01 Jul CALL MIKE SITRICK
By Steve Oney – Los Angeles Magazine, July, 2006
Fled the scene of an accident? At war with Page Six? Taking on the most powerful man in Hollywood? Addicted to painkillers? Accused of molesting children? Call Mike Sitrick. That’s what Halle Berry, Ron Burke, Roy Disney, Rush Limbaugh, and the Catholic archdiocese did. He plays the media better than anybody.
Mike Sitrick’s corner office high in Century City’s Northrop Building could pass for that of a San Fernando Valley accountant. The sofas are maroon, the tables freen marble, and the desk and cabinetry blond wood. A LeRoy Neiman lithograph of a bar scene dominates a wall. There’s nothing about the room that suggests its occupant is one of the most powerful figures in American media. But over the past 15 y ears the crisis management public relations firm of Sitrick and Company has shaped some of the nation’s most important news stories. On this spring morning Sitrick is orchestrating the story that’s on the lips of everyone from Los Angeles to New York. “If you do that,” he is telling Ron Burkle, the billionaire former owner of the Ralphs supermarket chain, founder of Yucaipa Companies, and business partner and friend of Bill Clinton, “it’s going to appear in New York Magazine that you said, ‘No comment.’ That isn’t what you want.”
