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.