After losing her home a week ago to the Los Angeles wildfires, Melissa Rivers is falling back on her parents’ determined nature and her own dark sense of humor to weather a “surreal” situation.
“For me and probably most people, we still just can’t get our heads around it,” says Rivers, 56, whose house in Santa Monica was among many destroyed by flames in the past seven days. “I do find moments where I am laughing, and then you look around and you see that your life is reduced to a couple of tote bags and a couple of Macy’s bags.”
But “I just keep looking forward,” she tells USA TODAY. “That’s what’s keeping me sane.”
While the TV personality is one of numerous celebrities who’ve lost their homes to the fires, “it’s an entire community, a small city gone. An entire town gone,” Rivers says.
Last week, she and fiancé Steve Mitchel “had started to get organized” when the warnings came about the Palisades fire and they needed to move quickly to evacuate.
“Everyone keeps asking: How long did we have? Honestly, I have no idea. You’re just going through your mental checklist: passports, paperwork, medications, dog food, cat food. There’s just a lot going on,” says Rivers, who managed to save a few important keepsakes including late mom Joan Rivers’ Emmy, a photo of her late dad Edgar Rosenberg, and a drawing Joan did of Melissa and her son, Cooper Endicott.
She’s had to move three times in the last week. The first night, she and Mitchel sheltered at her 24-year-old son’s apartment, where he had just started moving in with some school friends but only had a surfboard and a handful of clothes: “Literally, like no towels, no sheets.”
Then the three of them moved into a packed hotel but when that had to be evacuated, they relocated to a business friend’s property (which a tenant had fortuitously just moved out of) that was a safe distance from the fires. Although their cat is with them, Rivers’ dogs are still staying at a friend’s house.
“I truly don’t believe that anyone who is not here and who has not gone through this can comprehend what it’s like. And I’m fully now hitting angry,” Rivers says. “I have had two cries. One was about five minutes, one was about 40 minutes. I don’t have time for it. No one has time to wallow.”
That last bit is a nod to an inspirational quote from her mom which Rivers shared to Instagram on Monday: “You can’t change what happened. So have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward.” Rivers is also “relying very heavily” on lessons from her father and taken to heart a family motto inspired by Winston Churchill. “When you find yourself in hell, keep walking,” Rivers says. “And I am my parents’ daughter.”
“That is what I am doing. I’m finding that, strangely, comforting other people and checking on other people is helping me. Because I think it doesn’t allow me to think about myself. And at one point, I will have to,” she adds with a laugh.
River is “not allowing myself yet to look over my shoulder,” though she realizes “we are going to have to go in and go through the rubble. People have been sort of hiking into the area, but the ground is still so hot you can’t get really near anything. So we chose not to do that because my instinct is going to be to run into it and start looking for things. We’ve decided we’re just going to wait.
CES 2025 comes to a close today, wrapping up a jam-packed week of high-tech, futuristic cars packing everything from artificial-intelligence voice assistants to flying cars and 1000-plus horsepower electric powertrains. Some of these vehicles are already on sale in other countries while some preview upcoming production cars and others are far-fetched flights of fantasy. So without further adieu, here are some of the coolest vehicles we spotted on the show floor at CES 2025.
Honda showed off two prototypes of its 0-series EVs, both of which are due to start production in 2026 and sport sleek, stylish bodywork. The 0 SUV will arrive first with more conventional looks while the radical 0 Saloon is due in late 2026 and wears the same radical wedge shape as the 2024 Saloon concept.
Chinese automaker Zeekr, founded in 2021 and part of Geely’s vast portfolio of brands, brought three vehicles to the show. The 001 FR is the most appealing from an enthusiast standpoint—the wagon-like shape cloaks a quad-motor electric powertrain cranking out 1248 horsepower. The aggressive body kit, which includes a sizable rear wing, gives the 001 FR serious presence, and we were impressed by the quality of its suede-covered interior. We’d love to get behind the wheel and pin the 001 FR’s accelerator.
The Zeekr Mix is drastically different from the 001 FR, a bubbly electric minivan for the Chinese market with a spacious cabin. The Mix seats five, but the front seats can swivel 270 degrees to either face rearwards, towards each other, or towards the coach doors, which open up with no pillar in between to ease access to the cabin. Despite the more practical approach, the Mix is no slouch, with a rear-wheel-drive 416-hp single-motor powertrain and up to 436 miles of range on China’s CLTC test cycle when fitted with the larger 102-kWh battery pack. We’d be curious to see how the Mix would stack up against the VW ID.Buzz if it was ever brought to America.
