The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

As the August wedding approached, Lane and Adkins’s relationship started to unravel. “Promises he had made, he took back,” Nicole claims. She encouraged her sister to hold off on the ceremony. Lane thought plans were too far along, and she swore everything would work out.

But Adkins says that once they got married, she pushed him into a corner. They both wanted children, but all of a sudden, “She wanted kids immediately. I didn’t,” he says. “She said she wasn’t going to move unless she was pregnant. She said that over and over.” He came to believe she’d only married him so she could have kids.

Lane’s camp tells a different story. “From the outset of the relationship, Adkins was unfaithful and dishonorable,” says Rosen. “He cheated on her,” Nicole says. “She said, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why do these guys come after me, make me fall in love with them, and then break my heart?’”

“That is definitely not true,” Adkins says. “I loved Alycia with all my heart. Ending that relationship was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Lane’s broken heart didn’t stop her from screaming at her ex-husband-to-be on the phone from her office at the station. Her colleagues could hear the f-bomb tantrums even through her closed door. And Adkins wasn’t the only one she was yelling at. “When I was working on a story about her and Adkins separating, she sorta lost her shit and told me, ‘You’re cut off! You’re cut off!’ and then hung up on me,” says Dan Gross. “I’m sure the whole situation was upsetting, but I felt like she didn’t get that if I reported on the marriage, I had to report on the breakup as well.”





NOT UNDERSTANDING THE allure of her celebrity? That was understandable. Almost overnight, Lane had gone from being one of the crowd in Miami to being a veritable rock star in Philadelphia. But not understanding why a reporter would need to write the follow-up to a previously reported story? That didn’t make sense, not for someone who always said she was “a journalist first.” And she had been a journalist first. But since coming to Philly, Lane hadn’t been doing much journalism.

Her primary job wasn’t to hunt down stories, like she used to do. She wasn’t really expected to work sources or dig up leads. “When stuff hits the fan, you don’t want her without a teleprompter,” a newsroom staffer says. “[Larry] Mendte and [just-retired Marc] Howard? If the lights went off, they could keep reporting the news. Not her. And that’s okay. That’s what TV news is.”