Inside, her crystal collection sat on a shelf above a bin of bras. A couple of stuffed animals, inspirational sayings and books with titles like Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind decorated the room. A file cabinet served as a combination bedside and dining room table next to a double bed with a plush green velvet headboard.

“See, this is what happens when I try to clean up,” said the Amazonian blond writer famous for revealing things that most people wouldn’t confess to their best friends.

That Ms. Stadtmiller would try to hide anything at all might surprise readers of her work on xoJane, Jane Pratt’s confessional website, where she has written about “hate-masturbating” to Paul Ryan and recording herself masturbating in the News Corp. bathroom for a potential suitor, and where she has crowd-sourced her search for both a gigolo and a fantasy to act out with him.

This past February, Ms. Stadtmiller and her colleagues detected a foul odor in the office, “forcing us to root around to try to find the dead mouse or rotting corpse that might lie somewhere buried,” she explained. It turned out that the pungent odor was the result of a tampon that had been trapped inside the author for a month. Naturally, Ms. Stadtmiller wrote a post about the incident. Actually, two.

While she is hardly alone in her TMI tendencies, Ms. Stadtmiller has become a master of the medium during her tenure at xoJane, where she is tasked with writing a daily personal essay—no easy feat. Her boundless ability to plumb her personal humiliations for blog posts raises the question: what could possibly come next? Where does a writer who has confessed to stinking up the office with a rancid tampon find the next degradation to exploit?

“Her writing makes me cringe, because I don’t get the sense that she’s capable of editing herself or being at all self-aware,” said a prominent female blogger. “It’s addictive to read, but in the same way that it’s addictive to watch Celebrity Rehab or the Real Housewives.”

Ms. Stadtmiller embodies an exhibitionistic media moment in which writers, particularly women, often find that they get more attention when they traffic in self-revelation rather than straight reporting. What was once a central tenet of the women’s movement has morphed into a no-holds-barred culture where nothing is off limits and everything is archived on the Internet.

The art of the transgressive disclosure, as seen in Erica Jong’s zipless fuck, Joyce Maynard’s J.D. Salinger affair, Amy Sohn’s blow-up boyfriend and even Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, has its roots in the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, in which simply talking about sexuality and gender roles was an act of liberation. But is all silence meant to be broken?

“The most interesting stuff that I do is when I come from my own honest, authentic voice rather than through the zombie magazine filter that a lot of copy gets put through,” Ms. Stadtmiller said. “That’s why Girls is successful. It’s not impossible wish fulfillment, it’s flawed and messy and embarrassing.”

But there is a big difference between Girls and Ms. Stadtmiller’s work. Ms. Dunham may get pilloried in the press for what every single line in an episode says about our culture, but it is worth remembering that even pantsless Hannah Horvath is a character. In real life, Ms. Dunham has been extremely selective about what she will and will not share about her personal life. Even former xoJane train wreck Cat Marnell, who just signed what is in publishing parlance a “major” book deal for a reported half-million dollars, has a deceptively controlled persona. Ms. Stadtmiller, on the other hand, doesn’t hold anything back.

“Some people can’t handle Mandy because she is so endlessly, unabashedly herself,” said Sara Benincasa, Ms. Stadtmiller’s friend and fellow comedy writer. “She doesn’t hide embarrassing things about herself.”

In person, Ms. Stadtmiller is a towering presence: she is over six feet tall and has long blond hair, even features and a toothy smile. She has taken enough selfies that her face is familiar from a quick Google search.

Married to her college boyfriend at 25 and then divorced five years later, she writes a great deal about sex, but her romantic situation is currently in flux. She said she mostly dates men from the comedy scene, including an “almost-boyfriend” of a few months back, because they can handle her body humor. But even they can be wary of becoming column fodder.

“There is a dirty little secret about writing about your dating life,” she wrote last September. “What people don’t tell you about doing the whole personal memoir thing—or ‘oversharing’ if you want to be a reductive hipster dick about it—is that many dudes live in fear of being written about.”

Ms. Stadtmiller didn’t always mine sex and personal hygiene for material. The San Diego native studied journalism at Northwestern, interned at The Washington Post and got a reporting job at The Des Moines Register. She was working in a quasi-PR role for a medical school alumni magazine at her alma mater when she “found her voice” by hatching a blog called Bloggy McBlogalot and started doing stand-up comedy. She divorced her husband, who, she wrote, “cheated on me brutally,” and moved to New York to pursue writing and performing.

She was hired as an entertainment writer and eventually as a dating columnist at The New York Post, where Ms. Stadtmiller did not shy away from talking about herself. A casual newsroom encounter with her might result in a monologue about her upcoming comedy shows, or masturbating, or a “finger-banging” encounter of some sort.

Her dating column, “About Last Night,” made her a favorite Gawker punching bag back when the blog still had favorite New York media targets (the recurring slugline was “Oh Mandy”).

But she was also a workhorse who could turn copy around quickly. “Mandy would act bipolar. Sometimes she was so warm and would say ‘great to see you,’ and other days she’d walk past you like a zombie,” said a former Post colleague. “She was really hardworking and very talented—but very damaged.”

She made it onto the Post’s front page by going to a Nevada brothel to bed America’s first legal male hooker, but wound up making fun of him instead as he invited her to caress him, told her he wanted to be spanked and lavished praise on her naked body. (Documenting other people’s pleased reactions to her nudity and prowess is another branch of Ms. Stadmiller’s exhibitionism, one that would seem at odds with her willingness to project herself as sexually repulsive.) “It was like a bad second date. That cost $500,” she wrote.

