Fired Capitol Hill worker takes blog one step farther

In May 2004, Jessica Cutler was fired from her $25,000-a-year mailroom job with Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, for using one of his Washington office computers to create an online diary of her sexual escapades that read like a trashy novel.

Now she’s cashed in by writing a trashy novel with the same name as her raunchy blog: “The Washingtonienne” (Hyperion, 304 pages, $23.95).

Her blog chronicled sexual encounters with six men. Some, including the married chief of staff in an unnamed federal agency, paid her for sex.

She made saucy observations like: “I’m sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way: How can anybody live on $25K/year?”

When a popular Web site called “Wonkette” publicized Cutler’s blog, the 27-year-old became a minor-league Washington celebrity.

Gossip columns reported her exploits. She posed naked for Playboy.com. Bored Capitol Hill staffers spent their workdays trying to identify paramours she listed by initials.

Cutler, who reportedly received a $300,000 book advance from Disney-owned Hyperion, says she no longer relies on male companions to pay rent on her new apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, although she’d like to.

“I am still like, ‘Why am I paying my rent like an idiot?’ ” she says. “I think a guy should do it.”

Cutler’s quick-turnaround novel, in stores now, is a thinly veiled autobiography that centers on a heroine named Jacqueline Turner. She spends her leisure time carousing in Washington bars, picking up men and writing a blog to amuse pals with her brazen antics.

Jacqueline gets a Capitol Hill job in the mailroom of a pro-life, Midwestern GOP senator after a sugar daddy forwards her resume.

The unnamed senator is described as “a horny guy” who stares at her chest. The senator’s wife makes his staff rearrange office furniture because she “thought she was Jackie Kennedy and that her husband’s office was her own little White House.”

When Jacqueline isn’t rearranging furniture for the senator’s wife, she sorts through outraged constituent letters about such topics as Janet Jackson’s wardrobe mishap.

She spends her days in an all-male section of the office known as “the Locker Room,” where the guys read the office’s free copy of Hustler magazine and debate which strip club has the best lunch buffet in D.C.

“Since when did a Senate office become the new Las Vegas?” she wonders.

Spokesmen for DeWine’s office refuse to discuss the novel, let alone whether it reveals a Las Vegas side to DeWine’s wholesome, family-values persona.

“I am not going to read it and not going to have any comment on it,” says DeWine communications director Mike Dawson.

Others in DeWine’s office are speaking out through the legal system. Last month a DeWine staffer whose trysts with Cutler were detailed in the blog filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit.

“It is one thing to be manipulated and used by a lover; it is another thing to be cruelly exposed to the world,” says Robert Steinbuch’s lawsuit against Cutler.

This move seems more likely to compound Steinbuch’s embarrassment than redress it. The suit puts every sordid detail of Cutler’s Internet musings about “RS,” such as “likes spanking,” into the public record.

Steinbuch’s lawyer and Cutler both deny the case is meant to hype the book.

Attorney Jonathan Rosen says he had to file the lawsuit within a year of the blog’s discovery, which happened to coincide with the book’s release. He says he had to list offensive items in the blog to show how they damaged his client.

“The last thing we want is more publicity,” Rosen says.

Cutler doesn’t mind the extra buzz for her book, although she acts bemused by the uproar over her “kiss and tell” conduct.

She says that her sex life truly wasn’t a big deal and that family and friends in her native Syracuse, N.Y., are surprised anyone cared.

“It never occurred to me that anything I was doing was bad … or degrading,” she says. “I guess people in Washington don’t have enough work to do.”

Cutler describes her book as a mix of fact and fiction. She says she altered real characters and experiences for the sake of “novelistic conventions.”

Some of her experiences in DeWine’s office are portrayed accurately; others aren’t. For example, she says she obtained her job in DeWine’s office through a regular applications process, not a boyfriend. A man she dated offered to get her a job in a different congressional office, but she didn’t accept.

She says she never met DeWine’s wife, and the office-arranging spouse is “a caricature of a senator’s wife.”

But she says DeWine’s office did contain a section called the “Locker Room” and that she heard male colleagues there discussing strip-club buffets.

Cutler says she plans another book that will be less autobiographical, although friends have suggested Steinbuch’s lawsuit might provide fodder for a sequel.

“It sounds like an episode of ‘Ally McBeal,’ ” she says.