NEW YORK — Stepping into the hypercompetitive arena of New York gossip, Jared Paul Stern wasn't afraid to spew a little poison.
As a writer for the New York Post, he described Melanie Griffith and Goldie Hawn as "cryogenic freeze jobs gone awry," called Elton John "too old, fat and short to look ironically hip in ugly sweatsuits," and once mused that "whenever you see a beautiful girl, it pays to remember that somewhere, someone is sick of her."
Stern, 35, became the story himself Friday after it was revealed the FBI videotaped him allegedly offering to protect Los Angeles investor Ron Burkle from damaging coverage in the Post's popular Page Six column. The reported price: payments that would amount to $220,000 over the span of a year. People familiar with the investigation said Stern made the offer at two meetings with Burkle, who had protested a series of Page Six items, one of which described him as a "party-boy billionaire."
Publicists on both coasts Friday were alternately aghast and delighted to see scandal touch the nation's most powerful newspaper gossip franchise. In an era when celebrity sightings are posted on the Web within minutes and paparazzi are accused of physically harassing stars, some say gossip columnists have pushed their symbiotic relationship with their subjects to the breaking point.
"There's a human incentive to test the limits of their own power," said one publicist for a major movie studio, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she deals with Page Six and other gossip writers. "They're not making a fortune, they're very powerful people in a big city, and it's possible that kind of goes to their head."
For 10 years, Stern has cut a noirish figure in gossip circles, affecting a fedora, pocket watch and a preference for rye whiskey. His writing is racy and caustic, evoking Walter Winchell, whose broadcasts beginning in the 1930s routinely wrecked careers and marriages.
Stern, a freelancer who worked two days a week as one of a handful of contributors to Page Six, was suspended Thursday afternoon after an assistant U.S. attorney told lawyers for the New York Post that they had tapes of Stern in an apparent extortion attempt.
The newspaper agreed to preserve Stern's computer hard drive and other possible evidence for investigators, said Howard Rubenstein, a Post spokesman. Rubenstein said Post editors were told the investigation is confined to Stern.
