The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

But that was no surprise. That was how she, and the station, had positioned her all along. A victim of Page Six. A victim of a celebrity-starved city. A victim, basically, of her own fame. They figured that if they could control her image, everything else would be okay; the celebrity itself was the beast that needed to be tamed. But there was another element in the equation that everyone seemed to ignore — one thing only Alycia Lane could be responsible for. Herself.

THE DAY BEFORE Alycia Lane’s life changed forever — May 1, 2007, when Page Six broke the bikini story — she sat in her office at CBS 3, mortified, holding closed-door meetings, trying to explain to her bosses what she knew was about to hit the press.

An editor from the Post had called Lane earlier in the day, asking about the photos she had e-mailed to Rich Eisen two weeks before. The Post had called Eisen, too. And then Eisen called Lane to say how sorry he was that their names were being dragged into a tabloid story. Two weeks before, Lane had gotten an irate e-mail from Eisen’s wife, Suzy Shuster, a college football reporter for ABC, while Lane was on vacation with her girlfriend Elizabeth Flores, staying at the trendy Mondrian in Los Angeles.

“Boy do you look amazing in a bikini … congrats!” Shuster had written. “Whatever you’re doing (Pilates? Yoga?) keep doing it — it’s working for you. Anyway, sorry but those seven e-mails you sent to my husband, Rich, well, oops, they came to the e-mail address we both use from time to time, but no worries, I’ll forward the beach shots as well as the ones of you dancing with your friends on to his main address … since you surely are trying hard to get his attention. I mean, what better way to get a guy’s attention than with skin!”

Lane and Eisen had met a decade earlier, when he was working for ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, and was buddies with one of Lane’s colleagues at her first TV job, at Channel 12 in the Bronx. Eisen occasionally joined the Bronx crew when they went out after work. He and Lane had been in and out of touch ever since, last seeing each other when she flew to Jacksonville to cover the Super Bowl in 2005. Lane thought Eisen knew one of her friends. Eisen couldn’t place her, so while they chatted on the phone the night before her California trip, Lane e-mailed him some photos she had of her with her friend — shots of them at a club in Las Vegas and on vacation in South Beach. She told him she felt kind of weird sending some of them — Lane was wearing a bikini, after all. But Eisen assured her it was no big deal: “You’re like a sister to me.”

When Lane showed her friend Elizabeth Flores the e-mail from Shuster, Flores did think it was a big deal. If someone sent photos like that to her husband, she would flip. “I would have responded like anyone would,” Flores says. “You’d be like, ‘Um. Okay. Your friend is in a bikini? Why?’” But Shuster went a step further, dashing off the snarky response that every woman has, at one time or another, fantasized about sending to an “other woman” of her own.