In April, George Mickum strode through the gold revolving doors of the Carlyle, demanding to be let into the apartment belonging to the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. He’d been sent there, Mickum claimed, to check on an “art object.”
Mickum had long been a familiar face at the luxury Upper East Side hotel. The 30-year-old was hard to forget; he spoke in an exaggerated transatlantic lilt like a character from “The Great Gatsby” and always had a Birkin bag swinging on his shoulder. Staffers had seen him plenty of times before, swilling martinis at Bemelmans with his best friend, Patty’s daughter Gillian Hearst, and getting his silky blond locks coiffed by his hairdresser at the hotel’s on-site salon.
But on this occasion, Mickum’s arrival caused an uproar. The staff refused to let him into Hearst’s apartment. Soon after, flyers with Mickum’s face were handed out throughout the hotel, banning him from the fifth floor “effective immediately.”
“Mr. George Mickum is the former friend / family acquaintance / real estate broker of The Hearst Family,” it read, adding, “If seen please call Security.”
Seemingly overnight, the man Gillian Hearst’s kids called “Uncle George” was officially persona non grata on the Upper East Side.
It was an abrupt end to an eight-year social climb that had brought Mickum into the inner circle of one of the country’s most esteemed families. Before the excommunication, Mickum had made himself ubiquitous at the galas and events frequented by the city’s blue bloods, where he shook hands with everyone and clawed his way into each photo op. His mother, Sally Painter, was a well-connected DC lobbyist who’d worked in the Clinton administration and now ran her own firm, Blue Star Strategies. Mickum set about charting a course from the smoke-filled rooms of the Potomac to the champagne-drenched ballrooms of the Upper East Side. Later, he’d tout “Mother’s” diplomatic connections as his gateway into New York’s high society. “They were just littered all over the floor, the names that he dropped,” said Peter Davis, who documents New York society as the editor in chief of Avenue magazine.
In the ’70s and ’80s, gay men dubbed “walkers” often accompanied prominent women like Jackie O and Barbara Walters to events when their husbands would rather stay home. Mickum took on the antiquated role with gusto. He pursued the fashion heiress Alessia Fendi, cozied up to the writer and influencer Hannah Stella, and edged his way into the orbit of Nick Hissom, the stepson of the billionaire developer Steve Wynn. In turn, he was invited to sail on yachts and stay at people’s second homes in the Hamptons and Palm Beach. But it was his friendship with Hearst that cemented his place in New York’s upper crust. Though they’d met years earlier, at an event for Prince Charles in London, they became truly inseparable after reconnecting in 2019, the year after Hearst split from her husband.
Within a few years, an Upper East Side mainstay went from “never seeing this person to seeing him everywhere,” she said. “I’d open my fridge and he would be there, sitting on the milk.”
Then last February, news broke that Mickum had sold fake Birkin bags to several people. “Manhattan socialites are up in arms!” Page Six cried, with one source crowning him a “modern male version” of Anna Delvey who “targets wealthy women.” By the time he showed up at the Carlyle begging to be let into Patty Hearst’s apartment, people had identified at least six fake Kellys and Birkins that Mickum sold to three individuals, some at more than $20,000 a pop. Worse, the women he duped had been some of his closest friends.
Rumor had it that Hearst, whom he’d lived with alongside her three daughters during the pandemic lockdown, had bought several bags from Mickum. She was mortified, and furious. She blocked him on social media and stopped answering his texts. The rest of her circle followed suit. He wasn’t invited to Save Venice’s Byzantine Ball, arguably the social event of the season, or to the Frick’s garden party, or to the Central Park Conservancy’s “hat luncheon.”
But he was still all anyone could talk about. At the Frick’s garden party at the Met Breuer in May, acquaintances analyzed his personality and patted themselves on the back for clocking him as a fake from the start. “I always thought he was a disgusting human being,” one acquaintance said, adding that Mickum “had gross fingernails.” Meanwhile, former friends continue to wonder if anything Mickum said was true. Prathan Peter Poopat, the founder of the luxury sneaker brand Common Projects — which Mickum has claimed to co-own — dubbed him a “fashion George Santos.”
The thing that flummoxes people most is that Mickum seemed to have already achieved the consummate social climber’s dream. He’d gotten onto the toughest guest lists, had a seat reserved for him at the best tables. Mickum, of all people, would’ve known that social capital is priceless. How did he get caught in such an obvious scam when everything else in his social life had been so delicately finessed? How could he have been so greedy, so brazen, so stupid, or, god forbid, so poor that he would risk losing a lifetime at the Hearst table for $20,000 cash up front?
When George Mickum moved to Manhattan in 2015 as a 21-year-old graduate of the University of Delaware, he didn’t have a membership to the Southampton Bathing Corporation or a network of close-knit schoolmates from Dalton or Trinity. What he did have was a dream: He wanted to be in that 1%, to live the good life, the Bay Area philanthropist Elisabeth Thieriot said.
