Kelly Rutheford’s “Gossip Girl” character set for spinoff and killed-off too?

“Gossip Girl” star Kelly Rutheford (Lily van der Woodsen) is going through a very nasty divorce with her hubby of 2+ years, Daniel Giersch. Kelly went to court last week to ask the judge in her divorce case to let her go to NYC with her two-year-old, Hermes. The judge shut Kelly down, telling her he’ll take the issue up a week from today.

Giersch doesn’t want Hermes to travel to NYC because he claims Kelly works insane hours and gets totally stressed out when she’s shooting (not great for the unborn baby either).

Sources on “Gossip Girl” tell TMZ that Kelly is supposed to be in New York to shoot by January 27. If the judge shuts her down next week that’s not going to happen. Producers could deal with a small delay and shoot her out of sequence, but if the delay is longer they could just end up killing off her character.  The irony is her character is about to spawn a spinoff.

After months of, rumors, the show’s creators/exec producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are proceeding with a spinoff that will serve as a prequel to the sophomore drama and chronicle the wild teen years of Lily van der Woodsen (Kelly) in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The network has ordered a backdoor pilot for the project, which will air as a “Gossip” episode May 11. The 1980s world will be introduced in flashbacks tied to the episode’s story line of Lily and her daughter Serena (Blake Lively) wrestling with a problem, Schwartz said.

Written by Schwartz and Savage, the spinoff will center on young Lily Rhodes (her maiden name) who, after a falling out with her parents, is forced to move in with her sister, the black sheep of the Rhodes family. Overnight, Lily has to transition from a life of luxury and education at a wealthy Montecito boarding school to living deep in the San Fernando Valley she once made fun of and going to public school. Caught between two worlds, Lily dives into the fast-paced Sunset Strip and the Hollywood lifestyle of the ’80s, journeying over the hill to a world of wealth and excess that used to be her own.

Eventually, she meets rocker Rufus Humphrey (played on “Gossip” by Matthew Settle) for a fling that will result in Lily’s secret pregnancy, but “that wouldn’t be for quite a while in the run of the show,” Schwartz said.

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