Cat Marnell, the famously drug-addled beauty editor at xoJane.com, announced today that she has parted ways with the site because she refuses to get sober. At the behest of xoJane.com’s publishers, she entered rehab earlier this spring but didn’t stay clean and never totally returned to work afterwards. In an e-mail to the Post, Cat explained:
I’m always on drugs … Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next … Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers.
So, in theory, her drug addiction actually makes her a superior editorial contributor — now if only she could make those deadlines. (How does she know that her “editorial black magic” is dependent on her drug intake if she’s never worked sober?) Anyway, Cat’s former boss Jane Pratt quickly took to xoJane.com to write her own response, which was truly sad and heartfelt. She seems to regret that she didn’t try harder to help Cat deal with her addiction, and that by employing her, she was in some ways enabling it. She explains:
I can be a bit oblivious about drug use, eating disorders, addictive behaviors. Once an editor of mine lost about a third of her body weight, was staying up all night, had a drawer full of pills and fainted in the office to be carried out to an ambulance to the hospital and I STILL thought she was just stressed from work (she was probably that too, of course). Kurt and Courtney were nodding out and I thought they were just tired. I believe what people tell me.
Maybe this is partly from growing up with an addict dad. My sense of sober is off.
Long story short, Pratt writes, Marnell wasn’t getting her work done, so she’s no longer on staff. Pratt says Marnell will “write more here in the future,” but made no stipulations about Cat’s sobriety. She concluded by saying that Cat “slimed” her with some stinky lotion on her last day at the office, which apparently means that everything’s cool between them.
When we reached out to Cat for comment, she told us that she had “not gone to bed yet.” We’ll check in with her after she gets some sleep.
Earlier: 142 Minutes With Cat Marnell
