By TER Staff
Alycia Lane is far from a household name in Los Angeles, at least not yet. But she is the latest hire at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. Lane was hired this week as an on-air reporter and weekend anchorwoman. The announcement was made yesterday by local NBC management in Los Angeles. She is expected to begin her weekend anchoring stint later this month, in the meantime she'll be doing daily reporting.
Lane's hiring would have generated little fanfare as a virtual unknown in the Los Angeles television market had she not become a overnight 'national media star' due to her meteoric rise as a gossip tabloid subject over the past year and half. Her notoriety stems from a very messy situation at her former TV job in Philadelphia where she was a local TV anchor for nearly five years.
Alycia lost that job in January of this year. She was fired after a series of events that can best be described as nothing short of a textbook example of how the world of 'news' in the internet age can turn virtually anybody, even media people themselves, into tabloid fodder in less time that it takes to read an email.
The Enterprise Report has been talking to Alycia Lane directly and extensively since she moved to Los Angeles in June. Lane relocated to Los Angeles with her boyfriend Chris Booker, who took a job as a radio DJ here recently as well.
As news of her hiring at KNBC hit in Los Angeles yesterday local media bloggers and the Los Angeles Times jumped on the tabloid story line that Alycia Lane was some kind of oversexed 'news-babe' that had despite her "bad girl" reputation landed a plum job here in the nation's second largest media market. As it goes with most headline grabbing tabloid induced stories, the facts about her story are far from the truth. The actual documented facts suggest an entirely different story.
In a series of conversations with The Enterprise Report prior to her hiring at KNBC Lane expressed her dismay at how her once solid reputation as a reporter and journalist have been dragged through the mud. Despite her ultimate vindication in the incidents that spawned her rapid rise to the front pages of the tabloid gossip world, and the top internet search engines on the web, the story of her trashed and tarnished reputation continues unabated.
Lane has a theory of why that is, and it all has to do with attractive women and the way tabloid and mainstream media make a lot of money off of them. She also believes that the series of events that led to her firing in Philadelphia are a product of a business that turned her into something other than a rational, normal intelligent woman. She believes the reason it happened is purely based on capitalism and profit at its worst. Her reputation had to go in order for the news outlets to sell a sexier tawdry audience grabbing story. The sellable plot line meant she had to be trashed and vilified.
Despite the tabloid headlines, the actual facts about what happened to Alycia Lane are clear in the end.
In early 2007, she was accused of sending sexy bikini photos to an ESPN anchor who was married and that the man's wife had inadvertently intercepted them.
In late 2008, she was charged with assaulting a NYPD police officer in December in conjunction with a traffic dispute and accused of calling the female cop less than flattering things related to her sexual preference. The New York charges were later dropped.
You would think once vindicated in a serious legal case Lane would have gone back to work. If you thought so, you would be wrong. She never got the chance. She was fired long before that ever happened. According to her bosses at her old job the media attention had become too much for them to deal with. Her former boss summed it up this way in a statement released at the time to the media:
"it would be impossible for Alycia to continue to report the news as she herself has become the focus of so many news stories."
As for those supposed sexy photos sent to an ESPN anchor, Alycia claims they were friends and that it was all done in jest.
The serious side of her gossip nightmare was much more telling. Her co-anchor in Philadelphia, a guy named Larry Mendte, who claims to have had some kind of 'close' personal relationship with Alycia in the past, was later charged and convicted of hacking into her email accounts by federal authorities. He admitted he used those emails to spread rumors and gossip about Alycia to others in the media.
(Larry Mendte and Alycia Lane at KYW-TV, Philidelphia)
Lane has filed a civil lawsuit against her former employer in Philadelphia TV station KYW-TV, her former co-anchor Larry Mendte, now a convicted felon and others. The civil cases have yet to be decided.
Although Lane spoke directly to The Enterprise Report in great detail about her views on what happened to her in Philadelphia, her life since, and her recent hiring at KNBC and other personal matters, TER decided to not publish her direct quotes, at her request, due to her on going civil legal cases back in Philadelphia.
Lane believes that when your personal and professional reputation is smeared publicly, the only vindication worth anything in the real world, especially in a world driven by tabloid headlines that make media corporations loads of profit, is in a court of law. That may sound strange coming for a broadcast journalist working in what has become of local TV news, but that's her view.
She also believes that moving forward and being happy in her life is the best revenge. She says that is what her family taught her and what she has been doing a lot of lately.
We'll have to wait and see what happens next.
