To recap: Bill was working as a vaguely defined "adviser" for some investment funds owned by Yucaipa, Burkle's company. Then his wife goes and runs for president so Bill publicly "severed business ties" with Burkle, presumably to avoid being photographed with more attractive young women on Burkle's plane.

But! Bill's consolation prize was that Yucaipa would pay him $20 million when he left. For what? Nobody's really sure! But there were lots of things that could blow up in Bill's (and by extension, Hillary's) face, politically:

Mr. Clinton was one of the three owners of the foreign fund's general partner, along with Mr. Burkle and Dubai Investment Group (YGP) Ltd., an entity that was part of the business empire of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.

The Yucaipa connection presented other potential difficulties for Mrs. Clinton, people familiar with the matter said. In late 2007, the foreign fund invested in a Chinese media company, Xinhua Finance Media Ltd., whose parent company had past ties to the Beijing government.

Oh you know who else was connected to Clinton via Burkle? Convicted scam artist Raffaello Follieri! So, my working theory here is that taking the money would have caused too much of a headache for Hillary in the press, and also, since Bill's payout was theoretically tied to how much he earned, maybe there wasn't all that much money there to be had anyhow. But if you know better, feel free to share. [WSJ]

Ron Burkle: Our tipster reports: "Ronny Burkle was lurking around the William Rast show last night with his pal Danny A. (Model wrangler extraordinaire who is BFF with Leo DiCaprio. Danny A. is the guy who is mostly responsible for filling Burkle's jet with attractive females.) A cloud of around 15 teenage girls swarmed Justin Timberlake (Rast is his label) as he left the show; I can't imagine Burkle was far behind." Yea, if he looked more dashing he might be able to get away with it. But that ratlike visage just sinks him. Give it up, Burkle.


Bill Clinton: You need to stop hanging out with Ron Burkle first of all, Bill! Even a serious Bill fan who considered the whole blowjob-in-the-Oval-Office thing to be really punk rock has got to admit that the time has come for Bill to retire from skirt chasing. (Not that there's any proof he still is!). Now you can enjoy sleeping with the Secretary of State, Bill. Can we call you Bill?


Steve Bing: Real estate heir, big time developer, Hollywood money man, Burkle and Clinton pal. He's 43 and he fathered a baby with Elizabeth Hurley out of wedlock. And he had another paternity battle with his other ex, who was Kirk Kerkorian's gal! All we're saying here is find a nice lady and settle down for fuck's sake. This Burkle-led triumvirate has spent more than enough time being the old dudes up in the club.


Mario Batali: The portly ginger-haired restaurateur enjoys whizzing around on his moped, wearing Crocs, manipulating salamis, traveling about Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow, and doing who knows what to young lasses in the back rooms of restaurants across Manhattan. We like your Olive Oil Ice Cream dude, but you're almost 50, and we just don't want to think about Mario Batali's sexuality. That's all there is to it really.


Ron Perelman: The bald-headed corporate raider is thrice-divorced, richer than god, and prone to playing the field, as many billionaires are. We don't like your looks, your gruff personality, or your shady PR firm, Perelman. When you next get married, consider very carefully whether you would like to stay married to said lucky woman.


But we do like:

Salman Rushdie: Yes, he could be accused of being a creepy old man, what with his hobbit physique and penchant for dating women absurdly out of his league (you would think, at least). But give the man his props. He writes some bitchin' books. Stares down death threats. Then goes out with Padma and, currently, with Pia Glenn, who we saw in Will Ferrell's Broadway show and, we must say, does one mean dance. So Salman Rushdie can't be put down. He's smarter than all the guys above and cavorts with badder women.

It's all these Clinton-friending liberal rich people who keep getting into messes these days, isn't it? When's the last time you heard anything about rich Republican financiers and executives flying about the nation with models, fucking teenagers, and carrying on sex orgies with movie stars? Is it the liberal connection to godless Hollywood? Former United Artists CEO and Bush Super Ranger Jerry Weintraub stays out of the headlines. Ken Lay was busted for fraud, not massages.

Hell, maybe liberals just have more fun? That's the point of liberality, isn't it? Those European values, that subjective morality, the godless thing? Clinton was impeached for having too much fun in office. Nixon never had fun ever except when he got zonked on painkillers and insulted the Jews, which is not really anyone's idea of a truly good time. Epstein never saw anything wrong with what he did. He just likes massages!

