The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

EVEN AFTER THE bikini photos, CBS 3 still thought it could save her.

Alycia Lane arrived at World Cafe Live on November 29th — five weeks before she would be officially “released from her contract” by the station — in the same kelly green blazer she’d been wearing an hour before, while she sat behind the anchor desk for the 6 p.m. broadcast of Eyewitness News. She now had on jeans and cute white sneakers, since this was a fund-raising event for Back on My Feet, the nonprofit running group for homeless people, and everyone was supposed to wear sneakers. Even Chris Booker was wearing sneakers. Booker — radio station Q102’s morning jock — was Alycia Lane’s new boyfriend, which was why he was leaning in so close to her at the bar, gently tucking a stray strand of her shiny dark hair behind her ear. Alycia Lane appeared to be happy. And sweet.

Station management had been encouraging Lane to make more appearances at feel-good events like this ever since May, when she had achieved national notoriety as a “witch,” a “home wrecker” and a “whore.” It all started, of course, when she sent those pesky e-mails of herself in a bikini to NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen and, by accident, his wife, which landed her in The Mother of All Gossip Columns — the New York Post’s Page Six — and temporarily transformed “Alycia Lane” into the second most popular search on AOL’s Hot Searches and the sixth most popular on Yahoo’s Buzz. Page Six had written about her before — an item had her posing “cozily” with Monaco’s Prince Albert. But in the wake of the bikini photos, the Post went on full Alycia alert — camping outside her Washington Square apartment last summer to snag shots of her and her then-new boyfriend, CBS network anchor Chris Wragge, and, in October, reporting that execs at CBS in New York, Lane’s own company, pressured Wragge to break up with her “because of her bad press.”

But CBS 3, whose newscast Lane had helped lift out of the ratings basement, wasn’t giving up on its $750,000-a-year investment, and thanks in part to events like the one at World Cafe Live, by the end of November, the damage control actually seemed to be working. The station’s 11 o’clock newscast, co-anchored by Lane and the very bronzed Larry Mendte, finished November sweeps just one shiny dark hair behind ratings-winner Action News.

So CBS 3 had a lot to celebrate at its afternoon holiday party on Sunday, December 16th. Until 4:07 p.m. That’s when a staffer manning the assignment desk saw the story by Daily News scoops Regina Medina and Dan Gross pop up on Phillygossip.com. The staffer ran to the party and pulled station president and general manager Michael Colleran aside. “Oh my God,” Colleran yelled when he saw the story. “Oh my God! This is bad!”

The headline: ALYCIA LANE ARRESTED IN NEW YORK FOR ALLEGEDLY ASSAULTING AN NYPD OFFICER.