Jhené Aiko has joined the cast of Hey A.J.!, the upcoming Disney Jr. animated show based on a children’s books series written by retired NFL star Martellus Bennett, while Meghan Trainor will have a recurring role.

The music-filled family comedy series will follow a young girl named A.J., voiced by Amari McCoy (Marvel’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends), who “along with her stuffed bunny sidekick, uses her big imagination to make ordinary life moments extraordinary,” according to the Disney Jr. announcement.

Grammy-nominated artist Aiko will voice A.J.’s mom Siggi, while Super Bowl champion-turned-children’s author Bennett will voice A.J.’s dad Marty. Also joining the cast: Juliet Donenfeld (Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures) as A.J.’s best friend Jessie, Innocent Ekakitie (Bunk’d) as Jazz, and David Mitchell (Phineas and Ferb) as A.J.’s bunny sidekick Theo. Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Trainor will have a recurring role playing Jessie’s mom.

The casting news was announced Friday morning (Aug. 8) at the “Disney Jr. Let’s Play!” fan celebration, taking place throughout the weekend at Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, California.

Other Disney Jr. news coming out of Friday’s fan event: The new series Cars: Lightning Racers, inspired by the Disney and Pixar Cars film series, will see Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy reprising their roles as Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater, respectively; Marvel’s Avengers: Mightiest Friends will debt as the first preschool Avengers series, following Spidey and Iron Man-specific shows; and two new Mickey & Minnie’s Holiday Songs musical specials will arrive this year timed to Halloween and Christmas.

“Our shows are often a child’s very first connection to the world of Disney, sparking the songs they sing, the characters they adore, and the adventures they want to live again and again,” Ayo Davis, president of Disney Branded Television, said at Friday’s event. “Today’s announcements build on that leadership, expanding the worlds kids already love and introducing new multiplatform stories that will capture the hearts of the next generation.”

As fellow moms of two, Aiko and Trainor are surely no strangers to children’s television. Aiko is mom to 16-year-old Namiko (whom she shares with her R&B singer ex O’Ryan) and 2-year-old son Noah (with her rapper boyfriend Big Sean), while Trainor has 4-year-old son Riley and 2-year-old son Barry with actor husband Daryl Sabara.

Hey A.J. — produced by Surfing Giant Studios, with Bennett, Jeff “Swampy” Marsh and Michael Hodges serving as executive producers — will debut in 2026 on Disney Jr., followed by a Disney+ release.

MGK and Megan Fox may no longer be engaged, but former “twin flame” couple are still making beautiful music together. Just check the songwriting credits for rapper-turned-pop-punk-rocker Kelly, whose new album, Lost Americana, features a track titled “Orpheus” credited to co-writers Kelly and Fox.

The gentle piano and strings ballad opens with MGK sighing, “We grew a tree back in the garden/ With a celestial seed that fell down to us from the stars/ The sun rose high and killed our shadows/ There’s more to see under the light than in the dark.” The lyrics allude to the tragic Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice via lines about an undying love that cannot be.

“Somewhere in a different realm, we’re still together/ Somehow, I’ll find my way to you again/ Shipwrecked, but I hold hopes of buried treasure,” MGK sings on the song in which he vows, “I won’t let you love me, but I can’t let you leave me/ It’s a tragedy, and we’ve all seen that scene.”

In the Greek myth, musician Orpheus loses wife Eurydice to a snake bite and travels to the underworld to plead with Hades for her return. The god of the depths offers to let Eurydice return to life if Orpheus agrees not to look back at her until they’re both above ground again. When his anxiety about their return overwhelms him, Orpheus looks back and loses Eurydice forever.

Similarly, the song that appears to chronicle the on-and-off couple’s tumultuous, drama-filled love affair, which seemingly ended for good when they split just before Fox gave birth to their daughter, Saga Blade, in March of this year. It also seems to be a call back to the poem “Prove it, Orpheus” from Fox’s 2023 book of poems Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, which fans at the time suspected was about the singer.

In it, she wrote, “And when they ask you what is your biggest regret/ Don’t writ it in a song/ Cut yourself open and write it in blood.”

The “celestial seed” reference in the song also seems like a call-back to a mini-controversy that erupted around the time of the baby’s birth when MGK announced the good news by writing, “She’s finally here!! our little celestial seed.” Kelly later clarified that of course they didn’t name their daughter Celestial Seed, but it’s unclear at this point if the song writing preceded the tweet or if Kelly leaned into the misunderstanding on the track as a wink.

