IT WAS THE LAST MONDAY in January 2022 when Jeff Zucker realized his world was about to come crashing down. The semi-secret romance he'd been having with his deputy, Allison Gollust, was going to become public. He was being forced to resign from his job as president of CNN. His $300 million legacy project, the CNN+ streaming service, would be orphaned. And Zucker's former friends, the Cuomo brothers, were out for blood.
What to do? He huddled at his apartment with Gary Ginsberg, the media executive and former Rupert Murdoch adviser whom he'd known for years. Ginsberg told him he needed Risa Heller. A 43-year-old Brooklyn Heights mother of three, Heller has become the crisis-communications warrior of choice for the city's most cancellable elites.
"I didn't know her," Zucker tells me. "The first time I ever met her was the day she walked into my apartment the day before my departure was announced. And she ended up sitting in my kitchen for like the better part of the next 72 hours."
"The thing about Risa is she's a bit of a character," he says. "She comes in, sets her coffee down, takes over the room, and comes out with that accent that I can't even figure out where it's from I'm not quite sure if it's Bloomfield Hills or Long Island or Brooklyn or what." And then she demands you tell her the entire truth about how things got to the point that you had to call her, before telling you what to expect and helping you navigate it.
How badly does Zucker think it would have gone for him without Heller? "That's an impossible question to answer," he says. "But I think she absolutely made one of the worst weeks of my life a tiny bit easier."
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