The story of how our country got to the point of financial meltdown is a lot of things — frightening, infuriating, nauseating, incomprehensible — but sexy? Former derivatives trader Iris Mack would have us envision her being tongued down by Robert Rubin, the Clinton-era treasury secretary who some blame for presiding over Wall Street's deregulation and later bringing Citigroup to the brink of ruin.
In a rambling, boastful and bizarre blog posting for HuffPo, Mack says she had a fling with the much-older and married Rubin around the time that he was chairman of Citigroup. She claims their first steamy encounter was in Florida in January 2008:
Things were much more relaxed by the time I walked him back to the Ritz - which was along the way to my South Beach condo. When we passed a homeless man along the way he made a bit of a show of opening up his fat leather billfold and producing a dollar — "There but for the grace of God…" he remarked melodramatically — and I gave him a lot of heat for that, because who exactly did he think he was kidding? I said give the man a job. Heck, you're the head of a bank! But when we reached the hotel entrance, the tension returned. He got this funny look on his face, and asked:
"Do you want to go upstairs and…cuddle?"
So that's what this is about. For a moment I was totally speechless and had to dig into my Harvard trained PhD brain to figure out what the hell he meant by "cuddling"! What can I say; once a teetotaling math geek, always a bit slow to pick up on signals from the menfolk. So the former Treasury Secretary had a "crush" on me! And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands everywhere sort of like an octopus. But as soon as the thought entered my mind — the former Treasury Secretary has his tongue down my throat?! — I came to my senses a bit and awkwardly went back home before we both got too carried away. This is to say, I said to myself that there would be no other former Treasury Secretary appendages entering any other of my orifices.
But there were dozens more phone calls from Bob Rubin over the next year, and one more dinner — this time in a private dining room in his Ritz Carlton hotel suite. Yes, I am sorry to confess, human weakness got the best of both of us and there was more "cuddling". However, when I finally came up for air and came to my senses, I bluntly - in his face - asked the obvious "So, are you married?" question. Of course, I'd read his memoir and figured Google would let me know if he'd officially split from his (very attractive) wife, but I'm also vaguely aware how much time and money it can take for these things to make the transition to "official" from "de facto." But his reply suggested that either his marriage was far from any stage of finished, or that he was just kind of creepy.
Oh, and Rubin isn't the only former treasury secretary with whom Mack says she has crossed paths. Last year she claimed that when she was an analyst for Harvard University's endowment manager, she was fired for emailing a warning to then-Harvard president Larry Summers about risky derivatives trading at the firm.
Watch out, Timothy Geithner!
Sometimes the powerful behave very badly. For examples, see our photo gallery of 'The Most Scandalous Politicians of the Decade.'