To live and die by the sword of social media
The final blow came as day was turning to eve.
Last Friday, after Jessica Mulroney saw her entire world crumble within a matter of hours — “dumped,” “sacked,” pick your synonym, from all her television gigs and all her brand sponsorships — a message appeared in my inbox that even the charity she had co-founded (along with many of the other Mulroney women) was disassociating.
For those of us reading the interpersonal tea leaves, what this meant was this: The Shoebox Project — an organization that distributes gift-filled shoeboxes to displaced women in various communities — had distanced itself from the mother of three, via a board comprising, among others, her own husband, Ben, son of a former PM; the husband of sister-inlaw Caroline, Andrew Lapham; and even one of her closest friends, socialite Krystal Koo.
Being publicly censured by your nearest/dearest? Sure, that’s one thing, especially in what’s become the biggest media-society Toronto OMG since the Jian Ghomeshi years. But so is the whole scandal being recapped thereafter by “eTalk” on CTV, the very show that counts her husband as its long-time co-host! Awkward or what?
Well, times it by 10 when Ben’s own co-host, Elaine “Lainey” Lui, posted a 1,000-word screed some days later, musing wisely on the Amy Cooper-esque tempest that has engulfed Jessica — see the column written by my colleague Vinay Menon — but also effectively burning it all down by writing, in terms of the CTV intercompany dynamics, “I am afraid of the Mulroneys.”
Also from Lainey: “People are afraid of retribution. I am afraid of retribution … retribution may not come this week or next week, but in three or six months when Jessica’s white privilege … is reactivated.”
Also, this tour de force line: “Meghan Markle is Jessica Mulroney’s superpower. She keeps that superpower to herself.” (Just go read Lui’s blog, as I cannot do it justice regurgitating.)
Watching the whole Jess mess go down — in real time, on social media — it made me think of Lizzie Grubman for some reason. You remember, doncha? The PR diva who flew into such a rage at a nightclub in the Hamptons in 2002 when she was denied a spot in the VIP parking lot that she yelled obscenities at a doorman and then reversed her Mercedes into a crowd, prompting criminal charges and a rep that came to define then the excesses of a certain Veuve set?
Jessica, you see, just went and Lizzie Grubman’ed her own career — except, instead of driving a Mercedes into a crowd she just happily flung herself in front of one.
The story behind the story here? One that doubles as this always-reliable cautionary tale: You live by the sword of social media, you die by the sword of social media. At a time when many get a dopamine hit from watching the likes and shares and reposts pour in, basking in a cascade of affirmations and handclap emojis, her way-outta-line response to a Black woman, particularly during a time of racial reckoning (publicly! in writing!), shows how far-gone the stylist-slash-TV-host-slash-professional-bestfriend-of-Meghan Markle already was when even a sliver of the opposite was incoming. In terms of her Instagram, she had been alive by it.
For those of us in Toronto who’ve noticed how increasingly fixated Mulroney was on her presence there — the constant deleting and pruning of her feed, for one — this was the psychology that precipitated the faceoff with Sasha Exeter, a local influencer, growing increasingly toxic and then peaking with a legal threat sent after 2 a.m. (misspelled as a “liable suit.”) As someone who knows some of these players, and has closely followed the friendship between Meghan and Jessica, it was, I think, always headed this way, in that Jessica was always the Achilles heel.
Insecurity plus power is often a dangerous cocktail. Combine: a lack of finesse plus paranoia (because of all the press attention, some of it admittedly unfair) and this is the context. Now add: some unchecked privilege.
But though many of the headlines around the world have fixated on how this affects the duchess (it really shouldn’t, except isn’t it interesting that this is who she chose as her BFF?), my focus has turned to what this does for Brand Mulroney. If daughter-in-law Jessica was the diffusion brand of the bigger family brand, in marketing speak, what indeed?
It was going so well, alas. On the up, all these decades after the political dynasty moved out of 24 Sussex and, for many, was a surname best associated with the GST you pay on your duvet (Brian Mulroney’s government instituted the national tax). Example: When Jessica and Ben were front and centre at the worldwide sensation that was the royal wedding in 2018 — their twin boys participating as pages, their young daughter a flower girl, and Jess so fawned over she even made the front page of the Times of London that week — it was a suitable full circle to the royal connections that go back some. Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, had come to stay with the Mulroneys back in the day after all. And Brian and Mila now? Elated at the social triumph of their eldest son.
Around that time came another moment for Brian to bask in some international mojo: when George Bush Sr. died and the ex-PM was asked to eulogize at the funeral (having long been chummy with the Bushes). Mulroney, as elder statesman, was fantastic in his oratory — and earned plenty of live CNN action.
All this now? Tarnished. Consider that when you type “Mulroney” and “racism” in Google you are likely to get a scroll that brings up the events of the last week. Never mind that the greatest consensus-forming legacy of the Mulroney years in Canada — at least internationally — was how Brian led the fight against apartheid in South Africa during the 1980s. Canada, being the first to issue sanctions — when the U.S. and Britain were slow to do so — has long burnished the bona fides of Mulroney Sr.
In terms of the woman at the centre of all this, writer Pauleanna Reid summed it up when she tweeted: “Jessica Mulroney. A career that took her a decade to build, she lost in less than 24 hours. Every brand deal. TV deal. And worst, her reputation. It’s a great case study and lesson on crisis management, checking your own privilege, and why you need POC on your advisory team.”
Also a case study on what happens — in a society context — when everything blows up and you do not have much social capital, so to speak. If you could see the barrage of DMs I have been getting from people around town who’ve been rubbed the wrong way by Jessica, or had some fashion-world horror story involving her, you’d get the drift. “Had she built up collateral on her way up …” a smart friend, with a boldface name of her own, started to tell me. If. Instead, the schadenfreude has only been too real (even from folks who previously spent years genuflecting and/or had enabled because they didn’t want to create fissures in their social circles).
Likewise, some of the response overseas. The journalist in England, for instance, who told me the story over the phone this week about how Jessica had apparently tried to take credit for the Givenchy gown that her friend, the Duchess of Sussex, donned for her wedding, only to precipitate an official denial by the then designer of the house, Claire Waight Keller.
And so it had come (as the news moved everywhere from TMZ to BBC): Here was a woman who’d gone from carrying Meghan’s bridal train to carrying the brunt of the Mulroney name.