Thieriot met Mickum when he was a teenager, during a dinner in Windsor Castle. Mickum’s mother, Sally Painter, had earned a place in the royal orbit by convincing wealthy donors to contribute to Prince Charles’ charities. In one Facebook photo, Painter and a young Mickum, wearing velvet monogrammed loafers, stand beaming next to the future king. Thieriot said she saw Mickum as a polite young man with a “lovely sense of aesthetics, proportions.” She was impressed, and soon invited the teenager to contribute to her magazine, FSHN (which stands for “Fashionable, Sustainable, Haute, and Nouveau”). Mickum had his own column, Politically Correct, where he gave fashion and etiquette advice for jet-setters and proffered crucial tips such as “in a country where head coverings are strongly suggested you cannot go wrong with Hermes.”
For as long as anyone could remember, Mickum stood out. As a 14-year-old student at the Fields School in Washington, DC — a $52,750-a-year private school for artsy children — he started a styling firm named Georgeous. Even as a young teen, Mickum had his signature swoop of blond hair and the confidence to charge up to $375 an hour for fashion advice, according to local news articles at the time. A former classmate said that from early on Mickum recognized the value of a name brand, making it his mission to befriend a girl in their class who was related to the Kennedys.
Painter introduced him to a client base of “ambassadors and other D.C. heavyweights,” a 2012 profile of Mickum in a local news outlet said. His father, Paul Mickum, was a lawyer from a family of lawyers (an award at Georgetown Law is named after Mickum’s grandfather, George Mickum III). His parents separated when he was young, and he frequently accompanied his mother on work trips and to events as her plus-one. He was equally comfortable hobnobbing with high-school kids and with the rich European ambassadors Painter worked for, and he was particularly skilled at charming older women. “Sally often described George as her best friend,” a former business contact of Painter’s said.
After graduating from college, Mickum arrived in New York eager to make a name for himself outside the DC khakis-and-polos crowd. He said he worked in public relations and sales at the fashion showroom The News, though Common Projects’ Poopat recalled him as a junior employee who worked the reception desk. By night he attended events populated by Manhattan’s upper crust, including Town & Country parties at the Carlyle and book launches at Baccarat. The stylist PJ Pascual said Mickum would throw himself in front of the party photographers like Patrick McMullan, desperate to see his photo online the next morning.
Mickum befriended the former “Real Housewives” star Ramona Singer. He wrote to the uptown fixture Lauren Lawrence asking her to interpret one of his dreams in a column she penned for the New York Daily News. The pair had been introduced over dinner at the old-money social club Doubles. “He said: I don’t know anyone in New York, and I’m counting on you to introduce me to everyone,” Lawrence recalled. He attended jewelry events for Van Cleef and Bulgari with Nicole Salmasi, a wealthy woman in her 60s who once earned a shout-out in The New York Times after her husband bought her a $250,000 diamond pendant “on impulse” at a Chopard event.
Not all of Mickum’s friends were over 50. He became friendly with a young woman who was seeing the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the time. Mickum and the woman grew so close that they even shared a tiny poodle mix named Trudy, whom Mickum said shared his expensive tastes; the pooch’s teeth had supposedly fallen out from exclusively eating caviar. Mickum was eager to advertise his own connections to Schmidt. He’d talk about his close relationship with “Eric,” inviting new acquaintances to join him on the billionaire’s yacht. (A person close to Schmidt said, “Eric was not familiar with this person.”)
But Mickum was always looking for the next shiny thing. His early acquaintances may have been rich, but they “weren’t Rockefellers,” the society publicist R. Couri Hay said; they were “on the lower end of the social scale.” To get where he needed, Mickum needed a friend with real clout.
In New York, there are certain names that give you the key to the city. They’re hammered into its brick and mortar, festooned on its grandest buildings: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Astor. For Mickum, that access arrived in the form of Gillian Hearst, the great-granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who inspired Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” It was less than a 10-minute walk from Mickum’s modest one-bedroom apartment on Central Park South to Hearst Tower, the 46-story skyscraper on 57th Street that housed publications like Cosmopolitan and Esquire.
Gillian Hearst was not always a Park Avenue princess. In the mid-1970s, Gillian’s mother, Patty Hearst, became a national sensation after being kidnapped by the far-left militant Symbionese Liberation Army. After spending 21 months in prison for crimes committed alongside the group (she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton), Patty married a San Francisco cop, Bernard Shaw, and moved to Wilton, Connecticut. She raised her two kids — Gillian and Lydia — in the relatively low-key town of 18,000. Shaw took a gig working as the head of security for the Hearst Corporation.
When Gillian Hearst finally arrived in New York at 22, she seemed “younger than her years,” someone who knew her said — surprisingly wide-eyed and naive for a woman with her pedigree. Instead of posing for Maxim and Vogue like her model/actress sister Lydia, Hearst worked behind the scenes at Town & Country (a Hearst publication) as a senior editor managing the social pages. The only magazine cover she ever graced was Quest’s 2021 philanthropy issue, after she was elected chair of the associates committee of the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Hearst is famously private. Many of the more than 50 people we spoke with in the course of reporting refused to even say her name out loud, for fear of offending the media heiress. “This is Citizen Kane we’re talking about,” a friend of Hearst said. “They have a lot to protect.”
