This piece dropped at this incredibly specific, almost impossible-to-recreate moment in New York. Walk me back to how you even got inside it.

I graduated from Wesleyan with no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was an English major — I always had my nose in a book. Back then, you could just think, "I like to read, I like to write, maybe I'll have a job at a magazine." I got a job as an assistant at New York Magazine, mostly through Dany Levy, who started DailyCandy. I answered phones, did the classical music listings. I worked under Michael Hirschorn, who was Executive Editor then and later became the person who really transformed VH1 into the cultural product it became.

After two or three years, Ariel Levy — who's now a writer at The New Yorker — and I asked the magazine for a couple months off to go hiking in Nepal. They said yes, and when we came back, they said: what else can we give you? And they gave me the party beat. Going out with Patrick McMullan, who takes the photos, and writing snarky 200-word copy to go with them and identify the different people.

When you were from New York Magazine and going out with Patrick McMullan, you were in the party. Invitations were being messengered over all day — flowers, everything. Please come and cover this, please have Patrick take pictures, put us in the magazine. The kind of invitations that look like Bar Mitzvah invitations now. And I started realizing fairly quickly that the people inviting me to these parties were not only established figures like Peggy Siegal, but a lot of younger publicists who were very close to my age.

I idolized Tom Wolfe. Part of my job as an assistant was making Xeroxes of articles for writers — things like "Radical Chic" — and I would always read them. So I started formulating this idea: I want to be Tom Wolfe. Maer Roshan, who's now editor of The Hollywood Reporter, was a very close friend of mine, and he really encouraged me to write about what I was seeing. He was the editor of that piece. We came up with the idea to pull the curtain back on the people who were controlling so much of the nightlife we were covering.

I was not quite an outsider, not quite an insider — I'd been integrated into this world for maybe three to six months, the way a fashion editor gets integrated into fashion. But I was willing to write about it like an outsider. I think that's part of what made the piece so explosive.

How did you go about doing that? Were you gathering string the whole time, even while you were technically covering these events on behalf of the magazine?

I was doing the reporting the whole time I was working alongside Patrick. I would go to Lizzie [Grubman]'s office, for instance, and just observe. I remember being there once while they were working out the invite list for a party that night — Should we invite Trump? No, he'll hog all the press. He was just looked down upon at that time as another gross guy in the scene. I was just there, watching all of it, as part of my job.

Shoe leather and being in the mix was the main way I got information. Someone told me the story that opens the article at a Mercedes-Benz event out of the city. That's just how business was done.

Yeah, the Trump detail — "he'll hog all the press" — is genuinely eternal. The quotes in the entire piece are remarkably candid. Was that a product of the times?

Reporting was completely different back then, because nobody thought to themselves, this is going to last for posterity. Nobody thought, "You can Google me in 50 years and find this." People didn't think a quote would live under their name forever. You could make the argument that it's pretty hard to find anything about anybody before around 2012 on the internet.

And I think one of the reasons something like ‘Love Story’ — the JFK Jr. [series] — is catching on with a certain group of people is that that fantasy was real. That's what Tribeca looked like. That's the way people acted and dressed. Carolyn Bessette going out to a nightclub in a slip dress, smoking cigarettes, flipping her hair around and going home with a male underwear model and treating him poorly. People talked the way they talked because they didn't think it would follow them.

Did the lavishness of that world tempt you? The gifts, the access, the flowers?

I went to Dalton and was upper middle class. The daughter of an artist. My mom is a painter and my dad was a professor. I didn’t covet a lot of the things people had. I was brought up by parents who are very Upper West Side intellectual socialists. 

For me, it was more about the anthropological interest of being with the people that were a little like the popular crowd at Dalton that I never really got to hang out with. Experiencing what it was like to be on the inside and be a VIP at the party than it was getting flowers or a cashmere sweater. 

You were simultaneously covering the events these publicists were promoting and reporting on them critically. Did you feel that tension while reporting?

This piece really blew up my access. It was, in a lot of ways, a swan song for that beat. There were repercussions. But I didn't care — I was happy to move on and not cover nightlife forever.

What made it an exciting piece to publish was the editor-writer relationship. My allegiance was to Maer and to putting out something readers would want. Part of the breakdown in media today, I'd argue, is that bond isn't as strong as it once was. What makes people do experimental or radical work is feeling like an editor has your back. If you're just another disposable freelancer, would you publish this piece today? Probably not — you'd be too worried about compromising your access.

