Clueless Executive Is the Latest Casualty of Teen Sexting Scandal Trope

How many cautionary tales about texting nudie pixxx or elaborately written BDSM scenarios (e.g. I am zipped in2 a gimp suit, strapped in a chair w/ no seat, listening to oil the rubbery skin of a suitably-wide eggplant…) must we, collectively, be told around the Internet campfire before people in important public positions stop leaving written records of their sordid sexual lives for us prurient Internet perusers to happen upon? At least one more: a top executive at Hearst Corp. named Scott Sassa has been forced to resign his position as president of Entertainment and Syndication after a Los Angeles stripper he was sexting with on the regular concocted an ultimately unsuccessful extortion plot, proving that you don’t need to actually be a sexting teenager to act like a sexting teenager.

According to the Post, Hearst Corp. is a fastidious and asexual sort of place (in other words, no Bacchic orgies in the boardroom), and its other top execs were dismayed to learn of Sassa’s textual indiscretions, which started harmlessly enough with an L.A.-based stripper sending Sassa, according to a Post source, “sexy pictures.” Sassa responded in kind with a series of texts containing “words you would absolutely not want your boss to see,” a practice that, says the Post‘s source, was fairly common to Sassa in his communications with “many other girls in New York.”

From sexting, things turned abruptly into movie-of-the-week extortion territory when the stripper allegedly enlisted the help of a boyfriend to blackmail Sassa. Since this sort of thing is really the Post‘s jam…

But the LA stripper, helped by a boyfriend, then tried to blackmail Sassa – a single father of two daughters – saying she’d expose their raunchy messages if he didn’t give her money. A second source said, “She made a list of demands.”

When Sassa didn’t pay up, the boyfriend e-mailed the sex-text exchanges to horrified Hearst honchos, including CEO Frank Bennack Jr., Hearst Magazines president David Carey and Michael Clinton, president of marketing for the magazines.

Sassa was then asked to resign, and, though he didn’t respond to news of his resignation directly, he did make his status as “former president of Hearst Entertainment” Facebook official because clearly no lessons about oversharing on social media have been learned here.