(When asked for comment on a variety of details, a lawyer for Hearst emailed, “I can assert that the majority of this information is not only erroneous but grossly misleading.” Hearst didn’t respond to several requests for an interview.)
Still, Hearst became a regular on the gala circuit, eschewing the cutouts and razzle favored by the new-money set for headbands and cap sleeves. After marrying the lawyer Christian Simonds at the Pierre in 2007, the pair had three daughters, whom they raised in a $10 million Renaissance Revival-style townhouse on the Upper West Side.
Hearst built a circle of confidants, including Krista Corl, a fellow Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering chair; Dee Dee Sides, a nonprofit consultant; and Scott Buccheit and Naeem Delbridge, a longtime Manhattan power couple. “She’s a classic Taurus,” said Pascual, the stylist who’s been friends with Hearst for decades. “We trust. We’re loyal up till the end.” But some felt the line between being Hearst’s friend and a sycophant could blur. After all, she was the one paying for the charity-gala tables and hosting people at Wyntoon, a private, remote fairy-tale-style village in California owned by the Hearst family. Invitations required staying in Hearst’s good graces and constantly buttering her up, someone who knows Hearst said. “The whole family feeds off that yes mentality,” he added. “She needs those people to be like, absolutely, Gillian, you’re the best.”
Hearst and Mickum met briefly years ago, at a Prince’s Trust event in London, as both of their mothers were involved in the royal family’s charities. But Mickum and Hearst’s friendship blossomed in late 2019, a year after Hearst and Simonds’ divorce and shortly after Hearst’s brief relationship with the producer Matthew Kehoe.
Instead of spending the anxious early days of the pandemic with a romantic partner, Hearst ended up hunkered down in the Berkshires with her three daughters; Buccheit and Delbridge, her friends of over a decade; and Mickum. Perhaps because Mickum had come through two of the most trusted pathways imaginable — the future king of England, and her mom — Hearst welcomed the young man who showed up at her door loaded with gifts like truffles and caviar. One person who knows the family said she initially thought Mickum was a chef given the amount of luxury foods he brought over. “George has a way to penetrate people,” Pascual said.
From the outside, it was an idyllic lockdown. Delbridge posted a photo of Hearst, Buccheit, and Mickum alongside Hearst’s three daughters and the group’s pets — Wicket the Pekingese, Mario Glen Coco the Frenchie, and Trudy the poodle mix — in her estate in woodsy Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Both humans and canines wore personalized onesies, pink for the girls and blue for the boys. “So cute,” Patty Hearst commented. The group spent the pandemic drinking, cooking, playing tennis, and dining out at the nearby members-only Stockbridge Golf Club. Mickum was up there for two or three months, quickly becoming part of the family, two people close to the Hearsts said.
When the world reopened, Mickum was Hearst’s designated plus-one. He was “kind of vouched for” by someone everyone knew and trusted, a former friend said. He escorted her to the New York Botanical Garden’s orchid gala at the Plaza and the Central Park Conservancy’s winter luncheon at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He and other friends of Hearst’s spent a week in Wyntoon, dressing up in Bavarian outfits. Mickum even tagged along on family trips to the Bahamas, staying at the Albany resort, an uber-exclusive destination owned by Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, and Justin Timberlake where the cheapest accommodations start at $3,000 a night. (Mickum would tell people he was “close friends” with Albany’s other part owner, the Tottenham chief Joe Lewis, someone who met him at the resort said.)
Not all of Hearst’s friends liked Mickum. Buccheit and Mickum clashed during lockdown, with Buccheit mocking Mickum’s stories and calling him a liar. “To know him is to loathe him,” Buccheit wrote in an email. “To paraphrase Mary McCarthy when asked about Lillian Hellman, ‘I can’t stand him, everything he says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” Pascual was similarly skeptical. Mickum came off as pretentious and desperate, Pascual said. Mickum was always mooching off Hearst, who paid for everything, and embarrassing himself by getting drunk at galas.
“He was starving to be in that social scene,” Pascual said.
By late 2020, Mickum was scheduling breakfast, lunch, drinks, and dinner with different social figures, all in the same day. In hindsight, people said, Mickum’s closest friends seemed to conform to a type: wealthy women at vulnerable points in their lives, often going through breakups or divorces. He made himself indispensable in these relationships, mostly just by being there; good company is one of the few things that’s hard to put a price on.
In addition to Hearst, Mickum became close with Christie Grimm, the chief creative officer at Guest of a Guest, who helped cement his presence on the charity-gala circuit and gave him occasional opportunities to write for the site. He also spent much of the pandemic getting wasted in Steve Wynn’s palatial apartment on Central Park South with a group of 20-something art-world types orbiting Wynn’s stepson, the 31-year-old collector Nick Hissom. Hissom’s boyfriend and business partner, Kameron Ramirez, said Hissom was introduced to Mickum “by a very wealthy and legitimate friend who suggested George may be a good business contact regarding other art collectors he was connected to,” though Ramirez added that “there was never a deeply personal relationship between Nick and George.”
