'Inside Edition' anchor reportedly kicks publicist during party meltdown

Inside Edition anchor Deborah Norville addresses The Women's Conference 2008 in Long Beach, California October 22, 2008. (Reuters)

“Inside Edition” anchor Deborah Norville went into a fashion meltdown at the Plaza on Wednesday — kicking a female publicist outside Harper’s Bazaar’s starry Icons party for daring to “walk into her shot” on the red carpet.

Norville was interviewing celebs for a sponsor outside the party, where guests included Mariah Carey, Hailey Baldwin, Kate Upton, Gigi Hadid, Rita Ora and Kendall Jenner. But with every top model at Fashion Week arriving, there were “a ton of models just walking through her shot, not even acknowledging she was filming,” said a spy, sending Norville into a fury.

She’d had enough when “a publicist walked through her shot while she was talking to Jean-Paul Goude,” and, “Deborah took out all her anger. She kicked the woman, hard, all while continuing to smile for the camera and ask questions,” a shocked spy said.

Then the anchor aggressively “kept jumping in front of other reporters” to hijack interviews.

“A celeb would be going to talk to someone and [Norville] would just bust in, ‘I’m Deborah Norville!’ You’d think it was the Oscars . . . or ‘The Hunger Games,’ ” sniffed a witness. “[She was] practically tackling celebrities.”

When Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith made his way up the carpet, Norville shouted, “Willow!” — the name of Smith’s famous daughter — before producers corrected her. She also mistook Julia Restoin Roitfeld for her mother, Bazaar global fashion director Carine Roitfeld, who was one of the event’s hosts.

Safely inside the black-tie bash, Katy Perry sang a set of hits, and even dedicated “Firework” to fashion assistants — for “when you rip your pants, you have two Band-Aids fall off of the back of your heels, you’re sweating . . . and you feel, maybe, like a little plastic bag.”

Guests swilled so much Champagne and other libations, the bars ran out of glasses. Also at the star-studded affair were Robert Kraft, Jeremy Scott, Stephen Gan, Glenda Bailey, Manolo Blahnik and Michelle Rodriguez. Reps for Norville had no comment.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.

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