Katie “Cougar” Couric is a big fan of Michael Walrath.
“He’s superhot,” Katie Couric whispered to a reporter who was working on a fawning profile of the investment guru and male socialite for the New York Times style section in 2014. At the time, Walrath was building a home in East Hampton, a favorite vacation venue for Manhattan elites where Couric, a former celebrity, is still a household name.
Seven years ago, Walrath sold his startup digital marketing firm to Yahoo, Couric’s current employer, for nearly $1 billion. Walrath has funded a number of new ventures since then. In 2008 he and his wife Michelle (also a socialite) founded “socially conscious” Atlas Films with his longtime friend, director Stephanie Soechtig, the creative visionary behind Under The Gun. This, of course, is the anti-gun documentary that has landed Couric in hot water for deceptive editing.
Couric recently threw Soechtig under the bus by claiming to have had concerns with the film’s editing that she failed to raise “more vigorously.”
Soechtig, meanwhile, issued her own defensive response to critics, telling Variety: “In hindsight, had I known that the NRA would focus on eight seconds of a two-hour film, I might have done things differently. But I made the creative decision and I stand by it.”
This isn’t the first time Couric and Soechtig have teamed up with the Wealthy Walraths to make a socially conscious documentary. Atlas Films also made “Fed Up,” a 2014 documentary attacking the American food industry. Couric and Michelle Walrath “helped” produce the film, along with the socialite environmental activist and bi-coastal Hamptons denizen Laurie David, ex-wife of comedian Larry David, who aided in financing. New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg also put money behind the documentary.
Couric and Soechtig met in 2009 when Soechtig appeared on Couric’s CBS News web series to promote Tapped, her documentary critical of the bottled water industry.
Meanwhile, the Walraths haven’t looked back from Under the Gun. They’re busy adding a third floor to their gargantuan Hampton’s estate which sits on five acres in newly trend Montauk. That’s not far from Couric’s East Hampton home, which is more convenient to the summer social whirl.
Perhaps Couric, who nominally identifies as a journalist, should have known better than to get into bed with a bunch of East Coast elites who are bored and even richer than she is and have nothing better to do than to try and “make a difference” in the world with their money and their “artistic pauses” that make gun-rights activists look like idiots.
On the other hand, partying in the Hamptons while lecturing the little people can be so much fun.
TAKE THE POLL
