MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Rapper Rick Ross was arrested in Miami Beach early Thursday and charged with battery after a woman he was living with told police he hit her, authorities said.

Ross, whose legal name is William Roberts II, surrendered at the Miami Beach Police Station, two days after the woman filed a report with police, officials said. Ross faces a felony charge of battery by strangulation, as well as a misdemeanor battery charge, according to online court records.

An attorney for Ross, 50, said in a statement that his client is being wrongfully accused by an ex-girlfriend whose true motivations are unclear.

“The ex did not even file a police report until a month after the claimed incident allegedly took place,” defense attorney Steve Sadow said in the statement. “Mr. Roberts is innocent and has pled not guilty to the charges. He respectfully requests that his friends, fans and the general public not prejudge the situation and allow the judicial process to run its course.”

Ross was released from jail on a $5,000 cash bond later Thursday, according to court records. An arraignment is scheduled for Oct. 22.

According to an arrest report, a woman told Miami Beach detectives that she had been living with Ross on Aug. 28, when he accused her of cheating on him and struck her multiple times. She said Ross also choked her with the collar of her shirt and slammed her into a wall. The woman said she was eventually able to leave the home and then returned later — after Ross left — to collect her belongings.

Ross pleaded no contest in 2017 to aggravated assault after he was accused of forcing a man into a guesthouse at his suburban-Atlanta mansion in 2015 and beating him with a handgun, according to Georgia court records. Under a first-offender program in Georgia, the court issued an order exonerating Ross of guilt on that felony count.

Ross is a longtime South Florida resident who gained prominence in 2006 with his debut single “Hustlin’.”

The rapper and entrepreneur helped put Miami on the musical map in the early 2000s, when most hip-hop fans looked to Atlanta and Houston as Southern rap headquarters. “Hustlin’” was certified platinum twice by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and sparked a bidding war for Ross. He eventually signed with Def Jam Records, headed by Jay-Z.

Ross’ debut album, “Port of Miami,” also went platinum, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. It was the first in a series of chart-toppers, including 2008’s “Trilla” and 2009’s “Deeper Than Rap.” He has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards.

In 2008, he founded the influential label Maybach Music Group (MMG), boosting the careers of signees like Wale, Meek Mill and French Montana.

His most recent album, “Set In Stone,” was released in July.

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NEW YORK — Dig out your roller skates. Pair them with a cowboy hat. Miranda Lambert has officially entered her disco chapter.

“Crisco,” the country star’s 11th studio album, is a collection of boogie-forward tracks, buoyed by sweeping strings and what sounds like a wink from the dance floor. It’s out Friday.

“I’ve spent a lot of my career with fiery songs and heartbreak songs and this record just has a lot of joy on it, and I think that’s just where I am right now in life, too,” Miranda says.

The title track is almost a mission statement: “Baby, we’ve been cookin’ with Crisco/Ain’t we mixin’ country and disco/Stir it around, give it a spin/And it’s a rhinestone world we’re livin’ in.”

“I’ve just never explored that before. I really am a Merle Haggard girl, you know what I mean? I just love three chords and the truth,” says Lambert. “I just felt like I, maybe at this point, earned the creative freedom to try something fun and try something different.”

The album release caps a special few months that include getting seven Country Music Association Awards nominations, a disco ball-filled performance at the Academy of Country Music Awards that got attendees up and boogying, and making history as co-writer of the crossover-smash “Choosin’ Texas.”

That tune sung by Ella Langley has gone six times platinum, been crowned Billboard’s official 2026 Song of the Summer and helped her become the only woman to simultaneously hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts. It was just named the longest-running No. 1 hit in the U.S.

“We never would have thought just sitting there, on a back porch with a couple of beers and guitars, writing a country song, that it would take over like it has,” Lambert says.

“I’m thrilled that ‘Choosin’ Texas’ is a country song and the world is loving it. Like that makes me happy. I’ve dedicated my entire adult life to country music so that alone is like so much happiness for me.”

Lambert and Langley wrote “Choosin’ Texas” with Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor. It’s a song exploring what it feels like when someone is falling out of love with you and Lambert can only guess why America has fallen so in love with it.

“It kind of feels like something fresh, but something you’ve also heard before. When you hear it, you’re like, ‘I kind of want to sing along to this, even though it’s the first time you heard it.’ You know what I mean?”

Lambert co-produced Langley’s album “Dandelion,” the first time she’s produced another artist, something she says she enjoyed. Langley returns the favor by being featured on the swaggering opening “Crisco” song “Snakeskin Boots.”

“I think the reason that we are drawn to each other is because I see a lot of my young self in her,” Lambert says of Langley. “She’s definitely a pistol. She’s fiery. She knows exactly what she wants. She’s a true artist and songwriter and she’s an inspiring person to be around.”

Lambert also has good news about another fellow country artist, squashing any lingering beef she had with Kacey Musgraves. The two collaborated on “Horses and Divorces” — “Maybe we’re more alike than we think,” they sing — on Musgraves’ new “Middle of Nowhere” album.

Miranda points to the “crazy grind of this business” for prompting ebbs and flows in their relationship and the stress during “early stages of your career, trying to really plant your feet in the ground, plant your stake in the ground, and say, ‘This is my spot.’”

“Sometimes it gets tricky when you’re navigating that with other female artists and it was really cool to just come together and talk about it and it’s, as we say, whiskey under the bridge now.”

“Crisco” came to life after she and Chris Stapleton wrote and recorded the lovely “A Song To Sing,” their version of “Islands in the Stream,” which earned two Grammy Award nominations.

“We wrote this song a few years ago and it really opened up my mind to exploring different sounds. I think it set us on the path to explore more and got me really curious about parts of country music I hadn’t explored yet, which eventually inspired the entire record,” she says.

