Shock and Awe and Hanna Lee
On going to war with a spirits publicist.
I was triggered by my Spotify Wrapped. It wasn’t Spotify accusing me of being a Pink Power Pop Princess last April, fair play, it was the reminder I listened to 469 minutes of music on the night of April 25th. Where did I find the time? I was on a slow train to Kyiv. Russia had threatened to fire on the city that night, but my phone was the only thing blowing up. Hanna Lee wouldn’t stop texting me and my give-a-fucks were on vacation.
One night last January, the longtime hospitality publicist who appears to rep everyone and everything from Andrew Carmellini and William H. Macy to the Dead Rabbit and Edition Hotels, invited me to the media preview for a new downtown bar a few blocks from my apartment. The upstairs was already packed by the time I arrived, so I suffered small talk with Hanna’s partner, before I slipped downstairs where one of the bar’s owners held court over an empty room. I claimed a seat, scanned the menu, and made my pick. The barman shared the story behind his signature recipe and after one sip I was sold. By the time I had finished, the bar filled up around me. Hanna asked me to give up my seat so I hit the road.
I made my way over to my friend Tim’s movie screening up the block, but I couldn’t get the bartender’s story out of my head. The next day, I sold a trend piece to a drinks publication, my pitch anchored by the cocktail and its backstory. If you’re a publicist, even one with mixed feelings about my work, you might take the win. One, I’m telling you up front I confirmed coverage and it only cost you one drink. Two, it’s an industry trade, so an interview with your client isn’t going to turn into a federal investigation. However, when I told Hanna the good news she wasn’t having it.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but some of you do: Writing a thorough story, doesn’t mean it’s a negative story, and answering my questions, even if I might not like the answer, is doing your job. Ignoring my questions or lying to a journalist, is a mistake. If you can’t take yes for an answer, or say no with finesse, what good are you?
Case in point:
Two and a half years ago, Hanna invited me to lunch in midtown to interview the team behind Empirical, the Noma distillery responsible for clarifying Doritos. As I entered, she stood up and set down her partner like a sentient handbag. For more than an hour we sat there politely waiting out our babysitter so we could have an intelligent conversation in his absence. Finally, I told the Empirical team that I was bound for Monte Carlo, and they volunteered how Prince Albert II, Monaco’s head of state, was a fan of their brand. I soon discovered Prince Albert was the honorary president of the Monaco Whisky Society, now the Monaco Whisky & Spirits Club, and the guys shared how Empirical recently participated in a society event at Le Beauvallon, a private estate in nearby Grimaud, in the south of France. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was following my time in Monaco with a weekend in nearby Port Grimaud where I was interviewing a megalomaniacal Bond villain intent on ruining Yellowstone creator David Glasser by any means necessary, so it would be no trouble to pop by Le Beauvallon as well.
Do you know what soft power is? Soft power is when you achieve your goals with influence rather than force. NFL games in London and Munich, Saudis buying the PGA, China lending pandas to foreign zoos, those are examples of soft power, just like a bar hiring a publicist and hosting a bunch of spirits writers for drinks.
The Monaco Whisky Society is an example of soft power too; the society describes itself as “the first collaborative venture in the Principality of Monaco to promote Scottish heritage and culture.” It’s an act of diplomacy, finding common ground with another nation, promoting trade with Scotland, and it’s an excuse to drink and party.
The Monaco tourism board, and the team at SBM, the holding company for Monaco’s luxury hotels and casino, were all so excited by the prospect of a story connecting their properties to a cultural agenda endorsed by the Prince. After all, how many original destination stories about Monaco do you read in a year that focus on the country’s present and not its past? About the Prince as anything more than a link to the golden age of his parents’ generation? Now you have a foreign leader enthusiastic about a new Danish spirit brand that’s paying homage to Scotland’s whisky heritage. And it’s an organic fit. I’m not inventing an excuse to write about Empirical, not jamming it in somewhere it doesn’t belong; it’s a destination story that benefits from the brand’s inclusion: The reader may be pleasantly surprised to find a taste of Scotland in Monaco, the same way Prince Albert discovered the taste of Empirical’s spirits at his event.
