How I became the ‘femme fatale’ of New York gossip

Several weeks ago I was awakened by a phone call from a man who, speaking in a loud and excited voice, demanded to know the fine details of my personal life. Was I in a relationship with the Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff — and under what circumstances? Who had introduced us? Who had I seen in the past? Where did I work? How much was I paid? He was, I gathered before I hung up, a man with a website.

More puzzled than rattled by his aggressiveness and seeming rancour, I googled his site and, as I sat there, saw my name appear and myself go from a girl with no reputation in the city to a girl who, as my mother in Atlanta would soon point out, had lost her reputation.

From this unknown man’s unknown website, my terrible scandal quickly moved to Gawker, the gossip site of record in New York, which published every saucy picture it could find of me, and then, shortly after, to tabloid headlines in the New York Post. I was, in the initial report, a hapless naïf, prey to a ruthless older man. In the Gawker view I was a shameless hussy furthering my career. In Page Six (the New York Post’s gossip column), I was merely a comic-book blonde.

Three gossip items later — and one horrid though amusing cartoon (by the guy who equated President Obama with a chimpanzee) portraying me as a 13-year-old girl in bed with an 80-year-old — I asked the question any normally insecure person would in such a situation: ‘Am I a sleaze?’

And, if so — since I was not involved with Alex Rodriguez (the baseball player and ex-squeeze of Madonna), nor a public official, billionaire or financial schemer — when had the public sleaze bar been so dramatically lowered?

The circumstances of my disgrace? I had a low-level job at Vanity Fair — so in scandal parlance I was an ‘intern’, although, actually, I was a freelance researcher on an hourly wage; my romance with Michael, a married man, was, in the telling, a torrid office affair (although in my short tenure he never came into the office, as he worked at home); and to boot, I’d had another beau before him, uncovered by the gossips, with a problematic marriage.