Sitrick - The fixer: secrets for saving your reputation in the age of viral media

Copyright 2018 by Michael Sitrick

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Originally published in hardcover 2018, ebook ISBN 978-1-62157-435-4

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This book, like the last, is dedicated to my best friend, life partner, and wife, Nancy, whose love, sacrifices, and support over all these years made it possible for me to accomplish what I have.

Contents

Table of Contents

A Note to the Reader

Its not unusual, when a client calls, for him or her to ask whether the conversation will be confidential. My response is always the same: Of course, confidentiality is critical in the business were in. You couldnt kiss and tell and stay in this business.

How then, one might ask, can I maintain confidentiality and write a book about the cases with which we have been involved? This is the same question I addressed in my first book, Spin. Much of what we do is public. In those instances where we discuss things that are not, we have masked the identity of the clients or had them review and approve what we have written.

Michael S. Sitrick

Dennis Kneale

February 2016

O n a startlingly bright Saturday morning, after a lovely, sunlit drive north out of Los Angeles and into the Pacific Palisades of southern California, past a guarded gate and a carefully plotted patchwork of large homes nestled among the craggy cliffs and canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, I arrive at the House that Mike Built.

Out front, a large glass sculpture obscures the view of the front door, almost as if guarding it. Inside, the place overflows with paintings and sculptures: originals by Peter Max, LeRoy Neiman, and Mark Kostabi and limited-edition prints by Picasso, Warhol, Chagall, Mir, and Norman Rockwell. Out back a dark infinity pool seems to spill endlessly past a serene pond, which gives way to a stunning vista of lush mountainside plunging down to the Pacific Ocean.

This is the home of Michael S. Sitrick of Sitrick And Company, which does a thriving business in the art of strategic communications, practicing PR as persuasion. He is the Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin (Gawker), The Flack for When Youre Under Attack (Forbes), and the prince of PR and the Wizard of Spin (fifteen years apart, in the Los Angeles Times). Most fitting of all, perhaps, he has been called the Winston Wolfe of Public Relations (Fortune), referring to the fixer played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. Though his firm provides communications services in a wide range of caseslaunching companies, bankruptcy reorganizations, corporate governance, hostile takeovers, regulatory fights, government investigations, reputation management, lawsuits, and high-profile divorcesMike Sitrick is known best for crisis advice, and he is legendary as the best in the business.

He has spent nearly three decades building Sitrick And Company (spelled with that upper-case A), which has evolved and thrived with the explosion of the Internet, TMZ, 24/7 celebrity journalism, and the rise of social media. In Mike Sitricks view, most companies in crisis deserve a fair trial in the court of public opinion, a shot at redemption, and a chance to make things right, though he has turned some clients down. He has been a spectral presence in some of the highest-profile stories and hottest controversies to ignite the media:

The scandal at Hewlett-Packard after its chairman was accused of spying on board members and reporters

The feud between Disneys then-CEO, Michael Eisner, and Roy Disney, board member and nephew of Walt Disney himself, culminating in Eisners stepping down as chairman and the early retirement of one of the most powerful CEOs in Hollywood a year later

The tumult at BlackBerry

Scandal in the Catholic Church

The mosque at Ground Zero

The restoration of the estate of Michael Jackson after his drug-overdose death

The exposure of the doping of Olympic athletes by the Russian government

The clients involved in these stories have authorized Mike Sitrick to talk about their cases or the facts have previously been made public. He cantand wontdiscuss cases that are pending or in which the details or his involvement have not become public.

The tougher the case, the more impossible the situation, the more likely Mike Sitrick is to take it on and try to pull off a miracle. Some people who know him attribute this to an urge to stick up for people who get picked ona soft spot he developed as a Jewish kid protecting his younger brother on the multiethnic streets of the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s.

Im honored to help Sitrick share the secrets of his craft in a book that is equal parts how-to and tell-allor tell-almost-all; this guy knows secrets he never will tell. We have known each other for more than fifteen years, having met when I was the managing editor of Forbes in New York and he visited me with a clients story to sell.

Sitrick published an earlier book on his approach in 1998eons ago in Internet time. He signed the copy he sent to me after we first met, way back then. I still have it and brought it with me on this visit to his home. On the first page, he wrote: Dennis, enjoyed our lunch. Hopefully, a couple of cases we work on together will be in my next book. Mike, 5/17/99. Which was kind of prophetic, it turns out.

Sitricks new effort is all the more important in this age of the Net and social media, when any misstep can blow up into a worldwide embarrassment on Facebook, when the Outrage Brigade on Twitter, armed with virtual torches and pitchforks, can destroy the career of any CEO, company, or celebrity.

I show up at Sitricks home at 9:30 a.m. expecting four hours of first-round interviewing. He ushers me in the front door, mutes the smartphone that is grafted to his ear, and says he has an emergency conference call coming up. He is almost six feet tall and trim, his lack of a potbelly impressive given my struggle with my own. His face bears stubble from a working vacation at his house in Hawaii, and the new goatee gives him a devilish glint.

I follow him into his home office, where paintings waiting to be hung rest on the floor and a cup of coffee waits, getting cold. Sitrick turns away from me and sits down to hover over a screen and keyboard, editing a statement drafted by the emergency clients general counsel and waiting for the call to commence.