Courtesy of Wireimage.
Lizzie Grubman ? celebrity publicist and event planner ? was a New York legend. The daughter of high-power entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, who repped Madonna, Elton John, and Bruce Springsteen, she was practically bred into the city?s notorious glitterati.
Grubman was never a model student and dropped out of Northeastern University after only a semester. In 1996, she started her namesake PR firm from her own home and two years later was featured on the cover of New York Magazine which named her the ?reigning queen of New York nightlife.? (Susanne Bartsch who?)
In the story, writer Vanessa Grigoriadis describes a typical night out in Lizzie Grubman?s New York:
?One balmy evening in late September, a few days after SoHo?s newest hot spot, the Mercer Kitchen, opened its doors to the public, Lizzie Grubman threw a party there to launch America Online?s new 4.0 software. AOL?s Steve Case and Bob Pittman gave her the names of five guests they wanted to invite; she supplied the other 1,000 from her database of 10,000 VIPs, color-coded under categories like Model, Celebrity, Fashion, Junior, Older Social, Editor-in-Chief, and Clubbers. ?Honey, this is a Lizzie party,? she said proudly. ?This is my crowd.?
During her reign as the party planner to the stars, she represented the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Jay-Z. She even credits herself with introducing hip-hop to white middle-class America.
?No one believed in hip-hop but me. Everyone was like, ?Lizzie, are you sure you?re going to be able to get this in the mainstream?? she told New York Magazine in 2005. ?But I would beat those reporters down, and look at it now. There?s nothing bigger. Everyone looks at me now and says, ?You were so right.??
Even Madonna sang her praises: ?I don?t know much about Lizzie?s biz, but she?s had balls ever since she was a little kid. And if she?s anything like her dad, she?s a fucking bulldog.?
But all that changed in 2001. A little after midnight on July 7, Grubman arrived at Conscience Point Inn, a then-popular nightclub in the Hamptons. Once inside, she got into a drunken argument with an ex-boyfriend (who hasn?t?) and stormed out.
She then got into an altercation with a bouncer who insisted she move her father?s Mercedes SUV from a fire lane. ?Fuck you, white trash,? she responded (yikes!) before slamming her car into reverse and CRASHING into a crowd of people waiting in line for the club. Sixteen were injured but miraculously no one was seriously harmed. Nevertheless, the life of the party had become the ultimate party crasher.
The accident and subsequent trial dominated tabloids that summer. Gossip columnist George Rush famously referred to the accident as ?a larger parable about class conflict.? Grubman eventually reached a plea bargain, publicly apologized to all those who were injured, and served 38 days in jail.
Four years later, in 2005, she was able to translate her celebrity (or infamy) into an MTV reality series, PoweR Girls. It lasted one season because nobody watched it. She still manages her namesake PR firm today but has delegated herself to stay behind-the-scenes.
?I think I?ve matured, I think I?ve grown up,? she told The New York Times in 2016. ?Living a private, nonpublic life is a much happier life.?