Hanna Lee killed the story. After lunch and placing the story, I asked for a followup interview with the Empirical team to flesh out the piece, and she shut it down. “We just heard back from our client, Mark, who spoke with the Prince’s office and they have specifically asked that this story be kept confidential and not made public. We hope you can honor this request as otherwise it will put Empirical in a bad position.”
There are some lessons here if you’re a publicist and reading this. Don’t put the above in writing. I could have taken her response to the Daily Mail and before you know it there’s a story about the Prince threatening the team behind the world’s best restaurant in an effort to cover up his drinking, while his wife, Princess Charlene, remained out of sight with a mystery illness. Don’t kill a friendly story and replace it with an open-ended narrative you can’t control. Lucky for everyone, I’m not that kind of reporter. I am thorough though.
And I was bothered. Because of course I was already in contact with Nicolas Saussier, the Prince’s press chief inside the palace, and he could not have been more cooperative, even providing me with the personal details of the whisky society’s founders so I could interview them. SBM, the Prince’s holding company, which connected me with the palace, would never have done so, never would have advocated for my story within its ranks, if the Prince opposed it. But Hanna insisted otherwise and after I reassured her the palace fully supported my story, which was going into a client-friendly spirits trade publication, she pivoted. Hanna explained the Empirical team was now on the road, too busy to participate in interviews any time soon. So I followed up with her for the next four months before she finally confirmed Empirical was passing on the opportunity.
To this day, I can only assume something truly appalling must have happened that night at Le Beauvallon. Was the Monaco Whisky Society simply a front for secret Empirical-fueled orgies? Maybe? Did Prince Albert drive Empirical to bankruptcy in Copenhagen because they said too much? Probably? I don’t know. I just know you’re not a good publicist if you take a positive story in a trade publication eager to publish a fresh take on whisky culture and Empirical’s latest innovation, and instead burn me with that outlet while leaving me guessing whether your client was witness to sex crimes instigated by their own product. I will now and forever associate Empirical with the plot of Eyes Wide Shut.
Back to last January.
I sold a positive story about some delicious drink at a hot new downtown bar that Hanna was using her soft power to put on the map. Good for her, good for them.
However, she was in no rush to let me sit down with the bar’s owners. She insisted I email her my questions in writing. It’s something I never do, a request that personally offends me, but I liked her client enough, I already placed the story, this was literally a trend piece, so, sure, why not? But for the next month they refused to answer any of my questions. I followed up often, I explained the bar was in my neighborhood and I could pop in again, any day, any time, that I also wanted to take photos, but that was a non-starter. This was especially frustrating because I personally liked the bar, I’d be a regular there, except for the fact they did not want me anywhere near them. Was I going to pop in one night for drinks only to find the bartenders refused to speak to me? Why would I want to go back? This back and forth, with Hanna as a conduit, went on for more than a month before I made one final effort. I sent Hanna a fact check request, really a back door to an interview. Maybe they won’t speak to me, but they had to confirm or deny the bartender’s anecdote. Turns out they could do less.
My story was finally published last April. My editor was happy. I was paid well and in a timely fashion, thank you. Life goes on.
I can’t say exactly what I was playing during my Pink Power Pop Princess phase last April. Chappell Roan? Olivia Rodrigo? Beyonce? But De La Soul’s “Say No Go” made my top ten for the year. Shortly after my story was published, and before I returned to Ukraine at the end of the month, I attended a sneak preview of Civil War at the AMC Times Square. I loved it, I felt like I was watching a spiritual sequel to Twister, a wacky gang of thrill-seeking do-gooders risking it all on a great American road trip.
It was at that same time Hanna began hitting me up to take action answering her emails. She wanted changes made to my story. That drink I savored back in January, that I just wrote and published an article about, she told me I got it all wrong. I didn’t drink what I thought I did. That it was all some big misunderstanding, that my story was embarrassing to her client, I needed to remove the owner’s anecdote right away. Also, the owner? He wasn’t really the owner, just a sometimes consultant. Never mind every story everywhere about the bar read otherwise.
