Wolff to Hit Back at 'NY Post' in 'Vanity Fair'

Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff has always seemed to enjoy inflicting pain with his pen. But in the past few weeks Wolff has found himself in the unfamiliar role of target for the poison darts of other scribes. Now he's striking back.

On Feb. 26, the society-gossip site Cityfile published an item claiming that Wolff, who is married with children, had been involved in a "lengthy affair" with a 28-year-old writer and fact-checker named Victoria Floethe, who had worked in junior positions at both Vanity Fair and Newser.com, the news-aggregation site that Wolff founded in 2007.

Wolff denied it, but that didn't stop the New York Post from picking up the story and running with it -- hard. The Post's gossip column, Page Six, ran several items about the relationship and another about Wolff's struggle with his elderly mother-in-law over an apartment. Editorial cartoonist Sean Delonas mocked Wolff in a drawing -- an honor usually reserved for the likes of Al Sharpton and Rosie O'Donnell. Eventually, the Post reported, earlier this week, that Wolff and his wife were divorcing.

With all his dirty laundry now aired, Wolff is going on the offensive, writing an upcoming Vanity Fair column recounting the experience of seeing his life become gossip fodder and examining the motivations behind the Post's ferocity. Wolff, according to sources he's spoken to about the piece, believes the paper's campaign against him is at least partly payback for The Man Who Owns the News, his recent biography of Post owner Rupert Murdoch. Though his portrait of Murdoch was on the whole admiring, Wolff's aggressive marketing of the book's least-flattering drew a prickly response from the mogul.

But some believe the real grudge is not Murdoch's but Post editor Col Allan's. Allan made no secret of his dislike for Wolff even before the latter wrote a blog post predicting Murdoch would fire Allan for publishing a cartoon that was widely read as a racist swipe at Barack Obama.

I emailed the Post to ask Allan whether he was the prime mover behind the paper's Wolff coverage, but haven't heard back yet. (Update: A Post spokesman says, ""There is no campaign against Mr. Wolff. Page Six is interested in gossip about all sorts of bold face names, big and small.") Wolff, meanwhile, confirms he's working on a column about the saga, but will only say, "Still in the middle of writing, so never know where it will end up until it's done."

As for Floethe, she offered her own take on the situation in the Spectator today.

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By the way, Vanity and Portfolio are both owned by Condé Nast Publications.