Sally Quinn, 68, third wife of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, 88, is profiled in July’s Vanity Fair as an overbearing social climber who has alienated the children from his previous marriages.
Sally, a self-styled expert on entertaining, put herself in the magazine’s cross hairs last Christmas when she scheduled their son, Quinn‘s, wedding on the same day in April when Bradlee’s granddaughter, Greta, was set to get married, thus ensuring that Bradlee’s older children couldn’t attend Quinn’s wedding.
Sally then made matters worse by writing in February about her “dysfunctional family” in her regular column in the Washington Post — which, after zealous complaints both by family members and readers, was killed by the paper’s new executive editor, Marcus Brauchli.
In another gaffe, Bradlee just came out with a book, “A Life’s Work: Fathers and Sons,” which goes into great detail about his relationship with Quinn, 27, but fails to mention the existence of his two older sons, Dino and Ben Jr. Vanity Fair says the book was “conceived by Sally.”
“The book is yet another cynical, fraudulent gambit conjured by Sally to aggrandize herself at the Bradlee family expense,” Dino told Vanity Fair’s Evgenia Peretz. “Dad should have put the brakes on her long ago while he was able.”
To illustrate Sally’s “protectiveness,” the magazine describes a trip to St. Martin where, “Quinn lost his virginity to a prostitute in a brothel bar. When he told his parents, the next morning, his father essentially congratulated him. Sally, on the other hand, was hysterical. She dragged him back to the brothel, demanded to know who the girl was, and, with Quinn in tow, escorted her to a clinic to get tested for HIV.”