I checked Eater, The Infatuation, The New York Times. Had everyone else retracted and corrected their coverage about the bar’s owner that morning? No? No.
Once I made those changes, Hanna explained, the non-owner would be excited to host me at his bar, a statement I found perplexing. Why would someone who misrepresented his role, who made up the concepts behind his drinks, who put me in this awkward position to retract and correct my coverage, suddenly want to host me?
The last thing I want to do is publish anything factually inaccurate. That damages my reputation, livelihood, the credibility of my publication, and hurts journalism at large. So I sought some clarity from her. How did something I drank never exist? Why did the bar owner lie to me the night he told me the story behind it? On the record? Why did he misrepresent himself? She backtracked. The drink may have existed that night, but they’ve since taken it off the menu. Okay, I thought. I could wrap my head around that. Maybe it had, their menu wasn’t online and I had never been welcomed back. I emailed my editor. She was understanding. We changed the copy to note this drink in its original form was no longer served there. I let Hanna know the copy had been updated. She thanked me. I thought finally we could move on.
After a few days, I received an urgent update. The changes weren’t enough. She wanted to speak on the phone. I declined. I explained I’d moved on. A longtime publicist should know as a freelancer my work was long since completed. She must have crossed paths with my editor in her career and could reach out to her directly. But Hanna wanted me to do more. I told her as politely as possible I had no more time for this nonsense, that I was bound for Ukraine in a few days, to Kyiv, to cover the first bar show since the war began. I had wrapped up all my work stateside and I hoped I wouldn’t be disturbed while I was there. For six weeks, her client had my complete attention and squandered it. For my safety and peace of mind, I wanted to be completely present once I crossed the border.
One reason I’m not scared when I’m in Ukraine is because I’m focused. I don’t want praise for the work I’m doing there, I want to be left alone to do my work. Instead I entered a new phase of harassment wrapped in platitudes, texts about how great it was that I’m highlighting “our industry” over there, but how I still need to go back to my editors and pull her client’s story.
I crossed the border from Krakow to Lviv, where I spent the night, and woke up the next morning to finish this story for New York magazine. I boarded a train bound for the Kyiv Holiday Inn after lunch which, according to Spotify, took about 469 minutes. But I wasn’t only listening to You’re friendin’ me up so we could connect / And what are the odds? You send me a text, I was haunted by it. Hanna Lee, who already got everything she initially asked for, who I kindly asked to leave me alone, who viewed my Instagram stories that showed me traveling across Ukraine in real time, thought this was the right time to waste more of my time.
A few weeks prior I still wasn’t sure when I would return to Ukraine. This trip was a last minute decision after learning about the Kyiv bar show, which I determined was worth the risk of an impending missile attack. If all the country’s best bartenders were willing to reunite in Kyiv–the show, sponsored by Diageo, was literally called Spilnota, which means Unity–and if a few foreign bartenders–two Ukrainian women, one who landed at A Bar With Shapes For A Name in London, the other at Le Syndicat in Paris–were willing to make the journey, then so could I. As Tom Sizemore says in Heat…
About twenty years ago, I watched an HBO movie called Live from Baghdad, about how CNN covered the 1991 Gulf War. You can watch the whole movie on YouTube, but there’s one scene in particular where a reporter is hiding while the Iraqi army sweeps his hotel, and as he’s about to be discovered, he draws open the curtains surprising them while a massive aerial attack plays out behind him.
I have seen this movie a hundred times. If there’s one scene that’s been on my vision board for all my life it’s this clip. Now here I was, chugging to Kyiv ahead of curfew, before an all-nighter on a high floor at the Holiday Inn, eager to live my best life and watch this Russian air strike from my window, and I can’t just enjoy war in peace? I have to tolerate four hours of Hanna Lee texting me? She told me she was in contact with the owners of the bar that very afternoon; I could only assume she told them where I was and what I was doing and they absolutely did not give a shit.
