Final Chapter

LEGAL BRIEFS Michelle Rodriguez's roommate dropped assault and harassment charges she brought against the ''Girlfight'' star last month. Louise Ann Ward, 21, told a Jersey City, N.J., court on Thursday that she didn't want to press charges over the March 16 incident, a fight that started in their apartment and spilled out onto the street, in which the ''Fast and the Furious'' star allegedly punched Ward and pulled her hair, leading to a swollen right eye and laceration for Ward and a bite on the arm for Rodriguez. At the courthouse, the 23-year-old actress explained, ''Friends fight, and then they make up.''...

R. Kelly has settled a suit filed against him by Tracy Sampson, an Epic Records intern who claims Kelly pressured her into a sexual relationship two years ago, when she was underage. Terms of the settlement with Sampson, now 19, were undisclosed, but she had initially asked for $50,000. It's at least the second such suit he's settled; he paid a reported $250,000 to settle a suit in 1998 filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who claimed Kelly induced her to have sex with him and other teenage girls when she was 15. Sampson's attorney says she represents two other young women who will also be suing Kelly.

Meanwhile, Chicago police are still investigating the oft-bootlegged videotape that allegedly shows Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl, a tape Kelly claims is a forgery. Still, that tape may be hurting sales of Kelly's latest project, his ''Best of Both Worlds'' collaboration with Jay-Z, which is selling only modestly. Except, maybe, for those people who are buying copies just to smash them, as anti-Kelly protesters did last week at the offices of Chicago radio station WGCI-FM. Kelly phoned the station, asking fans to stick by him, but did not offer an explanation as to why a tape purporting to show him engaged in statutory rape is circulating.

PASSING NOTES Roy Huggins, the TV writer-producer who created or co-created such classic series as ''The Fugitive,'' ''The Rockford Files,'' ''Maverick,'' and ''77 Sunset Strip,'' died Wednesday in Santa Monica. He was 87 and died of natural causes. He started as a novelist and screenwriter but found his calling in TV, where he wrote 350 scripts.