Stern, soft-spoken and reticent in person, delivers his toughest blows in print. His weekend shift on the Gawker blog produced thousands of words on the case.
"Baste the billionaire in oil and turn the stove to gas mark 6," he wrote in one posting. "The greasy grocer is in full panic mode and he's running out of clean pants."
Sometime before lunch, he posted a photograph of Estella Warren, an actress who had told a reporter for the New York Times that Burkle "is a good guy and he is not being portrayed as the guy he really is." In the photograph, she is topless, her breasts covered only with strands of hair.
"We were amused to see this comment," he wrote. "[She] seems to have forgotten that I put her on the map via Page Six back when Paolo Zampolli first brought her over from a pig farm in Peterborough, Ontario."
The poison pen is a habit that goes back a long time, said Peter Stewart, a friend of Stern's from Bennington College. Stewart said Stern ran with a moneyed crowd that was "looked on with malevolence" by other students. But he had a sideline: a gossip column, "In the Loop," that made him a recognizable, and feared, campus personality.
"That was the funny thing. People who would at least mimic disdain for Jared's cronies, you would definitely see them leafing through this thing feverishly," said Stewart, 34, who lives in Richmond, N.Y. "It's no surprise that he is where he is right now, just in terms of this strange notoriety."
