A former Senate aide who wrote a sexually explicit blog about her relations with officials on Capitol Hill is facing a lawsuit for invasion of privacy.
Jessica Cutler, whose short-lived blog astonished Washington in 2004, is being sued by Robert Steinbuch, a former legal counsel to the Ohio Republican senator Mike DeWine.
Under the pseudonym Washingtonienne, Cutler, whose job was opening the mail in DeWine’s office, identified her lovers using sets of initials, describing their sexual encounters in alarmingly precise detail, down to exact positions and number of ejaculations.
The men involved included Steinbuch, known as RS, and another figure she described as a ”married man who pays me for sex. Chief of staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush.” As her affair with Steinbuch became known on Capitol Hill, she wrote: ”RS just called again. Bad news: the rumour has spread to other offices. This is bad.”
The blog lasted barely a fortnight, and Cutler (27) was sacked once it featured on the Washington gossip blog Wonkette.
Steinbuch, who was not married at the time the blog was being written, claims that her ”outrageous actions, setting before anyone in the world with access to the internet intimate and private facts regarding [him], constituted a gross invasion of his privacy, subjecting him to humiliation and anguish”. He is seeking unspecified damages.
Cutler has since published a novel, The Washingtonienne, and runs a significantly more restrained blog at jessicacutleronline.com. Her lawyer said the judge had ruled that postings made more than a year before the start of legal proceedings could not be considered. Most of the explicit postings fall outside that limit. – Guardian Unlimited Â