At press time it was also unclear if the former couple worked on the song together, or if Fox’s songwriting credit is tied to her earlier poem; a spokesperson for Kelly had not returned a request for clarification on the credit at press time.

The majority of the songs on the album were written solely by Kelly or Kelly with Emma Rosen, or the pair with LP co-producer Nick Long. However, Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins gets a co-writing credit on “Starman,” which interpolates the entire chorus to 3EB’s breakout 1997 single, “Semi-Charmed Life.”

MGK has been on a full-court press blitz for Lost Americana, with his hometown of Cleveland preparing to celebrate its favorite son with the annual MGK Day celebration this weekend. Events from Friday through Sunday (Aug. 8-10) include the XXCon gathering at Jacobs Pavilion featuring an acoustic performance, DJ set from Emo Night Brooklyn and a celebration of the album tonight. The party will continue on Saturday with a Now That’s What I Call Brunch party with music by Bobby Booshay, a street league skateboard takeover and a bar crawl. Sunday will kick off with a Harley-Davidson city ride ending at the MGK Day Community and Arts Festival and celebrity basketball game; click here for the full roster of events.

A woman suing Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler over accusations that she was almost his “child bride” in the 1970s is urging a judge to deny the star’s efforts to dismiss her sexual assault lawsuit.

In court papers filed Wednesday in Los Angeles court, attorneys for Julia Misley argue that Tyler — whom they claim “groomed” and “manipulated” her as a teenager — cannot rely on the laws of Massachusetts to escape a case she filed in California.

“Defendant, as plaintiff’s guardian, used his wealth and celebrity status to sexually assault plaintiff as a child for multiple years in multiple states, including California,” Misley’s lawyers said. “Thus, it was defendant who chose California law to apply, not plaintiff.”

Misley (formerly Holcomb) sued Tyler in 2022, claiming she was the unnamed person he referred to in his memoir as a “teen bride” he almost married. They claim he abused his fame to win control over her — including signing an agreement with her parents to take legal guardianship — and sexually assault her for three years starting in 1973, when she was just 16 years old.

With a trial looming in October, Tyler has argued that the case must be dismissed. His lawyers say the pair lived together in Boston, where the legal age of consent is 16; he also says the statute of limitations in Massachusetts has long since expired.

But in this week’s response, Misley’s lawyers say that argument is clearly flawed — claiming he cannot hide behind laws in other states when he lives in California and some of the alleged misconduct took place in that jurisdiction.

“Now, as a California resident, defendant believes that he should not be liable despite never raising the defenses he relies upon,” her lawyers write in Wednesday’s filing. “This failure is fatal to his attempts to escape liability [and] plaintiff respectfully requests the court deny defendant’s motion in its entirety and allow this case to be decided by a jury.”

An attorney for Tyler did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.

Misley’s allegations against Tyler were not new. She made similar accusations in a 2011 article published by the anti-abortion website LifesiteNews, and she made the same claims in 2020 during an appearance on Fox News.

But in 2022, she took her allegations to court — accusing Tyler of using his “power as a well-known musician and rock star” in order to “gain access to, groom, manipulate, exploit” her.

The lawsuit repeatedly cited Tyler’s own memoir (Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?), in which he explicitly referenced a relationship with an underage girl. “She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it,” Tyler wrote in the book passage that’s quoted in the lawsuit. “I was so in love I almost took a teen bride.”

The lawsuit alleged that Tyler convinced Misley’s parents to grant him guardianship over her — an accusation that also came with quotes from his memoir: “I went and slept at her parents’ house for a couple of nights and her parents fell in love with me, signed paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state.”

In Tyler’s motion to dismiss the case, filed in June, he didn’t deny the basic facts. But his lawyers characterized the pairing as a consensual “romantic relationship” between a man “in his mid-twenties at the time” and a woman “between the ages of 16 and 19.”

“Plaintiff and Tyler lived together in Boston, Massachusetts, where the legal age of consent was (and remains) 16. Plaintiff has never lived in California,” Tyler’s lawyers wrote. “However, five decades after the fact, plaintiff sued in California claiming that her relationship with Tyler, part of which occurred prior to her turning 18, constitutes ‘childhood sexual assault.’”

“Under Massachusetts law at the time, the age of consent was 16, and as such, plaintiff and Tyler’s relationship was legal,” they wrote.

If Tyler’s motion is denied, the case is currently scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 1.