Early on a recent morning, in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the publicist Mitchell Jackson started his day as he normally would, by taking his phone from the nightstand and scrolling through it. The subject line of an email grabbed his attention: “Financial Times article — lawsuit from Macrons.”
It came from a Financial Times reporter who was requesting comment from Mr. Jackson about some breaking news: The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte Macron, had just filed a 22-count defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jackson’s biggest client, Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster. The Macrons accused Ms. Owens of falsely and repeatedly stating on her show that Mrs. Macron is a man.
Mr. Jackson, 33, hunkered down in his home office and hopped on a call with Ms. Owens and her team to drum up a public relations plan. He put on Black Sabbath and sipped Earl Grey tea as he read through the more than 200-page lawsuit. He paced the room as he rolled calls with reporters from Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times and TMZ.
At 12:24 p.m., he hit send on a press statement he had written for his client. The tone was combative.
“Candace Owens is not shutting up,” it read. “This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.”
That evening, when the Macrons’ lawyer appeared on the CNN program “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” Mr. Jackson was still on the phone. He had spoken — on the record, off the record, on background, on deep background — with over 30 journalists.
“Today was just another day at the office for me, though,” he said. “This is what I live for.”
Since starting his small firm, BCC Communications, in 2020, Mr. Jackson has assembled a client list as diverse as the hero and villain character selection screen of a Street Fighter video game.
On the right, he represents Ms. Owens, the YouTube star Brett Cooper and the Gen Z politico CJ Pearson. His other clients include the leftist comedian podcaster Adam Friedland, the millennial Instagram celebrity Caroline Calloway and the hip-hop podcaster and OnlyFans adult film star Adam22.
“I’d say that I represent a large portion of the top podcasters and YouTubers in America, which, therefore, are the top celebrities in America, because the game has changed,” Mr. Jackson said.
Mr. Jackson, who says he helps “complicated people tell their truth,” does his job with old-school flair. The first thing he says to reporters who call him is, “Are we off the record?” On wine-and-dine trips to New York, he takes TikTok influencers to the Metropolitan Opera. Closer to home, he holds appointments at Disney World, meeting with members of the media to promote clients like Ms. Owens.
“I don’t think Mitchell and I have ever viewed anything that we’ve tackled as a crisis,” Ms. Owens said in an email. “That’s why I work with him.”
“Having been on the receiving end of cancel culture himself,” she wrote, “Mitchell understands better than most that the shadows on the wall aren’t real.”
Mr. Jackson’s clients know about the scandal that derailed his journalism career. A decade ago, when he went by Mitchell Sunderland, he was a rising star at Vice. But after becoming a writer for its women’s vertical, Broadly, he was fired when a sexist email he had written was made public in a BuzzFeed News expose. The Mitchell Sunderland byline faded away. He took his husband’s last name when he married at 26.
Ms. Calloway, a social-media celebrity who wrote the memoir “Scammer” after being accused of scamming her followers, said that Mr. Jackson was a calming presence. “He’s my favorite person in the world to call when I’m just catching strays on Twitter that would otherwise ruin my day,” she said. “Mitch has that Warholian view of press that it’s neither good nor bad, but measured in inches.”
“I sometimes wonder if without his own cancellation he’d be so good,” Ms. Calloway added.
Flack at Work
On a hot afternoon in Fort Lauderdale, Mr. Jackson was sitting at his usual work spot, a cluttered table in a strip-mall Starbucks. He tapped away on his screen-protected laptop, which was decorated with a “Candace” sticker.
Bald, bearded and bespectacled, he drank two venti Earl Grey teas and a venti cappuccino while answering emails and sending video clips of his clients to People, TMZ and Barstool Sports.
I asked him how a man who had studied queer theory at Sarah Lawrence College ended up representing right-wing firebrands.
“I just don’t view the world in black and white,” he said. “And I think more people would be better served by thinking gray. But regarding my clients, I like everyone I work with. I sleep fine at night.”
“Also, quite frankly,” he said, “this is the gayest job on earth. I’m talking on the phone all day and defending people in the middle of public drama.”
He explained his approach to crisis P.R.
“The natural position for people often is to kind of go into a shell, and I have to say, ‘You have to keep on posting,’” he said. “If you keep on posting, the world keeps on going.”
“Publicists who drop their clients when they’re in trouble are the scum of the earth,” he added.
Online flare-ups don’t worry him: “Every time someone has tried to destroy one of my podcaster clients, they’ve always gotten bigger.”
As evening neared, he was behind the wheel of his SUV, blasting the playlist he gives to clients, titled “How to Survive a Scandal.” It includes “Stronger” by Britney Spears and “I’m Still Here” by Judy Collins. “There’s an emotional element to being in controversy,” he said. “So I want them to get into a positive mood, to know they will survive this.” When Prince’s “Controversy” came on, he turned it up. “I love this song,” he said.
That night, we met up at Tarks, a seafood stand where locals ordered fried gator tails and conch fritters. Before he talked about how his journalism career had ended when he was 25, he wanted to note that his familiarity with controversy actually dated to his South Florida childhood.
When he was growing up in the 1990s, his parents ran a pet store, Puppy Palace, which became a protest site for animal rights activists. As the demonstrators paraded outside with signs decrying puppy mills, his mother, Judy Norford, became a local news figure known for her crusade against them.
