American PR executive and Trump cheerleader Melissa Rein Lively is clearly someone who subscribes to the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In 2020, she live-streamed herself destroying a Covid-19 facemask display at a store near her Arizona home, screaming that staff were trying to stop her only because ‘I’m a blonde white woman’ with ‘a $40,000 Rolex’. When her deranged mask-rant went viral, clients dropped her en masse, and it began to look like an act of career suicide.
But Rein Lively, 40, says she was able to exploit her new-found notoriety by connecting with Covid-19 sceptics in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. From there, it was a small step for the diminutive but determined political wannabe to get her foot in the door at Team Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where she brazenly campaigned to be appointed the president’s White House Press Secretary. While she went on to blame her Covid mask tantrum on mental illness, Rein Lively now insists it was actually a brilliant PR stunt.
However, the blonde and Botoxed Right-wing provocateur – one of a breed known in the US as ‘MAGA influencers’ - may not be quite so convinced that all publicity is good publicity after she admitted in a London court yesterday to assaulting a woman by pulling her hair at a Tube station last October. Rein Lively, who was not present, accepted a conditional caution while a more serious charge, of assault by beating, was withdrawn in what police had originally described as a ‘racially aggravated assault’ at Bond Street station in the West End.
Court Proceedings
Lyndon Harris, prosecuting, told Westminster Magistrates’ Court that Rein Lively had agreed to pay £910 in compensation. German financier Philipp Ostermann, who Rein Lively has described as her fiancé and who was with her at the Underground station, denied two racially aggravated public order offences and a further public order offence. He is due to appear in court in November for trial.
The court heard that the woman assaulted by Rein Lively was with her sister and they were walking towards Bond Street station with two children, one of them in a pushchair, at around 7.30pm one evening. Ostermann, 37, and Rein Lively were ahead of them and appeared to be kissing. They also appeared to be intoxicated, the court heard. The prosecution said Rein Lively then appeared to stumble into the pushchair, leading the woman to push back with it. It is alleged that Ostermann then said: ‘You bloody Indians, watch where you’re going, you shouldn’t be here.’ One of the women responded that they weren’t Indian and told Ostermann, the associate director of a Munich-based private equity firm, to stop being racist, the court heard. Lively, who is just 5ft 2in without her usual sky-high heels, then grabbed one of the sisters by the hair and tugged it ‘in a forceful manner’, said prosecutors.
Police Investigation
British Transport Police had already outlined the alleged details of the incident, which saw the glossy couple bizarrely transported from the feature pages of US glossy magazines to the wanted list on the force’s website. The police said Ostermann had pulled out a small bottle and said it was pepper spray before spraying it in the direction of the family. Police said nobody was hurt in the incident but the use of pepper spray is illegal in the UK. Rein Lively and Ostermann, whose actions were captured by CCTV, were later identified by US news outlet CNN after the police released footage of the incident. It left Rein Lively with another notch on her notoriety belt.
Rein Lively's Response
In an interview with Arizona’s Phoenix Magazine, published last month, Rein Lively - glammed up to the nines for an accompanying photoshoot - suggested that she and her boyfriend were the real victims of the Tube incident and that it has been blown up out of all proportion by her notoriety. ‘My brand, my personality, made it 10,000 times worse,’ she said. ‘And I mean, just really turned what ultimately was a brief altercation, where we were attacked from behind, into a global manhunt.’ She went on to compare herself to reality TV superstar Kim Kardashian, an American who it’s impossible to imagine taking the Tube. ‘I’m famous for being famous, and this is just never gonna go away because everything ties back to this 2020 incident,’ said Rein Lively, referring to her Covid mask scandal. ‘And it doesn’t matter, you know, what I do or what I don’t do, it always is going to be tied back to this.’
Background and Controversies
Rein Lively has since tried to distance herself from her pandemic histrionics, which she blamed on being sucked into the QAnon conspiracy, the loopy far-Right political movement that claims a cabal of child-abusing satanists controls the US federal government. Members also believe the Covid-19 outbreak was a hoax. Rein Lively once tweeted frequently about QAnon conspiracy theories and even claimed in another viral video that she was not only a spokesman for the group but also worked for Trump. However, she later blamed QAnon and pandemic-related stress for causing her to have a mental breakdown. In a wide-ranging public rehabilitation campaign as she became a major online hate figure, she gave a string of interviews in which she claimed she spent a week in a psychiatric facility after her Covid mask escapade and later undertook an eight-week programme at the Meadows, Arizona’s celebrity addiction treatment and therapy centre. There, she said, she received counselling over the psychological legacy of the suicide of her mother when she was 14 and being sent to an ‘abusive’ boarding school. Curiously, in her interview with Phoenix Magazine, Rein Lively said she has never had a mental health diagnosis or any related issues.
Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, to a Jewish family which had lost many family members in the Holocaust, she enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. At Arizona State University, her property developer father bought her an apartment in the nearby affluent city of Scottsdale so she didn’t have to stay in one of the student dormitory rooms which, she told Phoenix Magazine, were ‘disgusting’. She joked that she got ‘a minor [academic qualification] in clubbing and partying’. Aged 19, she started a relationship with a neighbour, budding property developer Jared Lively. They married in 2011 but are now getting divorced. After working briefly as a local TV reporter, she went into PR, soon setting up her own company. She now runs America First, which she describes as the country’s ‘number one anti-woke PR firm’, and has since added a sister firm, Europe First. America First says it represents ‘candidates, personalities and companies who think on the right side of things and are unapologetically patriots’. She won’t disclose who her clients are.
Legal and Reputational Issues
One of the first rules of practising public relations, say experts, is to avoid becoming the story – something Rein Lively has repeatedly failed to do. In 2019, she got embroiled in a public feud with two former employers. After questioning her mental health, they accused her of conducting a harassment campaign against them. A judge approved their application for restraining orders against her. The Daily Mail also established last October that she has been removed from several resort hotels by police officers for misconduct that included using racial slurs towards guests. Someone who knows Rein Lively well told this newspaper at the time: ‘I have nothing good to say about her. She’s a total loose cannon.’
Rein Lively has renounced QAnon but she remains a MAGA stalwart who has boasted about having the so-called ‘Mar-a-Lago Face’ – blindingly-white teeth, thick make-up and unsubtle cosmetic surgery – that is common among senior Trump administration women. (Although she admitted in her latest interview seeing a plastic surgeon twice a year, she bristled at claims she wears false eyelashes.) She was so determined to ingratiate herself with the second Trump administration that she temporarily moved to Florida in 2024, staying in a hotel near to the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. She openly angled for the job of White House Press Secretary, telling the media she was ‘a hair’ away from getting the post, which instead went to Karoline Leavitt. Rein Lively revealed that she had told Elon Musk – at the time a key figure in Team Trump - that, if she didn’t get the job she’d like to be his personal spokesman. This didn’t work out either. Rein Lively still gushes over Trump, telling Phoenix Magazine he is ‘an adorable grandpa… so cute and so adorable, and he means so well’.
After failing to get the press secretary job in early 2025, she embarked on a prolonged period of globetrotting, flying first to Vienna to go skiing, before travelling to Dubai, Majorca, Tokyo and Venice. Plans to split her time between Europe and Scottsdale, however, hit an early road bump last year when she was deported to the US after being detained in Zurich for overstaying her visa. ‘I was like, well, I’m an American and I’m cute,’ she smugly told Phoenix Magazine. ‘They’re gonna just look the other way and say, don’t do it next time.’ Now she has discovered that the British justice system wasn’t about to look the other way either.
