Floethe hits back over Wolff scandal

When Victoria Floethe, an attractive 28-year-old journalist from Atlanta, was caught having what she describes as "a torrid office affair" with 55-year-old Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff, it spelled the end of Wolff's marriage to Alison Anthoine and made Floethe the talk of New York.

A few weeks ago, after Floethe was woken up by a telephone call from a minor gossip website, the news quickly spread to Gawker, the major gossip website. But Wolff had just written The Man Who Owns the News, an uncomplimentary – and ultimately unsuccessful – biography of Rupert Murdoch. As a result, the tycoon's two New York newspapers – the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post - did not hold back from covering the story.

"In an act of obviously gleeful revenge towards Michael", Floethe writes in this week's Spectator, the WSJ was able to "make me the harlot in the middle of a banner headline scandal." While at the Post a cartoon depicted the pair in bed together – him hideous and elderly, her fawning and barely pubescent – with the speech bubble: "Oh Mr Wolff, your books are so moral and ethical. I hope your wife appreciates them."

"Much to my surprise", Floethe writes, "a rather ordinarily complicated New York romantic life turned out to be newsworthy. I was a 'femme fatale'; I was sleeping my way to the top (Michael is one of the founders of Newser.com, a web aggregator, which paid me $12 an hour to do some writing); I was, well ...a girl who had sex." The story soon made it back to Atlanta, and Floethe's father told her she had besmirched the family name.
 
"I started to feel something like a surge of gossip rapture," Floethe recalls. "It turns out to be easy to believe what’s been written about you. I had gone astray. My morals were loose. I was that girl in New York caught with a married man, that foolish blonde in front of the popping flash bulbs. A Weegee grotesque. I was suddenly seeing myself as the gossips professed to see me, deeply chastened."
 
Floethe feels that New York has changed. "There's a new scourge-like atmosphere. Possibly it's the long descent into recession that has created a new culture of opprobrium - nobody these days should be having much fun… Hence my undisciplined romantic life can be discussed pretty much in the same breath as Bernie Madoff - at least in adjacent newspaper pages." ·