Tony's Diary Package — page 1090

serving jury duty the day he was supposed to have committed the assault) and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (the press conference for which took place on Burkman's stoop, and whose supposed victim was a 24-year-old Marine).* Being on the receiving end of an allegation of sexual misconduct is now a rite of political passage--a perverse sign you've made it. Fauci's star rose in March as he appeared at COVID-19 briefings day after day, outshining President Donald Trump and occasionally knocking the president's pronouncements out of the headlines. Here, then, was an opportunity for Wohl and Burkman to take down the newest of Trump's perceived enemies, to maybe become favorites in Trump's actual orbit. On the chance it would cause their own star to rise, they would move Fauci toward irrelevancy, if not infamy. The rollout of their latest smear job was a fiasco, a series of "media alerts" announcing press conferences with no start times, never mind that neither the public relations contact nor the company she worked for appeared to exist, and a "statement" from Rodriguez so breathless it seemed intended to steam up the windows. (Not for nothing, Sally Quinn recently confessed she based a thinly veiled D.C. heartthrob in her 1991 bestseller Happy Endings on Fauci, so Wohl and Burkman aren't the first to write this particular fan fiction.) "He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair. He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs," Rodriguez wrote of her fictional meeting with Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. After detailing some ineffective hotel bed wrestling and managing to flee with her honor intact, Rodriguez closed with the statement, "Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story." It was all in a league of its own weirdness, a collision of Harlequin romance and #MeToo. Nevertheless, several journalists called into a conference call to hear Rodriguez's story. We were treated, instead, to Wohl and Burkman on the line, stating they'd on the fly been invited to represent Rodriguez, who haltingly told a story that varied significantly from the media alert and, when questioned for clarification, was talked over by Wohl.