She’s talking about trust again, and how difficult it is to believe in someone. Jessica Cutler has a problem with confiding in others, she says, now that her salacious sexual past has been leaked for worldly consumption.

‘I definitely think twice about trusting someone when I meet them,’ Cutler says. ‘I really did have to learn the hard way.’

She’s been burned in the past by friends, agents and lovers, she says. By journalists, classmates and mentors, who bottled Cutler’s casual attitude and used it against her.

This whole trusting others thing, it’s going to stop.

Then she giggles.

‘Am I talking really fast?’ she asks a reporter whom she barely even knows. ‘A couple of days ago we did E. We did, like, three hits in one night. I’m still speedy.’

 

* * *

Cutler, 27, will have a problem keeping her vow.

Her candidness makes her a delicious character, a natural villain and an infectious heroine at the same time. It’s why the former Syracuse University student and her salacious Web log caused a media firestorm in May of 2004.

It’s why she signed a six-figure book deal later that year and posed for a Playboy.com photo spread. It’s why she’s being sued for invasion of privacy by a former lover. It’s why HBO optioned the rights to her story, and why the network hired Sarah Jessica Parker to produce it.

And it’s why she’s willing to talk about her life, devoting hours and hours of her time to reporters and gossip columnists, all trying to find out who she really is, and why her 15 minutes have yet to expire.

A former photo editor for The Daily Orange in 2000, Cutler lives in Manhattan, perhaps the only city suitable for her lifestyle. She’s short and petite, pretty with high cheekbones and a seductive smile. She’s a knockout by Washington, D.C. standards, but she admits she’s one of many pretty girls in New York City.

She just published her first novel, ‘The Washingtonienne,’ inspired by her blog of the same name, which details her racy sex life as a Capitol Hill intern.

The book follows the social flight of Jacqueline Turner, a lowly intern for a senator. She juggles six boyfriends, describing sex acts as casually as one would a bank transaction.

The book reflects her cavalier attitude, her sexual nonchalance. Only someone so sexually liberated, someone such as Cutler, could refer to anal sex – as she does on page 101 – as slipping out of ‘Door Number One and into Door Number Two.’

Her agents market the novel as fiction.

Sadly – or splendidly, depending on your social tolerance – most of it is true.

 

* * *

Cutler hopes her readership trusts her enough to buy the novel, and that her candidness justifies the $23.95 cover price. But really, sales would just be a bonus. She’s proud of her work. Proud that, after suffering a bout of writer’s block, she cranked out 291 pages in two months.

‘It’s not Moby Dick,’ she told herself for motivation. ‘It’s a book people will read and laugh and think is crazy. Just write the fucking thing.’

So she did. And she was paid handsomely. (A reported $300,000, though Cutler says it is less.)

Soon after the book came out, one of Cutler’s three U.S. agents landed her an interview on ‘Good Morning America’ to promote her novel.

She laughed and giggled and did what she did best: She spoke her mind. Her flippancy, symptomatic of her Attention Deficit Disorder, annoyed the producers. This was ‘Good Morning America,’ they said, and its housewife audience doesn’t enjoy watching some tramp chortle about stealing a woman’s husband.

‘I wish they had just told me,’ Cutler says. ‘If they wanted me to say something feminist or remorseful, I would have just lied and done it.’

She spends her days in her Manhattan apartment, living off the residuals from her book deal. She freelances occasionally and writes a regular column for Capital File magazine. As she did as a D.C. intern, Cutler juggles multiple boyfriends, mostly older men who dote on her, pay her rent and buy her purses and jeans.

As of mid-January, Cutler had ‘a couple’ boyfriends, though four or five might be a more accurate guess. Of course, that number changes like the tide. Most of Cutler’s relationships are casual trysts. Nothing serious. No commitment.

If a paramour doesn’t live up to her standards and expectations, she’ll cut him.

‘(In January) I said something about, ‘Oh, I have to pay the rent,’ you know, just to see what he would say,’ Cutler says of one of her boyfriends. ‘He asked to take me clothes shopping. Why would he pay for clothes if I need to pay rent? How would new clothes put a roof over my head unless I plan to build a tent?

‘I probably won’t be dating him anymore.’

Because of her occupation, it’s unreasonable for Cutler to hold down a steady boyfriend. Each man, each with his own work schedule, fills a void, or rather, a time slot in Cutler’s busy life.

