Probably everyone is familiar with the Stephen Hawking story by now. If not, here's a brief synopsis.

Brief Synopsis

Professor Hawking was brought to the hospital a few days ago to be treated for pneumonia. Hawking is the world famous physicist that wrote the short yet impenetrable 'Brief History of Time'. Or if you don't know him from there, he's been a guest voice on the Simpsons. (Bonus link! Click here for the Simpsons Stephen Hawking action figure.)

Now the fact that the 62 year old Hawking is a paraplegic who can only speak with a computerized voice box is the main reason he's being treated in a hospital rather than at home. And once they checked him in, they started seeing a lot of extraneous injuries. And they concluded: 'Someone has been whumping on the civilized world's most beloved scientist.

End of brief synopsis. Time for the updates.

'Right!' says the family. They've known all along that someone has been beating on Stephen. And they're pretty darn sure they know exactly who that someone is: Elaine Hawking. Yeah, they had accused her before, four years prior, but Stephen had refused to spill the beans on Elaine. They figure that this is a classic case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. This is a behavior usually found between mothers and children wherein the mother induces injury/illness in the child in order to get attention for themselves. 'Oh, you poor thing. Look at what you have to deal with.' Because of Hawking's level of dependence upon his wife, this accusation becomes quite plausible.

Here's Christian Gysin reports from today's Daily Mail:

A nurse who cared for Professor Stephen Hawking claimed last night that she saw his wife abusing and mistreating him. Elaine Hawking called her disabled 62-year-old husband a cripple, bathed him in water that was too hot and allowed him to wet himself, it was alleged.

The nurse was reported as saying: "She gets angry and has thrown him on the bed where he kicks his limbs or hurts himself. She allowed him to slip down low in the bath so the water goes in the hole in his throat. She has left him in the garden without his computer mouse so he cannot talk and call for anyone. She gives him lots of verbal abuse and calls him a cripple and an invalid, which depresses him. She would withhold the bottle he used to go to the toilet so he wet himself, which he does not like because he is a very dignified person and a very private person. The verbal abuse is unbelievable. Her mouth is like a sewer. We (his nurses) got so used to it we forgot it was not normal behavior."

Whoah! And that's only one nurse, whereas the Hawkings employ round the clock nursing services. The police are interviewing ten more nurses. And they're taking their time with it, too. They've just about had it with this Hawking fellow. Cause like I mentioned earlier, they had dealt with this particular asshole a few years prior. He wouldn't help them then, and he's not being helpful now, claiming all allegations are false (no matter who they're directed against!) and that his privacy is being invaded.

You need to know that Hawking has been wasting away from motor neurone disease for around forty years. Forty freaking years is a hell of a long time to be wasting away from anything. And I'll let you in on a little secret. Had Hawking not been blessed with a brilliant mind, which has allowed him to earn a large personal fortune (round the clock nursing ain't cheap), he would sure as shit be dead now instead of popping up in the news whenever they need a quote from a well known physicist. With Carl Sagan long gone, we're just about out of celebrity scientists.

Now when Hawking was twenty-two years old and still spry, just a few months after his unfortunate diagnosis, Stephen took himself a wife, girl by the name of Jane Wilde. And even though his health continued to slowly  degenerate, they produced three healthy kids in the first dozen years of their marriage.

What sort of woman puts up with this type of life, you wonder, taking care of an invalid day after day, year after year, and still professing her love. Let me be cruel for a moment. This man is a car wreck. Take a look at this guy! Good Lord! And a sparkling conversationalist, I'm sure. I'm thinking that this Jane Wilde is a regular Mother Theresa. She even got her ex-husband to build him his very first voice synthesizer.

But it couldn't last. I know what you're thinking, she couldn't take it anymore and left him. Wrong! He left her! No, I'm not kidding. He left her in 1990 for Elaine Mason. How does a paralyzed physicist meet cute girls, anyhow? Uh, when they're emptying your bed pan, of course. He ran off with one of his nurses, leaving two kids still at home, one of them ten years old. And that's the truth. Except for the part about running off. I'm sure that's not right. I have this vision of Woody Allen making an escape from the hospital with Louise Lasser shouting "I'm wheeling as fast as I can."

Jane Wilde was reportedly broken-hearted, but eventually she got over it. She remarried in 1996, and in 1998 wrote a book, 'Music to Move the Stars', about her marriage to the Professor. How would you describe it, Jane? "A brittle, empty shell, alone and vulnerable, restrained only by the thought of my children from throwing myself into the river, drowning in a slough of despond, I prayed for help with the desperate insistency of a potential suicide." Damn, girl, why didn't you just pack it in. "I couldn't go off and leave Stephen. Coals of fire would have been heaped on my head if I had."

Ah, well, it's all over now. And is little Stephen happy at last? I mean aside from the fact that he keeps showing up at the emergency room with the occasional bruises and cuts and broken bones. Oh yes, and that incident when Elaine left him stranded in the garden on the hottest day of the year, and he suffered severe heat stroke.

A different nurse has been talking to The Mirror U.K. the past couple of days.

"I remember coming in one day and he had a cut on his throat. She must have shaved him very harshly. It wasn't a shaving nick. It was about three inches long... Another time she slammed his wrist down on his wheelchair and his wrist broke. That actual moment was seen by a nurse but she was given a very hard time. Elaine was very jealous of her, she was attractive. If you were a threat at all, that was her worry."

The source also described a special ritual that Elaine would perform for all the new nurses, calling them unexpectedly to the bedroom. "She would often be doing some strange show. She would be naked on top of him. At the time, I thought I had made some terrible mistake. It was afterwards I was told that happened to quite a few people. It was to make it clear that they had a sexual relationship. It was an initiation."

Hawking has issued a statement. "There is absolutely no substance to the reports."

And ex-wife Jane? She had a statement too. "Stephen is very vulnerable. I don't think he is in control of the situation. I trust the medical authorities will take the situation very seriously and not discharge him before the situation is resolved."

But it's really not her problem any more.