A former friend said that one time, after a dinner at Nobu, Mickum got so drunk that he passed out in Wynn’s building’s elevator wearing a fur coat. “So he kind of screwed things up for them,” the former friend said.
Mickum would host dinner parties for a rotating group of 20- and 30-somethings at his one-bedroom apartment on Central Park South. (Two former friends recalled Mickum claiming he moved to the $4,500-a-month apartment because “Mother” said a previous, fabulously extravagant Park Avenue apartment, which neither had actually seen, intimidated potential suitors.) He served guests on his family’s vintage silver and showed off his art collection, which he said included a Picasso, a Hunt Slonem, and a Damien Hirst. He’d cook — two or three courses, with caviar to start, and always a lot more drinks than food. It could feel like he was putting on a show for his friends, with his endless over-the-top stories about “champers and caviar.”
“He was really charismatic, and outrageous, and fun, and polite,” a close friend from the time said. A dinner party at Mickum’s felt cozy. It wasn’t necessarily debaucherous, she said, but everyone always ended up drinking more than intended, egged on by Mickum’s own willingness to be silly.
Mickum presented himself as a man with unlimited access — someone who could help people get what they wanted, particularly things that money alone couldn’t buy. He said he could introduce friends to art dealers, help them procure international visas, even sort out childcare logistics. He worked as a broker at Douglas Elliman and offered to help the Hearst family sell an apartment they owned in the Carlyle. (The two-bedroom unit sold — without Mickum’s assistance — for $1.5 million in May.) “He would know people’s weaknesses and what they wanted and somehow always have something to offer,” a former close friend said.
Sometimes he delivered. Another close friend said Mickum once gave her a $1,000 loan “within minutes” when she needed it because of a credit-card crisis. Another time he found her a lawyer to help with her divorce. Once, after Mickum left drinks with friends early, someone who’d just met him for the first time asked why people put up with such an over-the-top character. “Everybody was like, yeah, he’s crazy, but he shows up whenever somebody actually needs a friend,” she said.
Mickum even positioned himself as a master matchmaker. The rule was if he set you up with your spouse, you owed him a Harry Winston ring. One of his favorite prospects was the hedge-fund founder David Fiszel. Mickum once hosted a Sunday-afternoon gathering at Fiszel’s townhouse, three female invitees said. One said Mickum promised a selection of eligible young men; instead, when she arrived, the room was filled with mainly women. It felt like Mickum was “looking to pass out girls,” the invitee added, noting that Mickum walked around the townhouse “yelling and asking the help for caviar.” (A person close to Fiszel denied any formal matchmaking arrangement.)
While it’s unclear how many Winston rings Mickum actually secured, there were perks. As he wrote in his Guest of a Guest article on “Being The Best Boat Guest,” “it is far better to have friends with boats” than to have a boat — “that’s simply a fact.” In July 2022, while Fiszel was out of the country, he agreed to let Mickum throw a luncheon, cohosted with Mickum’s mother, Painter, at his Hamptons home, under the condition that it was outdoors only. (The four-bedroom house, just down the road from Martha Stewart’s Hamptons home, rents for $250,000 a summer.) The party was in the yard, with sunflowers on blue tablecloths, croquet and caviar and Champagne. Everyone entering had to sign an NDA.
But despite the generosity of friends, there were still J. Mendel minks and Vacheron Constantin watches to buy, caviar at the Mark, $120 Peking duck at Hutong, and flights to Paris, the Bahamas, and Istanbul. Plus, guests on yachts must always bring a gift, according to Mickum, who recommended a pair of Hermès binoculars and caviar, “because I find that getting fairly priced tins of caviar in St. Barths or on the Med is a struggle.”
Most of Mickum’s peers lived off family funds, and his friends assumed there was some sort of parental allowance supporting his lavish lifestyle. Mickum was vocally horrified by any mention of working past 1 or 2 p.m., one acquaintance said. Once, at a birthday party at Tao, he loudly announced to the table that “working out is so middle class.” His stories about “Mother” portrayed her as endlessly connected and wealthy — the type of person who renovated a seven-story townhouse in Georgetown to be filled with lounges but without a single guestroom for her own son to sleep in. When Mickum’s friends actually met Painter in person, they were surprised by how unassuming she was, with one saying she seemed straight out of a Lands’ End ad.
The trick was, he acted like he was born to be in the upper echelons of New York society, said a fashion executive whose girlfriend was close friends with Mickum.
“It’s much easier to let someone into your circle” who seems like they already belong there, the executive said. “That’s what I think his method is.”
