THE BIG SPITZ BLITZ
Political strategist Lis Smith reveals in her new book how The Post exposed that she was dating prostitution-loving former Gov. Eliot Spitzer while working for incoming Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The spinmeister hooked up with the still-married “love gov” after working on his failed comeback bid to become city comptroller in 2013. She then switched to de Blasio’s general election campaign for mayor.
“My end goals — being able to stay in New York with Eliot and serve as the New York City mayor’s press secretary — were in sight. Then, in an instant, everything changed,” Smith writes in her tell-all, “Any Given Tuesday.”
“It came in the form of a text from Hari,” she says of fellow consultant Hari Sevugan. “‘ Call me. The New York Post is looking into you and Eliot,’ ” Smith wrote, adding, “Well, f--k. This isn’t going as planned.”
She continues: “As soon as I got Hari on the line, he filled me in. A New York Post photographer had been surreptitiously posted outside my SoHo walkup apartment. The photographer had captured Eliot and me exchanging ‘loving looks’ as we’d returned from a late-night dinner at a restaurant on my block.”
The photographer also snapped Spitzer leaving Smith’s apartment early the next morning wearing a skullcap and hooded sweatshirt. “Not exactly the wardrobe of an innocent man,” she notes.
Smith said she felt “violated” after learning she was being followed.
“Still,” she said, “I wasn’t exactly a PR neophyte. I knew from the beginning that our relationship would be a big tabloid story when it became public.
“But I compartmentalized this knowledge like other things in my life. Okay, so I’m working for tabloid target #1 in Bill de Blasio. Maybe they won’t focus on the former reigning champion, for once. Other people could blame it on naivete, I can’t.”
Scandal’s convenient timing
The Spitzer scandal would serve as a distraction for both Smith and mayorelect de Blasio — but the political-crisis communications guru thought she could ride out the storm.
“I had that early rush of love on the brain — I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was also reckless. I was making the bet that I could run out the clock on disclosing our relationship until I got hired officially. And then what?” she recalls thinking.
Smith tried to outfox The Post by going to the Daily News as a pre-emptive strike — in an effort to get a more favorable story planted about her relationship with Spitzer.
But that didn’t work out. The Post ran
the exclusive photos of Spitzer ducking in and out of the Soho walk-up.
“My mood changed when the Post story popped. It was as horrible as I’d anticipated and seeing the photos of Eliot and me taken in what we’d thought were private moments was even more disturbing, knowing they were on display to anyone who cared to look,” she writes in the 304-page tome.
To avoid stakeouts during the media frenzy that followed, Smith said she temporarily stayed with a friend from her college days at Dartmouth who resided on the Upper West Side.
The savvy strategist then had to figure out how to break the news to de Blasio and his camp, as their soon-to-be City Hall press secretary was now at the center of her own juicy tabloid scandal.
“Did I think I was going to walk into his office and tell him that I was dating Eliot Spitzer? Did I think he’d sit on the floor with me and sing ‘Kumbaya’ and tell me it would be all okay? (For the record, I can totally envision him sitting on the floor singing ‘Kumbaya’ — just not for me.),” Smith quipped.
She then told de Blasio chief of staff Phil Walzak over drinks that she and Spitzer were a couple.
“So the Post is about to report that I’m dating Eliot Spitzer. And I am,’ ” Smith told Walzak.
“Phil snorted: ‘F–-k. I thought you had cancer or something.’ He motioned to the bartender again — ‘We’ll take two shots of Jameson on top of that round’ —before turning back to me and clearing his throat. ‘Jesus, you always keep it interesting.’ ”
Burned by Hizzoner
But Smith is still sour that de Blasio let her hang out to dry.
“I’d made some faulty assumptions, but the first was that my loyalty to de Blasio or my competence at my job mattered. Behind the scenes, I’d get ‘keep your head up’ emails from senior de Blasio aides, but when it came to the press, it seemed their attitude was more along the lines of off with her head. I couldn’t talk to the media, and they didn’t lift a finger to defend me.”
Smith said she learned a hard lesson: Even a professional can’t try to manage a personal crisis without help.
“It’s an inherent conflict of interest. Unless you’re a total psychopath . . . I lost the media war that I’d thought I commanded,” Smith said.
Still, she sought to rationalize her relationship with Spitzer.
“Yeah, I guess I’d fallen in love with a slightly problematic guy . . . It wasn’t like I was dating Ted Bundy — Eliot was the former governor and attorney general of New York State,” Smith said, referring to the serial killer.
In a chapter entitled “The Eye of the Storm,” she recalled how her parents were shocked that photographers and scribes were camped outside their Westchester home when Spitzer joined them for Christmas dinner.
“If I’d thought things couldn’t have gotten worse, I was wrong,” she said.
She and Spitzer then jetted to Jamaica to get away from the media frenzy. But The Post discovered where they were.
Smith shot down a Post story claiming Spitzer was spotted kissing and sucking her toes while she was topless in a hot tub at a resort there.
“Neither Eliot nor I was gonna win a gold medal in the ‘not reckless’ competition at the Olympics. But seriously. We’d gone down to Jamaica to get away from tabloid drama, not actively court it,” Smith said.
“Our resort was more ‘Leave It to Beaver’ than ‘Debbie Does Dallas,’ ” she claimed. “Our most scandalous transgression was showing up three minutes late to the breakfast buffet and sweet talking our way into cheese and jalapeño omelets.”
It was from Montego Bay that Smith and de Blasio announced she would not be joining his administration. The final indignity, she said, is that de Blasio’s team wanted the statement to say her departure was unrelated to her dating Spitzer.
“It was total bulls--t,” she wrote. “How could they claim my dating life had nothing to do with the decision when it was the sole reason I was leaving?”
Smith also recalled another client she worked with, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as having turned into a Nicorette-chomping “a– hole” who ruined the lives of his staffers after letting national fame get to his head during the coronavirus pandemic.
Cuomo resigned last August amid claims of sexual-harassment and misconduct.