise snacks, climbing 60 steps in three different sessions, over one intense HIIT (high intensity interval training) session of climbing 60 steps three times in one session. "For them [the participants], it's easier to just go one time up and down the stairs and go back to sitting," says Marcotte-Chenard. "And because you spread it out throughout the day, it seems that people enjoy it a little bit more than if they do it in one single session." The researchers' study is unique for being conducted outside the laboratory, which could suggest that the research is more applicable to the real world. Not all research agrees that home stair-climbing is the answer, with some suggesting it is insufficient physical activity to lower the risk of CVD mortality and premature death. Additionally, sufferers of knee osteoarthritis can find stairs to be a painful ordeal. And observational studies even find that some demographics, such as females and overweight individuals, are less likely to take the stairs where there is an alternative. But for those able to tackle a staircase, choosing it over a lift or elevator could be a great way of getting some incidental exercise that will benefit both your body and mind. See you at the top. -- For trusted insights into better health and wellbeing rooted in science, sign up to the Health Fix newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