‘I have to take the role of boyfriend and really split it up or else I’ll be alone most of the time,’ says Cutler, who is dating, among others, a screenwriter.

It’s no coincidence that most of her boyfriends are in their 30s and have well-established jobs. She attracts older men with money, many of whom are married. She has no regrets.

‘If you’re dating a married dude, you don’t want them for yourself,’ Cutler says. ‘No one wants to be with a cheater. For now, those kind of relationships work for me. I’m not trying to get married myself, and he’s not looking for a wife because he already has one.’

She doesn’t consider herself a prostitute, but she will take their ‘gifts’ if they offer. Cutler calls it ‘conscience money,’ which they give her because they feel guilty. Sometimes she’ll use it to pay the rent. Other times, the capital is used for shopping sprees. She sometimes feels guilty about spending their money, she says. But Cutler has always been one to conquer her guilt.

She doesn’t want to come off greedy. Her image is very important to her.

During a recent excursion, a boyfriend took her to a high-end Manhattan boutique. Her only desire was a purse listed at $1,200. Embarrassed, Cutler told the gentleman she didn’t see anything she liked, so the couple went to a fashionable clothing store, which featured expensive dresses.

Not wanting to seem too greedy, Cutler settled for a pair of jeans.

They cost $300.

 

* * *

Cutler’s not going to like this part, the one that explains why she does what she does. She’s not big into the reasons behind actions. She lives for the moment and does what feels best. Right now, she has no plans to find another job until she finishes the proposal for her second book. Plus, a new career might be a fruitless endeavor: ‘I tend to get fired a lot,’ Cutler says.

But there just might be a method to all of this madness, which lies in Syracuse and is rooted in her upbringing.

Cutler was born in Syracuse in 1978 to a Korean mother and an American father. There were rules, of course. Mom was the disciplinarian – the bad cop to her father’s sweet image.

When Cutler was born left-handed, her mother forced her to use her right. Life would be easier right-handed, her mother would say. She showed Cutler examples: door knobs and drinking fountains. Her friends thought it was weird. Cutler just complied.

Her parents divorced when she was 12. About time, Cutler thought. But with it came a power shift. Her mother moved out. Cutler and her two younger sisters lived with their father.

‘Dad was the nice guy, so we could start doing bad stuff,’ Cutler says. ‘We started swearing a lot more, not cleaning up after ourselves, that kind of thing.’

Speaking through Cutler, both of her parents and her sisters declined comment. ‘For their own privacy. They don’t have books they’re trying to sell. :)’ Cutler wrote by e-mail.

She pushed and pushed until she could get her way. The rules with her father changed to unspoken pleas: Don’t get pregnant and don’t go to jail.

Cutler was too smart for jail and too prude for pregnancy. In elementary school, she enrolled in a program for gifted youth, which proved to Cutler her intelligence and left her with a superiority complex. When she returned to her normal school, Cutler felt smarter, better than everyone in the class, including the teacher.

In high school, she deemed herself too immature for sex. She attended Nottingham High School, obtained a fake ID and partied at bars with SU guys. In her junior year she joined social clubs, solely to boost her college credentials, then failed to show for any meetings.

She held a job at Peter’s Grocery Store as a cashier, where she flirted with college men who invited her to their parties. Again, Cutler was too quick to trust. Most tried to have sex with her, few knowing she was in high school. She feigned sleep or drunkenness to remove herself from the situation, all the while preserving her virginity throughout high school.

By the time she entered SU, she had tired of the campus life. She traveled to New York City most weekends to party with friends from New York University, refusing to schedule Friday and Monday classes to facilitate her trips.

At school she skipped classes and skirted her responsibilities, angering her superiors and professors who expected so much from a gifted student. Cutler lacked the motivation and wasn’t interested in the academic life. She did just enough to get by, studying the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and calculating which assignments were necessary for a passing grade and which ones she could skip altogether.

Cutler failed to graduate from SU, a fact reported by The Washington Post soon after she became newsworthy.

‘It’s crazy, it’s not even that hard of a school,’ Cutler says about SU. ‘I still don’t know where I’m deficient. It didn’t really matter until all this stuff happened to me. I wish I hadn’t put Syracuse on my resume. I wish I said I went to Princeton.’