The video features Lambert and Stapleton in matching red suits at a roller rink. If you look carefully, you’ll see she's wearing a pair of Dolly Parton’s hoop earrings lent out by the late superstar and he’s got on a Kenny Rogers necklace.

“I feel like I’ve got to thank her a little bit for this record because that song, that video, that whole day, having a little piece of her around me all day, definitely inspired me for this whole project.”

Grammy Award-winning songwriter Natalie Hemby, who has cut some 40 songs with Lambert over 20 years collaborating, co-wrote and played on five tracks this time, including “Snakeskin Boots.”

“Every record has just been completely different from the next, but I would say this is the most fun era that I’ve had, as far as writing for a project of hers,” says Hemby. “Her star is just shining so bright, as big as Texas, if you will.”

Miranda says country music is in a great spot right now, reminding her of the 1990s when there was something for everyone and a lot of female artists.

“There is finally room for everyone,” she says. “We’re not fighting for like only 30 spots on the chart. And people find music all different kinds of ways now. That has allowed for there to be all kinds of voices out there within our genre.”

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NEW YORK — Michael Douglas, the award-winning actor and producer, recently turned 82. He is a cancer survivor, a recovered addict, a married man, the father and son of actors. He is also an author, who begins his memoir with a message of thanks to his family — past and present and future — for the “sense of immortality.”

Immortality.

“Many times my father was asked, ‘Kirk, are you jealous of your son?’” he said during a recent interview at a Manhattan hotel, referring to his late father, fellow actor and sometime combatant Kirk Douglas . “And he said, ‘Jealous?’ This is a sense of immortality, a continuity of generations.'”

Family is how Douglas anchors his legacy and his place in a world he fears is breaking down. But there are other ways to live on past your own time: starring in cultural touchstones like “Fatal Attraction” or “Basic Instinct,” or writing a 500-page book that is called “One Helluva Ride,” a famous man’s journey from rebellion and coming-of-age, to midlife success and transgression to the inevitable reckoning with mortality and past mistakes.

Publishing on Tuesday, his memoir is framed around the making of some of his most notable movies, including “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Falling Down,” “Romancing the Stone” and two films that brought him Oscars: as a producer of best picture winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and as star of “Wall Street,” when his turn as corporate raider Gordon Gekko brought him the prize for best actor and helped make “Greed is good” a catch phrase for the late 1980s.

Douglas himself was once enough a symbol of hedonism that he was rumored to be undergoing treatment for sex addiction. False, he says, but in his memoir he acknowledges that at the time he met Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he married in 2000, he was dating five other women. They were all in different cities, he explained during his interview, and “as long as you weren’t seeing somebody else in the same city that might embarrass her, they were all right.”

He is now well settled with Zeta-Jones and satisfied enough with his career that he no longer has any great drive to top himself; he’s just as happy taking a walk in the garden. But Douglas also sees the book as a baring of the most painful moments of his life: his near-archetypal quest to forge an identity apart from his father; a childhood damaged by violence and divorce that only was resolved in the latter part of Kirk’s life; Douglas’ own divorce from first wife, Diandra Luker; the substance abuse battles of Michael and son Cameron Douglas, who spent seven years in prison on drug charges; and the diagnosis of Stage IV tongue cancer in 2010 that he at first assumed would kill him.

Wearing a dark blazer, blue shirt and no tie, Douglas is a warm and open conversationalist. During his interview, he spoke of the awesome burdens and privileges of being Kirk Douglas’ son, his improbable decision to become an actor, too, and the single line of dialogue he says comes closest to the truth about himself.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

DOUGLAS: I looked at dad as just Superman. He was so dynamic. He was so strong. He has such tenacity. I watched him on the screen as Spartacus, saw him as Ulysses ... I never thought I could be the man my father was. I didn’t think it was in the cards. It took me a long time to gain confidence and then to make a lot of the same mistakes he made.

DOUGLAS: I never thought about being an actor until I was in college. I had no major. And they called me into the office, “You got to declare a major. You can’t just take general education courses.” I was a bit of a hippie at the time. And I thought, “Well, my mother (Diana Douglas) is an actress, and I had seen her doing stage productions. And my father ....” So I thought it would be an easy course.

I started then performing in school. I had terrible, terrible stage fright, you know, (vomiting in) wastebaskets off stage.

DOUGLAS: I wanted to overcome my stage fright. I wanted to fight the uncomfortable feeling I had of being in front of a camera.

DOUGLAS: I think that’s probably true. I think I inherited my father’s tenacity, my father’s ambition, and his rage. He had a big temper growing up. There must have been this desire to feel like I was somebody. Because growing up, I was always the son of ....

DOUGLAS: They (his parents) had good friends and everything, but there was always an isolation about him. And I find I have a bit of that, too.

As far as a line for myself, I always love in “Falling Down,” when he (an unemployed defense worker who turns violent) says “I'm the bad guy?”

DOUGLAS: I’m fairly tough on myself in the book and, you know, honest. I tried to do the right thing but have found myself in situations where it appears that I am the bad guy.

DOUGLAS: I can’t say I would. I do not believe that you can balance career with family. You just can’t balance it. So I’m always saying to my kids or anybody else that will listen — get your career out of the way before you think about marrying and having kids. That affected my first marriage, because I was consumed.

DOUGLAS: No.

DOUGLAS: Because I was very uncomfortable talking about the early years and his physical abuse. He was of a generation that hit; my mother used the hairbrush. He was tough. That was also one of the reasons why it took a little time to warm up as we got older, and to forgive him.

DOUGLAS: Time heals, you know. Hopefully. Life moves on. Dad had that great line right after I won (the Oscar) for “Wall Street.” He said to me, “You know, I would have been nicer to you if I knew how successful you were going to be.”