“My childhood was what crisis P.R. is made out of,” Mr. Jackson said.
As he told it, his mother had her staff put out sizzling trays of free barbecue for the protesters, and she also paid teenagers to heckle them.
“The protests actually boosted her sales,” he said, “because people would stop to watch the carnival.” He added: “My mom told us as kids, ‘Controversy’s good for business.’”
An aspiring writer, he set his sights on New York and attended Sarah Lawrence, where he was drawn to the writings of Gertrude Stein. “You can learn more reading ‘The Making of Americans’ than you could from a communications school for what P.R. is today,” he said.
After college, he landed a job as a writer at Vice Media, which was then a bible of millennial hipsterdom, and became known for his gonzo reports on America’s underbelly — “My Week Inside the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, America’s Most Famous Brothel”; “I Attended a Juggalo Wedding at the Gathering of the Juggalos.” He was drawn to divisive characters, writing profiles headlined “Ann Coulter Is a Human Being,” “In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin” and “Legendary Publishing-World Terror Judith Regan Is Back in Business.”
In October 2017, after he became a writer and editor at Broadly, Vice’s newly launched women’s vertical, BuzzFeed News published its report. Based on a cache of leaked documents, it detailed how the right-wing site Breitbart News had curried favor with figures in the liberal circles of politics, tech and media. Part of the story reported that Mr. Jackson had sent an email to the Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos a year earlier, asking him to “please mock this fat feminist,” with a link to an article by the writer and activist Lindy West.
BuzzFeed’s story generated rancor toward Mr. Jackson within New York’s media community. Twitter lit up with critics calling Mr. Jackson a misogynist and demanding his termination. Vice fired him the next day.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a former Broadly editor, recalled how the publication used Breitbart and Drudge Report, which was then a conservative site, to gain online traffic. “We all lived and died by clicks,” she said. “If you got something on Drudge or Breitbart, numbers went bonkers.”
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Ms. West wrote that Mr. Jackson’s leaked email provided proof to feminist writers that the “abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a byproduct of the internet but a politically motivated silencing campaign.” Reached for comment, Ms. West said, “It’s no surprise that this person has failed upward into so-called ‘crisis P.R.,’ itself an apparatus of the right-wing war on accountability, justice and progress.”
At Tarks, as Mr. Jackson helped himself to curly fries, I pulled up some of the old tweets that called for his firing. He shrugged. “I didn’t look at them,” he said. “I just had someone else look at my phone. Which is the same thing I tell clients to do.”
“I came out when I was 14,” he added. “You think I can’t handle a few people online?”
Concerning the email, he was not apologetic. “Like, yeah, gay guys are queens,” he said. “Breaking news.”
“A lot of reporters say improper things to their sources,” he said. “I was just dumb and 24 and doing it in an email.”
Mr. Jackson seemed content with how things had turned out. “My advice to young people is always to blow up your life as soon as possible,” he said, “because the sooner you blow up your life, the faster your actual life can start.”
After he was fired, he said, friends distanced themselves from him and a book deal fell apart. He fell into a depression, barely leaving his apartment. Struggling to find work, he started racking up debt.
“Then Judith called me,” he said. “She started giving me freelance P.R. assignments.”
He was referring to Judith Regan, the publishing maven who had made a splash in the 1990s with best-selling books by Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.
“I’d met him years ago, when he was writing a piece about me,” Ms. Regan said. “He wrote a piece that was fair, which didn’t happen very often.”
Eventually, she brought him on as a full-time publicist for her Regan Arts imprint. “He was a kid in his 20s,” she said, “and I didn’t think he deserved to be canceled for life.”
She considered his P.R. work now.
“He can work with some of the best and some of the worst people on the planet, and I applaud that,” Ms. Regan said.
Walking the Dogs
I joined Mr. Jackson the next evening as he took his two Pomeranian-huskies, Princess Bambi and Bugs Bunny, on a walk along a stream.
The mood was pleasant until I asked him how he dealt with defending Ms. Owens’s more incendiary views. I specifically mentioned her claims that Mrs. Macron was a man, though the defamation suit had yet to be filed.
“I’m not getting into a tit for tat about things clients have said,” Mr. Jackson said. “I’m too smart to do it.”
I asked how he felt about an interview Ms. Owens had given to Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, in which she said that married gay men live in sin.
“Candace has never said a single homophobic thing to me,” Mr. Jackson said. “I’ve dealt with homophobia working for limousine liberals. I’ve never dealt with homophobia from Candace.”
The Pomeranian Huskies panted in the heat.
“I find it tokenizing when people make a big deal about my sexuality,” he said. “I don’t feel threatened by a single client.”
Things cooled as we moved to other topics — his (many) opinions on Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni, his thoughts on how Democrats lost their influence on pop culture. Then we parted ways.
The next day, Mr. Jackson flew to London. He had appointments lined up with British tabloid journalists and producers from “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” They were all keen to ingratiate themselves with his clients.
He sent me an email while he was away. Its subject line read: “On Record from Mitchell.”
“The reason I bristled against you when you pressed me on clients’ statements is that I love working for my clients,” he wrote. “I will protect them to the death, and I believe, if I agree to represent you, it is more than my job to protect you from the press. It is my duty.”
“I believe,” he added, “everyone has a right to tell their truth.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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