 

* * *

Cutler awoke the morning of her 26th birthday as an unknown intern, filing mail for Senator Mike DeWine, R-Ohio. By that afternoon, her 13-day-old blog had been picked up by Wonkette, a juicy political blog run by Ana Marie Cox, who also declined a request for an interview.

Cutler’s blog made her sexual escapades available for public consumption and quenched Capitol Hill staffers’ thirst for juicy gossip.

When her blog reached the computer of Cutler’s boss, she was fired on the spot.

The press had a field day. Bloggers and political reporters attacked the story, trying to decipher the identity of each partner, whom Cutler only identified with initials.

At first she ignored the interview requests, hoping the situation would blow away. Realizing it wouldn’t, Cutler opened her mouth and began her unsavory ascent.

‘It’s rotten,’ Cutler says of her fame. ‘Curing cancer is a great thing to be famous for. Doing something stupid and embarrassing – that was not a dream of mine.’

The only way to stop the publicity was to sell herself out. Cutler had watched enough VH1 to realize the quickest way to irrelevancy is to overexpose oneself. So she flooded the market with interviews, granting almost every one that came her way, trying to sabotage her career in the process.

When she realized the story wouldn’t fade, and that she could benefit financially from the publicity, Cutler hired an agent and signed a book deal. In a graduating class filled with talented writers and reporters, Cutler became the most profitable of them all.

And wouldn’t you know it: The one-time college photographer, the girl with the ADD, the girl who never really asked for any of this to begin with, well, she became a successful author. The New York Times called her sexual frankness ‘refreshing.’ Playgirl dubbed the novel the ‘year’s hottest read.’ The Cincinnati Enquirer called it ‘racy, offensive and really, really good.’

‘Writing isn’t hard,’ Cutler says. ‘It’s not like digging ditches, it’s not brain surgery. But it is being able to communicate something and being able to put things in a certain way.’

What she communicates is an honesty that’s too often suppressed. It’s what drove her book and fashioned her career and made her story so attractive to HBO, which has optioned the rights to her novel and has until the summer to produce a pilot for ‘Washingtonienne.’

‘One of the reasons HBO got really excited is because (the main character) is a very modern woman. She’s a character who isn’t apologetic in the fact she likes to have fun,’ says Shari Smiley, Cutler’s television and film agent at Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.

Cutler’s excited, of course, about the HBO deal, but sees little reason to get too excited about something so uncertain.

And something tells you she doesn’t really care whether it comes out or not. It’s not the money – Cutler gets paid whether HBO produces a pilot or not. There’s something in her voice, her giggle and the inflection that says she’s just as comfortable without the fame.

She was thrust into the public sector, her veil of privacy removed, which she opened herself up to scrutiny.

‘It’s not really my fault that this happened,’ she says about her fame, laying blame on those who hyped her up, documented her rise and contributed to the billowing train that became her career.

‘That’s the culture of the United States,’ says Michael Kantor, whose former blog ‘The Calico Cat,’ included a page dedicated solely to Jessica Cutler’s exploits. ‘Fame can be converted into money. Jessica Cutler managed to get famous for 15 minutes, and she’s turned it into more than 15 minutes worth of money.’

During the Cutler saga, ‘The Calico Cat’ recorded up to 25,000 hits per day as the public feasted in new Cutler updates: ‘Jessica Cutler claims her IQ is 140.’ ‘Jessica Cutler sold her book for ‘substantial six figures.” ‘Jessica lied about her age.’

The headlines read like a New York City tabloid.

‘The brilliant conclusion is that people are assholes,’ Cutler says. ‘I don’t know what else to say. That’s the big lesson I’ve learned.’

Friday, Cutler stood in line at a Manhattan bank, chatting on her cell phone. The conversation was about a photo shoot. Cutler, of course, would be the star. After she hung up the phone, the man behind her made an obnoxious comment, doubting the validity of the phone call, insinuating aloud that Cutler had a fake conversation fueled by her own vanity.

What nerve.

Despite everything she has endured in the last two years – the personal attacks, the misplaced trust and the negative book reviews that dismissed it as smut – Cutler is still easily offended, as if someone brazen enough to detail her sexual relationships in a novel could lack such self confidence.

‘If I wanted to, I could change my name, get on a plane, go to California and start over,’ Cutler says. ‘I could just leave it behind if I wanted to.’

And for some reason, you just have to trust her.

Published on February 19, 2006 at 12:00 pm