You said this basically blew up your access — what did that actually look like? And what did it do for you on the other side of it?

New York Magazine made it our mission to get as much buzz as possible, which at that moment meant Page Six and the New York Post. There was a flurry of coverage, and it became a thing — the thing — for about two months. Certain women in the story were upset, and things got messy.

For me personally, it changed my life. I was still essentially a glorified assistant doing listings and party captions. After this, every publication was calling me, and I was able to become a features writer off the success of it. Though I think a lot of people assumed every story I wrote would now be a blockbuster — and that's not how journalism works. You sometimes hit it out of the park, and sometimes you don't.

Since the piece came out, Lizzie Grubman went on to be involved in a very public scandal. When you saw that story, what was your reaction?

I moved on pretty quickly after the piece — to me, it was still just a story. And honestly, if you actually read what I wrote about Lizzie, it's pretty sympathetic. There's a detail in there about how she'd get out of the limo a few blocks from school because she didn't want other kids to see that she had more than they did.

I also can’t believe this, but something I’ll never forget is that she once invited me to a party and asked, "Do you want to talk to Madonna?" And I interviewed Madonna — about Lizzie Grubman — at a party, just like that. On the spot.

I didn't feel like, "Of course this was going to happen to her." I always had warm feelings toward Lizzie. Looking back now, I think: we were all really young. If I hurt any of these people, I feel bad for that. This wasn't Pentagon secrets. As a journalist, you never want to feel like you've affected the course of someone's life.

Do you still stand by the story even though some of the women were upset by it? And I ask that knowing "stand by" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

"Stand by" is a complicated term. Do I stand by it? Of course. Do I also see it as the work of a very young journalist? Yes. Both things can be true. Looking at it now, it's a weird combination — someone writing party captions, trying to do something novelistic, trying to do a Tom Wolfe nonfiction take, all at once. The fact that I'm just listing brand names throughout tells me I was too young to even know an article shouldn't include all of that. It's an odd artifact from my past.

I'm actually much more concerned about the historicization of my story on Britney Spears, which is the piece I'm known for. There are things I said in that story that I don't feel I should have said.

Do you think a story like this could even exist today?

You could never write this piece today, because there would be gatekeepers of the gatekeepers. Can you get access to spend three real days with someone like Alex Cooper and hear her talk in an unguarded way? I'm not sure. There are really important stories about influencers that should be written — that will be part of the cultural and historical record of this moment — and there aren't enough journalists to write them, and too many obstacles to getting that kind of access.

There are so many great stories that are still published where people are taking risks. But there’s something about [the New York Magazine Power Girls piece] that is specifically risky, given that it was about people that were supposed to be behind the curtain. Part of what you need in a rich journalistic ecosystem is people who are young enough to not just say, “Of course publicists behind the scenes are different people than what they seem.” 

There is a waving of hands that happens when you get older, that, quite frankly, I sometimes engage in where I’m like “Oh yeah, whatever, someone did that piece nine years ago.” And that jaundiced, cynical take on how the world works doesn’t actually create big moments. I've continued to be a generalist journalist, and I think my edge is similar to what made this piece work: a beginner's mind. I wasn't even allowed to watch TV when I was younger. I've interviewed so many celebrities knowing almost nothing about them going in, and I think that creates a more fertile ground. The best pieces blossom when they're not written by the so-called experts.

SCOOP: More on those Disney severance package numbers

Disclosure: I used to work at National Geographic, which is owned by Disney. 

Disney announced last week that it was cutting 1,000 jobs, and Business Insider got the exclusive on the severance packages those employees would receive.

I was texting with some friends about whether the packages, which varied depending on seniority and tenure, seemed generous enough. A manager with six years at the company got five weeks of pay, as one example. According to some of my sources there, employees who were let go also received two additional months of pay on top of their severance. Still, those payouts feel like pocket change in this fresh hell of a job market where long-term unemployment is rising. But maybe that's just my unpopular opinion! I’ve reached out to Disney with a request for comment. 

Speaking of unpopular opinions — you've got a chance to share your own in our new column, I Said What I Said. More on that below…

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