Her client wanted their co-owner-non-owner’s entire on the record anecdote removed from an outlet where I am not an employee, and they wanted it done now. On a Friday night train to Kyiv, Hanna became that me espresso.
Just as I have now come to believe Jeffrey Epstein’s private island was also stocked with Empirical, I began to wonder whether the owners of this hip downtown bar were holding Hanna Lee hostage in their basement with a gun in her mouth. There was no plausible scenario where she was voluntarily making demands of me in a war zone. Her clients were surely madmen beyond reason. She was done for.
Or not. A few hours later she texted me to say she resolved the issue without me. She called the publisher, a close personal friend of hers, she told me, and she explained to him my error, asked him to re-edit my story as a personal favor to her. And he readily agreed. Done! To think she could have done this with ease a month earlier, left me alone forever. I never would have revisited my old story. I never would have known. She also didn’t have to tell me now, but she chose to rub it in my face.
It was over, for real this time. I didn’t love that I was sold out by my publisher despite having been transparent with my editors in real time. Who were these horrible clients, really, who forced Hanna into this no-win situation? Did I want to know? No. Instead, I did my best to put the situation out of mind and enjoy the bar show. Until I met the owner of Fakultat, the best cocktail bar in Odesa.
Most of his team had quit and moved away from Odesa during the war, and he had long discouraged friends from visiting his bar owing to the constant threat of drone strikes in the region. After sharing his story with me, he had so many questions about the bar scene in New York, in particular the program at Double Chicken Please.
Now, I’ve been to Double Chicken Please, I like Double Chicken Please, but I also recalled that Double Chicken Please was one of Hanna’s clients, and this man, in this circumstance, asking about them while I was doing my best to put Hanna out of mind, it wasn’t great. For the briefest moment, I tried to explain he shouldn’t want anything to do with a bar like that, that any business associated with her was bad news. I must have sounded ridiculous trying to explain the sick absurdity of the New York bar scene to this man who is happy his bar is still open, happy to be alive. He wasn’t blown up by a drone on the road out of Odesa, or struck by a missile when he arrived in town the previous night. He wanted to live in the moment, to visit New York on the other side of the war. So I regrouped, let it go, fed off of his positive energy. I praised Double Chicken Please’s twin concepts and batched cocktails. And I went on to have one of the more fun nights of my life partying in basements and behind unmarked doors across Kyiv until curfew.
Sunday morning and I was neither dead nor gratified. I chased down the personal email addresses of the downtown bar owners, hit up my favorite breakfast spot, and over two iced lattes I wrote the guys a wide-ranging 12-page email about respect before making my way back to the show. If I ever write your client the first chapter of a novel where they are the antagonist, wired on caffeine, on a Sunday morning, God help you come Monday morning.
Imagine their surprise when they had no idea what I was talking about. They claimed they had no idea I had spent weeks trying to interview them. They were disappointed I had stopped coming to their bar. They would have participated in every step of the story if they had any idea what I was writing. They would have clarified any misunderstanding on Day 1. They said they can’t sleep and I said baby I know. They invited me to meet with them and I accepted their apology. That’s why I’m not naming them here. Their only sin was trusting the wrong publicist. A publicist who, to this day, has never bothered to apologize to me.
I had promised the bar owners I would keep this story to myself, but that proved too much for me. A few weeks ago, my Spotify Wrapped set me off. I shared a truncated version of this post in my Instagram Stories. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say and I realized afterward I didn’t actually owe it to anyone, not to the owners, not Hanna nor her handbag, to stay silent if this still weighed on me so heavily. And if it wasn’t the Spotify Wrapped that set me off, my Holiday Inn being struck in a missile attack the week before Christmas would have prompted this same response.
I don’t speak up often because I fear I’m losing work opportunities versus gaining them by rocking the boat like this, but what good am I really if I’m unfazed by a missile strike but intimidated by a publicist?