Mickum’s tendency to exaggerate was legendary. He never “let the truth get in the way of a good story,” a former close friend said. People raised their eyebrows when Mickum bragged about his friendship with “Jeffy Bezos,” told stories about shopping for $68,000 bracelets with Melinda French Gates, or claimed to be dating the pop star Shawn Mendes. Once, he told friends he’d acquired a permit to carry a concealed gun with the help of his “friends” Bill and Hillary Clinton. But the Upper East Side was full of eccentrics whose over-the-top tales everyone knew to take with a grain of salt. They also tended to make the best dinner guests. “If you stopped talking to people in New York just because they changed their name or they lied about their age, there would be no one left to talk to,” one acquaintance said.
While Mickum boasted about his job at Douglas Elliman, he was in fact an extremely junior broker with scarcely any listings. He talked about selling his fashion brand, Georgeous, to Neiman Marcus for $1 million, but there’s no record of him doing so. Two former close friends said Mickum would frequently discuss his ownership of Common Projects, a trendy sneaker brand selling $625 shoes, down to the minutiae of his share. But Poopat, Common Projects’ founder, said Mickum never worked for or invested in the company. He recalled meeting a “very flamboyant” person named George once or twice while he worked as an intern or receptionist at the fashion showroom The News, but that was the extent of their relationship.
People also questioned Mickum’s supposed relationships at jewelry houses and art galleries. One multimillionaire entrepreneur recalled Mickum aggressively attempting to sell her emeralds at a party, the very first time she met him; she steered clear for years. Another friend whose family worked in the gem industry said Mickum would ask him offhand to source extremely rare stones, such as a 10-carat diamond that cost more than a million dollars. He never did, and Mickum never followed up. Another former friend who worked in finance at the time said Mickum told him he had a direct line to Damien Hirst’s studio and asked if any of his clients would like to buy paintings from him, as Mickum had “several Damien pieces” he was trying to get rid of.
Art and jewelry were tricky things to unload; there was insurance to buy and appraisers swooping in with magnifying glasses. Bags, however, weren’t always subject to quite the same level of scrutiny.
To many, though, they were a work of art. Hermès bags, like the Birkin and the Kelly, have always been symbols of unattainable luxury. The baseline price is about $8,000, though prices can hit $400,000 for exotic skins and jeweled exteriors. But money alone cannot buy a Birkin, especially a rare one. “To get the premium bags you have to spend an exorbitant amount of money” with the brand over time, said Alexis Clarbour, Vice President of sales at the luxury-bag reseller Madison Avenue Couture. A lot of really rich people don’t have the time or the patience to spend years waiting for the opportunity to buy a rare Hermès bag, Clarbour said. As a result, licensed resellers often sell bags for two to three times their retail prices.
All of this has created a booming market for fakes. Recent headlines have trumpeted the rise of rich New Yorkers buying knockoffs and the explosion of high-quality counterfeits from China, with some “superfake” manufacturers going so far as to travel to Italy to buy leather from the same markets as Hermès. Paul Wharton, a high-end stylist based in Washington, DC, estimated that 50% to 80% of his clients’ Birkin collections are fake. “Once you’ve bought one or two, you’ve paid your dues, and the rest of us will turn a blind eye to your fancy knockoff,” Wharton said.
Mickum always turned up his nose at fakes. After all, as he told his friends, he had the ultimate connection at Hermès: Michael Coste, the legendary external-relations executive dubbed “the VIP whisperer.” It seemed believable enough. Hannah Stella, the influencer, said she saw Mickum’s closet full of what appeared to be dozens of Birkins and Kelly bags. Mickum had told her that, as a friend of Coste’s, he could get himself or anyone else an appointment at an Hermès store anytime he wanted.
In September 2021, Stella was on a weekslong European vacation with her husband, traveling through the Amalfi Coast, the Greek islands, and the French Riviera. Knowing Stella wanted a new Birkin, Mickum had promised to set up a meeting with her and Coste at the flagship Hermès store in Paris. But once Stella was abroad, Mickum told her the appointment needed to be rescheduled for a day when she was set to be at Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc, a luxury resort frequented by everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Kardashians. Stella left Antibes early to head to Paris.
But as soon as Stella arrived at the store, it was clear something was wrong. When she announced she was there for a meeting with Michael Coste, no one had any idea what she was talking about. Confused, Stella emailed Coste, hoping she could correctly guess his email address. As she sat in the store, humiliated and waiting for Coste to respond, she began to sob. It wasn’t even really about the bag, she said nearly two years later; she just didn’t understand how one of her closest friends could have put her in such an uncomfortable situation. When Coste responded, it wasn’t to apologize for the mix-up. Instead, he denied even knowing who Mickum was.
When Stella asked Mickum what happened, he blamed the confusion on the power dynamics at Hermès. Somehow, he said, he must have ended up on Coste’s “naughty list.” Stella was baffled. Why would her friend invent a meeting whose veracity would crumble when she showed up at the store? On the other hand, why would a high-ranking executive at Hermès deny knowing Mickum if they were in fact close?
