Crisis Management

PR Disasters: Handling Vick and Helmsley

by Patty

I know I’m the last person to ever talk about sports – I once thought the Carolina Hurricanes were a basketball team – but the Michael Vick situation stretched far from the sports arena, and fell right into the lap of a PR disaster.

It seemed like everybody had an opinion on Michael Vick admitting his guilt about engaging in dogfighting and killing animals in it. Unfortunately, a lot of the statements were unwise ones to make.

Several pro athletes did not do themselves any favors by showing how out of touch they were regarding the brutality of dogfighting and why many people reacted in horror to the charges against Vick. Deion Sanders, Clinton Portis and Stephon Marbury all made statements to the press wondering what the big deal was, with all their ignorant quotes documented in this article. They ended up looking foolish and showing their ignorance, comparing dogfighting to other legitimate sports. They should have heeded a PR rule of thumb: If you do not know anything about a subject, do not pretend that you do, even if it is in defense of a friend.

Leona Helmsley: Did “The Queen of Mean” Do Any Good?

When your client has the nickname “the Queen of Mean,” is famous for making the statement “Only the little people pay taxes,” and even her lawyer tries to defend her unsuccessfully from going to jail by acknowledging that she is a bitch, you know you have a major headache in trying to refurbish her image. In the wake of the death of rich real estate developer Leona Helmsley,, her publicist of 30 years, Howard Rubinstein, tried to smooth her image over, but only succeeded in showing how he failed to rehabilitate her with a good reputation.

In an obituary in Forbes, Peter Slatin noted how Rubinstein emphasized the considerable charitable donations Helmsley and her late husband Harry made, including to victims of 9/11 and Katrina. Yet Rubinstein avoided explaining why his client was known for treating “the little people” so badly and what changes if any she made regarding them after her prison stint in the early 1990s for tax evasion. By doing so, he did little to counteract the wave of notices that mentioned her legacy in largely negative terms.

Perhaps the harshest yet most exact summation of Helmsley’s life came in this article in The Economist, where the British publication contrasted the behavior of Helmsley against another grande dame of Manhattan who passed away recently, Brooke Astor. Astor treated the “little people” well, never made a big deal of her birthday and could even handle putting up with paper cups at an affair. Can anyone imagine Helmsley doing the same? And yet Rubinstein had the audacity to compare the two of them himself in his statements after Helmsley’s death. He – and Helmsley – simply just did not get how “the little people” think.

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