Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about

Michael Wolff in 2018. The author of the incendiary Trump book Fire and Fury has been accused of playing fast and loose with the facts. Photograph: Juan Naharro Giménez/Getty Images

In 2003 David Carr, the New York Times’s late, great media columnist, disclosed a $50m bid to buy New York Magazine that had been orchestrated by the writer and journalist Michael Wolff.

Among the big hitters whom Wolff helped assemble for the deal was the billionaire media tycoon Mort Zuckerman, the not-yet-convicted sex offender and Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, and the not-yet-convicted sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.