“Both things seemed impossible,” she said. She decided to put the incident behind her. The store allowed her to buy a gold Birkin 30 the next day, which softened the blow, even if she suspected the appointment had materialized because of employees’ pity. Plus, she enjoyed spending time with the eccentric Mickum. Yet she found herself trusting Mickum just a bit less.
“I think that he had these real human connections,” Stella said of Mickum. But looking back at the bizarre incident, it was almost as if Mickum couldn’t stop himself from lying. It felt, she said, “a little bit pathological.”
In June 2022, Mickum delivered an unassuming Bergdorf Goodman shopping bag to a Midtown East condo. Inside was precious cargo: a new 40-centimeter version of Hermès’ rare Haut à Courroies Birkin, or HAC, in khaki green, fresh off the runway.
The recipient was a fashion executive, a former financier in his mid-30s, who’d waited months for the delivery and paid Mickum $21,000 for the HAC. But when he looked inside, he was disturbed. There was no signature orange Hermès box. There wasn’t even a dust bag; Mickum claimed his mom’s assistant would drop it off later. Instead, the executive said, it was as if someone had found “an old Nike gym bag in your closet, and you dumped it in a Bergdorf Goodman bag.” The HAC itself was floppy and sagging, without the rigidity an Hermès bag should have. He had no doubt he’d bought a fake — an “obvious, slouching, laughably low-quality fake” at that.
The executive had long suspected that Mickum, whom he saw as a “harmless” eccentric friend of his girlfriend, didn’t have the connections he claimed. He didn’t like the way Mickum had weaseled his way into his life seemingly overnight. But Mickum was one of the executive’s girlfriend’s closest friends — her “partner in brunch” — who she saw nearly every day. She always defended him, pointing out all the ways Mickum had tried to help them out. Sometimes it was small things, like helping with cooking. Other times the stakes were higher, like when Mickum tried to appoint himself as the executive’s real-estate agent, showing him apartments in the Aman and the residences at the Mandarin Oriental. Mickum had for months been boasting of his close friendship with Coste and offering to source bags for the couple. The executive knew that no amount of money could buy him the Hermès connections it would take to get him a brand-new HAC straight off the runway. He decided to give it a shot.
In April, Mickum sent the executive a photo of what appeared to be a receipt from the Hermès store in Paris. It had the address of the brand’s flagship on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a purchase date of March 12, and even a pale yellow Hermès watermark. It was all the proof the executive needed to wire Mickum the 19,200 euros, or about $21,000, for the bag.
The $21,000 was a drop in the bucket for the executive. But the betrayal cut deeper. When the executive broke the news to his girlfriend, she was heartbroken. She and Mickum had become friends two years earlier with a birthday present: a simple notebook with her initials engraved on the front. She was touched by the unexpected, kind gesture from a near stranger, and within a month she and Mickum had become inseparable. They met three or four times a week for long lunches, walks in Central Park, and shopping outings at Van Cleef and Cartier. He always walked her home. “He made women feel safe,” she said.
The girlfriend knew some people were turned off by Mickum’s bluster. But she also felt bad for him. Whenever Mickum showed a flash of vulnerability — like a rare moment when he cried in front of her — he’d immediately revert to his flamboyant Georgeous persona. His lies felt like a “defense mechanism,” she said, not cruelty. So when the executive told her Mickum had sold him a fake bag, she didn’t want to believe that her best friend had tried to scam her boyfriend. She set up a meeting with the Hermès reseller Madison Avenue Couture, a small part of her hoping that somehow her boyfriend was mistaken.
The next day she entered the office and nervously handed the bag to Alexis Clarbour, who confirmed the worst. “I don’t think they’ve even produced this bag yet,” Clarbour said as she skeptically examined the cheap-looking satchel in front of her. Hermès bags have an architectural stiffness to them, like tiny buildings erected with scaffolding. The thing in front of her was practically floppy, like a bouncy castle that had lost half its air. What’s more, when she looked inside, there was no date stamp indicating when the bag was produced and no craft stamp denoting the artisan who’d produced it. The best superfakes rendered these details with such accuracy that even experts sometimes struggled to tell them apart from the real thing. But the bag in front of her wasn’t even close. It was such a brazen fraud, Clarbour said, that it was hard to believe Mickum had tried to pull it off. The receipt Mickum had given them from the Hermès flagship in Paris was similarly error-riddled, at least to Clarbour’s trained eye — even the font was wrong.
The girlfriend wanted to confront Mickum. But the executive wanted his money back. He texted Mickum that something felt “off” about the bag and that Mickum should ask Coste for a refund. Mickum agreed, sending a cashier’s check for $10,000 in early August. As the executive and his girlfriend waited for the remaining $11,000, they tried to keep their distance from Mickum. In response, he courted them harder, texting the girlfriend every day, asking her out for drinks, and even showing up at her apartment building unannounced. He invited the couple to the US Open and to an event his mom was supposedly holding with Asian dignitaries from the UN. Finally, in late September, three months after delivering the fake, Mickum sent them a second cashier check, fully refunding the amount the executive had paid.