But why the need to congregate around Burkle? To hang out with him? Why did Epstein and Chris Tucker need to fly around on Jeff's private jet? Why does Clinton need to fly around the world on everyone's private jet? Liberal types do like to improve the world, and the rich ones are narcissistic enough to believe that they can do it personally. So they network and party and fuck models while flying to Africa to cure AIDS! Conservative zillionaires just rack up huge profits, contribute money to candidates who can ensure that they'll continue to rack up huge profits, and mind their own fucking (criminal) business. The liberals need to have cake with Arianna Huffington and Bono, for some reason.

So it may just be that Burkle embodies these characteristics the most. The most narcissistic, the most convinced of his own rightness, the most desperate to network with powerful people in the hopes of reshaping the world.

And then they all get tied up in sex scandals and your house is foreclosed, the end.

You probably feel like a fool. Ohhh, poor you! How do you think fucking Ron Burkle feels about that $55 million?? Ron Burkle, a man whose name is not exactly synonymous with "integrity"! Ron Burkle, a man who spent a few hundred grand trying to sabotage the career of a fucking gossip columnist who pissed him off.

That's why I entreat you to read the indictment, Anne. Sure, some painful memories will come flooding back: the custom-made suits from Milan. The "flowers, cosmetics, clothes, wine, expensive dinners, dog walking services and orthodontist expenses." The $30,000 housecall. The Caribbean vacation in 2006. The two-story apartment in Rockefeller Center that Raffaello rented for visiting members of the clergy. The notable absence in said apartment of any visiting members of the clergy!

A wise woman once said: "A woman especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." Wait, does that ring a bell?? Yeah, genius it was the tagline for Becoming Jane. The thing is, it doesn't apply to women who have no actual knowledge to conceal. And I'm not trying to get you to pull an Ophelia here but did the Feds even bother trying to question you? Did you ever get deposed? Let me tell you Anne, I would love love looooove to live in a world that allowed me to believe you waited until last week to dump him because you were recording his phone conversations, "backing up" his hard drives, strategically digging through his wastebaskets and mastering his rhetorical tics in preparation for your directorial debut, an epic black comedy on the striking guilelessness of powerful, influential, successful, and thoroughly rotten people when they believe themselves to be possibly in the presence of Christ Himself. At turns subtle and madcap, stark and decadent, it could serve as a scathing cinematic indictment of …well shit, you name it: organized religion, the human condition, Money, Power, the Vatican, vanity, "Love," your idiot self, even your ex-boyfriend.

But I somehow doubt it! Which is why right now, I hate to break it to you, he may be the one going to prison, but he is also kind of "winning."

Rafaello Follieri: The Indictment [WSJ]
Earlier: Vaticonned! How Anne Hathaway's Boyfriend Got Clinton To Underwrite Their Fabulous Romance

Through the innuendo-laden assertion that Ms. Gershon has been "visiting" with President Clinton in California, the Article outrageously insinuates that Ms. Gershon has had an inappropriate sexual relationship with President Clinton. This is absolutely false, My client has the utmost admiration and respect for both President and Senator Clinton, and she is extremely offended by the false and defamatory inference that she engaged in an adulterous relationship with the President. ... We demand publication of a retraction and correction.

After the jump, learn the three times Gershon did hang out with Bill Clinton — not surprisingly, none of them include private jets dubbed "Air Fuck One."

But that infamous plane's owner, Ron Burkle, does make a cameo, as do the Shrivers and even Bono! Who even knew Gershon was this famous?

Ms. Gershon has only been in the same room as President Clinton on three occasions, during which she was always in the presence of anywhere from approximately a dozen people to several hundred or more. Specifically, Ms. Gershon was once one of several hundred or perhaps a thousand guests at a charity event at the White House while President Clinton was in office, which she attended as a guest of the Shrivers. On another occasion, Ms. Gershon attended a dinner in New York honoring Bono, where President Clinton was among the several hundred or more in attendance. On a third occasion, Ms. Gershon was a last-minute addition by one of the other guests who attended a dinner at the California home of Ron Burkle, with 10-15 people in attendance, including President Clinton.

Well, then — that settles it! Their demand for a retraction includes striking the offending passage from Vanity Fair's Web site, to which Gershon's lawyers conveniently link in their correspondence. Read up while you still can!

• Gershon: I Did Not Have Sexual Relations... [TMZ]

Recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip [suggests] Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. ... None of these wisps of smoke have produced a public fire. But four former Clinton aides told me that, about 18 months ago, one of the president's former assistants, who still advises him on political matters, had heard so many complaints about such reports from Clinton supporters around the country that he felt compelled to try to conduct what one of these aides called an "intervention," because, the aide believed, "Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road."

