The New York Press

An American Tragedy by Andrey Slivka

If you work in the media, or at least pay attention to the New York City tabloids, you’ll have come across the name of celebrity super-publicist Lizzie Grubman, and you’ll probably be aware of the crime for which she was arrested yesterday: slamming her 2001 Mercedes SUV, in reverse, into a bunch of patrons standing outside a chic Hamptons nightclub early on Saturday morning, injuring 16 of them. Police claim that Grubman—who, as the daughter of entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, represents a species of celebrity-culture royalty—bickered with the club’s bouncers shortly before climbing into her vehicle and gunning it backwards into a bunch of human beings and the wall of the club. She subsequently climbed into another car with two friends and drove away from the scene, making it a hit-and-run. The 30-year-old publicist’s been nailed with nine felony charges, which could land her 151 years in prison if she’s convicted.

There’s something spectacularly appropriate about this alleged crime: about the sense of entitlement that would possess someone who’d stand around yelling at a couple of bouncers; about the extravagant weapon—the Mercedes SUV—with which Grubman supposedly injured her victims; about the fact that Grubman turns out to be the publicist for the club in question, and to have dated one of its owners, which testifies to a morally unimaginative social exclusivity, to a world of privileged people constantly breathing the same recycled air, accepting the same values, rolling in the same slop. It’s the crime a novelist would have invented for his starved-skinny blonde publicist character to perpetrate. A bouncer’s being insufficiently groveling? Screw it—watch me climb into my million-dollar car and destroy the world. Don’t you know who I am? Excuse me—do you, like, know who I am?

This luminous detail comes from today’s New York Post article about the Grubman incident: “Among the injured was Sarah Thorne, the group associate publisher of Jason Binn’s Hamptons magazine. As she was being loaded into an ambulance, witnesses said she asked a friend to take off her expensive Jimmy Choo shoes so medics wouldn’t ruin them.”

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), July 09, 2001

Answers

The New York Press, July 9, 2001

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), July 09, 2001.