Money in hand, the executive and his girlfriend set up dinner with a couple they’d met through Mickum: a hedge-funder and his wife, both wealthy New Yorkers born in Turkey. Over dinner, the Turkish couple divulged that the wife had bought two bags from Mickum, a Birkin and a smaller Kelly Cut bag, and was buying a rare Kelly picnic bag with a turquoise leather flap and a wicker body. He had quoted her just over $20,000 for the picnic bag — a steal, given that they typically resold for upwards of $60,000. The hedge-funder’s wife broke down in tears at Madison Avenue Couture the next day when Clarbour confirmed her bags were also fake.
“She said: ‘You don’t understand,'” Clarbour recalled. “‘He knows my kids. He’s traveled with me. We’ve gone on vacations together.’ It’s not someone she saw at parties — it was someone who was in her home.”
One fake bag could be a fluke. But four fake bags was enough to start a frenzy. The hedge-funder’s wife confronted Mickum. He stopped reaching out to the executive and his girlfriend but never apologized. Rumors began to swirl. One Upper East Sider said people were being told to cut Mickum out of their lives. “No one would give details — just that he’d done something bad, something really bad,” she said.
Mickum, meanwhile, remained a Guest of a Guest “man about town,” telling the outlet in mid-December that his holiday wish list included platform mini Uggs and a vintage Cartier tiara. Just before the holidays, Mickum posted a photo of himself on a private jet wearing a diamond-encrusted Patek Philippe watch, a white Birkin bag on the table next to him. The caption read “IYKYK” — “if you know you know.” He and Hearst spent New Year’s together at Albany in the Bahamas. He showed up to the resort’s lavish New Year’s Eve party toting a white Kelly bag. He, Hearst, and her kids snacked on an all-you-can-eat buffet of truffle pasta and wagyu.
An implosion was inevitable. Hearst knew the two women who’d uncovered the fakes — because Mickum had introduced her to them. “If you’re going to be selling it to the same circle, then it’s just the domino effect,” PJ Pascual said. “New York is just so small.” Hearst had bought at least three bags from Mickum. In summer 2022, Pascual said, Hearst was gushing over lunch about Mickum finding her a Birkin 25 in baby pink that resells for about $30,000 in the secondary market. With Mickum’s tendency to embellish, Pascual was skeptical, but he kept quiet, knowing Hearst didn’t want to hear anything negative about one of her closest friends.
Selling fake bags and forging Hermès receipts was bad enough. But after all that, Mickum continued to push his luck; he went ahead and tried to sell Hearst the very same wicker picnic bag he’d originally sourced for the Turkish hedge-funder’s wife. It was almost as if he wanted to get caught — the opposite of damage control.
Buccheit caught wind of the rumors. After months of being stuck vacationing and partying with Mickum thanks to their shared best friend, Buccheit jumped at the chance to investigate. He reached out to the Turkish couple and the executive’s girlfriend, passing along their stories to Hearst. Hearst confronted Mickum in January, demanding a refund. But the real issue wasn’t the tens of thousands of dollars Hearst wasted; it was Mickum’s betrayal. Hearst had let her guard down. She’d let this man into her homes. He’d spent hours with her young children, bringing caviar to their birthday parties and helping them with their schoolwork. On January 14, Buccheit texted Pascual to deliver the exciting news. “LOL, he’s caught,” he wrote. “She’s done with him.”
“It’s not just about the bags,” Pascual said. The most disturbing thing was Mickum’s scheme to “inch his way into the family.”
By this point, the women duped by Mickum were out for blood. They contacted the publicist R. Couri Hay. They wanted justice, tabloid style. And they wanted their names out of headlines. Hay sent Page Six receipts and photos of the fake bags. On February 22, Page Six published an article alleging that Mickum had scammed top socialites by selling them fake Birkins. The article said Mickum partially refunded one of the women, transferring $22,000 to her account on January 31.
“They wanted him kicked out of society and kicked out of the city,” Hay said. “And I think to some degree that happened.”
After the article was published, New York closed its doors to George Mickum. Within 24 hours his entire social world had evaporated. Former friends cut off contact; Hearst blocked him on social media. Socialites started reaching out to the event-photography website BFA to have their pictures with Mickum removed from the site, with dozens of pictures disappearing each day thereafter.
Over steak frites at La Goulue and martinis at Café Carlyle, the Mickum scandal became a source of rampant speculation, finger-pointing, and schadenfreude. It became an opportunity to close ranks — to reaffirm who’s in and who’s out. “That’s why you don’t let new people in the club,” Hay said. “You just don’t know who these people are.”
After the Page Six story ran, Stella posted a TikTok about her humiliating fake appointment at Hermès Paris. Soon, she said, more people started messaging her their own strange stories about Mickum’s unrealized promises. In February, Avenue magazine published an article about a disastrous trip to Turkey that Mickum went on as the guest of the Turkish couple. After the hedge-funder’s wife gave Mickum thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry to take back to the US, Mickum told friends he was stopped by customs and ended up spending the night in a Turkish jail. Avenue described the wife as still frantically trying to retrieve the jewels from customs.