Not to mention in the skies, where a certain "Air Fuck One" voyage yielded an especially persistent rumor about a donor meeting, so to speak, between Clinton and Gershon — and we hear she gave him a lot more than a check. It hardly seems newsworthy in some ways, but on the other hand, we kind of like the idea of a whirlwind, testosterrific Lewinskygate 10th anniversary tour featuring Burkle, Bing, Jeffrey Epstein and the rest. No wonder Bill's doing all he can to keep Hillary on the trail; we'd vote for her right now if it kept us in sex scandals for another four years.

• The Comeback Id [VF]

"But—spoiler warning—things don't turn out so well for him. According to the source, in the fictionalized version the gossip is killed when his car is wired with a bomb." [Gatecrasher]

Reached for comment, Stern gave us some plot rumors of his own: "I hear that Burkle is being played by John Goodman. He goes to jail in the end—just like he will in real life—becomes the sweetheart of Cellblock C and finally gets to empathize with all those teenagers who found themselves face-down in the back of [his private jet] 'Air Force Two.'"

Ron Burkle, seen in the company of models like Gisele Bundchen since he separated from his wife, is a key member of Clinton's billionaire boy's club. (Former member: teen-massage-loving Jeffrey Epstein.) We don't really believe Hollywood's autumn rumor that the former president, notorious for receiving oral sex in the Oval Office, had entertained an actress on Ron Burkle's plane. (That was probably just an amalgam of Clinton's supposed affair with raunchy actress, Gina Gershon, and earlier pictures of the ex-president with girls on the Burklejet.)

Nobody really cares about Burkle's ties to foreign governments, apart from a few right-wing obsessives. It's Burkle's ties to pretty women that represent the real embarrassment, and threat to Bill Clinton's image as a reformed husband, or at least a more discreet reprobate. With Hillary Clinton in a battle for the Democratic nomination, her husband does not need a billionaire modelizer as a friend.

Ok, so basically Doug Band befriended Raffaello two years ago probs at some party with models, and Clinton agreed, through a fund he co-ran with supermarket billionaire/Page Six fanboy Ron Burkle, to invest up to $100 million in Raffaello's plan to redevelop Catholic Church properties that the Church would have to sell to pay their massive sex-related legal bills, which Clinton related to, being himself mired in sex-related legal bills. (It made sense that Raffaello would be the one to do this because he had reached the advanced age of 27 years old and knew the nephew of the Vatican's secretary of state, and yeah, I bet you forgot the Vatican had a "secretary of state.") To his credit, Raffallo's resume also included numerous other business successes that were completely made-up, and his father was a famous businessman in Italy because he had been convicted of fraud. Anyway, so Doug Band took a few hundred Gs from Raffaello, who in turn took a lot of money from various other big money types, for introducing Raffaello to so many big money types, who invested in them because investments related to the Clintons have always gone so well, and meanwhile Raffaello commenced snagging $40,000-a-month co-ops, accepting Clinton Global Initiative distinctions, and fucking Anne Hathaway. Oh: and buying private jets. He was so busy he forgot about the whole real estate thing! And then Ron Burkle caught on and got mad. And planted a blind item in his favorite newspaper suggesting he was cheating on Anne Hathaway? But she didn't dump him and so finally Ron Burkle sued and now Clinton comes out looking like he's totally learned that lesson about rich people who spend all their time jetskiing and dropping your name are probably shady and have no agendas other than fame and model fucking but provide good distractions to keep the media away all those damaging stories about real issues and shit.

How Bill Clinton's Aide Facilitated A Messy Deal [WSJ]

What beef are we referring to, then? Merely: "When one item [on Gawker] unfavorably contrasted him with a financier he detests, Burkle's lawyers launched a letter demanding a retraction and an apology." We may have apologized "acidly" (you be the judge), but c'mon Forbes, you know that financier's name. Say it along with us: Jeffrey Epstein, he of nubile masseuse propositioning. And let us just restate that Ron Burkle and Jeffrey Epstein are absolutely, totally different people, whatever "unfavorably contrasted" is supposed to mean. Still, Burkle "detests" Epstein? Since when? Burkle and Epstein were supposedly at least friendly acquaintances once. Guess there's no hope for Jeffrey to be included in "Six Degrees of Ron Burkle," even though alleged Burkle extortionist Jared Paul Stern made the cut.

The Rise Of Ron Burkle [Forbes]

Earlier: Gawker's Coverage of Ron Burkle, Jeffrey Epstein