Even Guest of a Guest, where Mickum used to publish his articles, went on the attack, with a contributor, Alexander Hankin, writing a piece, pegged to “the Birkin Bandit,” about how to figure out “who in your crew is grifting you” by concocting “deceptive backstories and tales of trust funds just to get their foot in the door.”
A lot of the wilder speculation in the community has come to center on Mickum’s mom, Sally Painter, whose high-profile relationship building has brought its own share of controversy. Her firm, Blue Star Strategies, which represented the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, was caught up in a political uproar after Republican operatives pushed claims that Burisma and its board member Hunter Biden used their connection to the president to illegally influence American policy. In 2021, the Justice Department investigated Blue Star over allegations of illegal foreign lobbying, though the investigation has since been closed. Some of Mickum’s former acquaintances have become fixated on this supposed “connection” between the liar in their midst and the liars running the country; one person speculated that Mickum had ties to a “soft coup” in Ukraine. “The word on the streets on the Upper East Side” is that “they’re practically a crime family,” Hay said.
We tried to talk to Painter and Mickum several times, but they refused to comment. Mickum went dark on his famously active social-media accounts, deleting his Instagram. He has, however, remained active on dating apps like Bumble and Tinder, posting red-carpet photos and advertising himself as a 6-foot-tall “avid traveler.” As of July, Painter still had a photo of Mickum as the header on her Facebook page.
Nobody has pressed charges against Mickum. The victims are embarrassed to have been conned; coming out publicly would only make them look worse. “Having worked at Town & Country and gotten fooled on a Birkin bag seems oxymoronic,” one person who knows Hearst said. Another acquaintance described it as “a stain” on her reputation. Nobody knows exactly how many bags he sold and to how many people. One former friend said she heard of 12 to 15, which would mean he could have made hundreds of thousands of dollars off the scam. Mickum hasn’t acknowledged selling his friends fake bags, even privately, nor has he apologized.
Still, some sympathetic to Mickum said he was simply trying to fit in in a relentlessly status-obsessed world where there’s constant pressure to wear your wealth on your sleeve. Mickum wanted to feel that “he was contributing something,” Thieriot said, and “that’s what it took for these people to accept him.”
New York has always been a city of reinvention, of faking it till you make it. If you weren’t born with a gold-plated name like Hearst, you have to create your own mythology. And once you’ve made it, the climb isn’t over: There’s always another rung on the ladder, a bigger boat, a better villa, a bag made of fancier leather, a friend with a posher name. Which might explain why so many people interviewed seemed so downright gleeful about Mickum’s downfall. They identify with him, and so they pride themselves on being nothing like him. They’ve convinced themselves they deserve their spot on the VIP list — even if getting there meant they had to lie about their age, or their upbringing, or the provenance of the jewels dangling from their wrist.
In a New York Times Magazine feature about the rise in counterfeit handbags, the author, Amy X. Wang, wrote that the reason the best fake Birkins are so hard to pick out is that so much about them is legitimately identical to the real ones. They use the same fine leather and the same hardware. They’re designed using the same plans Hermès craftspeople use, leading some to theorize the leaks are coming from inside Hermès. They’re at times so indistinguishable from the “authentic” bags that they threaten to upend the very idea of what we consider valuable to begin with. Perhaps Mickum’s biggest mistake was not that he lied but that he got caught. He outed himself as an obvious fraud, brazen enough to be spotted, instead of a seamless replica close enough to pass as the real thing.
It’s a shame, because Mickum had already done the hard part: He’d gotten his seat at the table. People liked him. They wanted him around. Why couldn’t he just sit back and enjoy his tartare? Some people just don’t know when to stop, Hay said. “He wanted a life he couldn’t afford,” he said. “He wanted to go where he didn’t belong.”
But Mickum, it seems, isn’t going down without a fight. On his visit to the city in April, in addition to stopping by the Hearst apartment, he reached out to several of his New York friends, telling them that everything they’d heard was a lie — if it wasn’t, wouldn’t he be wearing an ankle bracelet right now? — and that soon they’d hear his side of the story. Then, the week of King Charles’ coronation, the billionaire socialite Tracey Amon posted a photo on Instagram of her and Mickum out shopping in London. Amon once had her own New York Post scandal to contend with: She made headlines in 2017 when she blowtorched the safe containing her ex’s $25 million art collection. In the photo, Mickum, in sunglasses and a denim jacket, reclines in the back of a taxi surrounded by shopping bags. He smirks slightly at the camera. In the caption, Amon name-dropped Common Projects, the shoe company Mickum lied about owning, tacking on a sneaker emoji alongside the hashtag #GEORGE MICKUM.
“There is (almost) nothing better than UK taxis or friends with common projects or who show simple kindness,” she wrote.
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