The piece was a boon to her career, garnering attention on The Colbert Report and elsewhere. At the Post, some colleagues felt that she had exploited her subject, a 23-year-old ex-Marine who came across as earnest in his efforts to please, only to be mocked in print by the author in a Page 1
tabloid story. It was unclear whether he knew he was being written about. “We all died a little death when she went out and did that story,” said a former Post colleague. “We felt that if it is the future of journalism, get us out of here.”

She quit The New York Post in February 2012, when she said the culture of the features department changed and started taking on the “toxic” news mentality of the tabloid.

After the Post, Ms. Stadtmiller bounced between sublets and friends’ couches before landing at xoJane, a confessional web magazine whose writers are encouraged to share details of their lives. The magazine, founded by Jane Pratt, the editor of the much loved ’90s alt-beauty magazines Sassy and Jane, is a catalog of “It Happened to Me” testimonials about waxing, STDs, miscarriages, menstrual cups and, of course, orgasms. Ms. Stadtmiller was instantly at home.

To be fair, not all of her own posts revel in humiliation. As background for this piece, she sent links to 30 stories; sobriety, self-esteem and advice culled from personal experience were common themes. She has also mined her parents’ marriage; her mother left her fiancé to marry a marine vet who was blinded during combat in Vietnam. In an almost Parent Trap-like plot twist, her parents got divorced when Ms. Stadtmiller was in her 20s and then remarried five years later.

She wrote about adopting her dog, and penned an open letter to Lindsay Lohan encouraging the actress to get sober—like she herself has done. There is a new-agey, self-help quality to a lot of her posts, something that seems to resonate with xoJane readers, who lavish her with praise, thank-you notes and drawings.

“Thank you for helping me see myself as a player” read the subject line of an email Ms. Stadtmiller got in response to a recent post.

“I felt like you were talking directly to me,” the college-age reader continued. “I just can’t believe how much I relate to you and how similarly I feel.”

Colleagues at xoJane say she’s a generous editor. “What I don’t think Mandy gets enough credit for is her extreme generosity with other writers. She will break it down for you: ‘Here’s who to email with your pitch, here’s the exact word count you should use in that email ... here’s the time of day you should send it. Here’s how to follow up without being a little bitch,’” the writer and comedian Carrie Seim told us. “There’s a sincerity and nurturing quality—she’s genuinely thrilled when you succeed—that you rarely find in the brutally competitive New York media world.”

Ms. Stadtmiller does have an ethical code of sorts. She doesn’t write too much about her ex-husband, for example, a musician who likes to keep his Internet footprint minimal. She also insists that she filters out information that might compromise others, a practice she arguably did not deploy in her encounter with the prostitute, nor in her regular dispatches about sobriety. “I get shit sometimes for breaking the tradition of AA where you don’t reveal you are in it,” Ms. Stadtmiller writes. Anonymity isn’t really her thing.

In between xoJane posts, Ms. Stadtmiller is currently working on a roman à clef called News Whore, about her time at the Post. She expects to finish the book by the end of the year and start submitting it to publishers, although a self-published eBook prequel, a “compendium of blog posts” from the last eight years, will be available for download this month. The prequel, along with her podcast, is part of her effort to make the “News Whore” label into a brand.

Unsurprisingly for someone so concerned with branding, Ms. Stadtmiller is a tenacious profile subject. Within a 15-minute time frame on a recent Saturday, we received 10 text messages from her.

Following a prolonged back-and-forth to arrange details, we found ourselves back at Ms. Stadtmiller’s apartment. But this time, it had been transformed into a sound studio for her debut podcast. The bras were gone, replaced by microphones. The comedian Colin Quinn, whom Ms. Stadtmiller knows from the comedy world, sat in the upholstered armchair. Graham Smith, a musician friend, was on hand to help with the audio and chime in. Samsung was off in the park with a dog walker.

Ms. Stadtmiller, in sneakers, ripped jeans and a striped shirt, smoked an e-cig (she is an occasional vaper) and showed Mr. Quinn a childhood photo album. They bantered and traded barbs. Ms. Stadtmiller mentioned the summer that two different masseurs “ate her out” and volunteered that she has been listening to a tape of motivational speaker Louise Hay’s positive affirmations while masturbating.

“What’s my verbal tic?” Ms. Stadtmiller asked.

“Talking about sex,” Mr. Quinn replied.

“I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s true.”

Chace Crawford's name, misspelled by the post on the Post's header (top) in the same way the Sprock press release misspelled it.

On Saturday, Off the Record received a press release from Los Angeles-based celebrity PR firm Sprock. It was pretty thin gruel: “Actor Keith Collins & Actor John Stamos” were spotted at Westside Tavern, with Mr. Stamos “discussing his performances in his always sold out Broadway Play ‘The Best Man On Broadway’ [sic, throughout].”

“Also at the Tavern that night shooting pool was Gossip Girls Chase Crawford & Brandon Ruckdashel from ‘Co-Ed Confidential,’” noted the press release.

As we say, not much to run with. Imagine our surprise to see the exact item on The New York Post’s Page Six the next day. Granted, it was a late-summer weekend when most celebrities are in the Hamptons, but this was information many New York journalists had already found in their inboxes. “The Gossip Girl star [Chace Crawford] was seen at Westside Tavern in Chelsea on Wednesday night playing pool with Brandon Ruckdashel from ‘Co-Ed Confidential’ and a handful of beauties,” indicated Page Six in an item titled “Tavern Appeal.” Mr. Stamos, Mr. Collins and the play The Best Man also got name-checked in the 80-word item.

Ashley Dupre, prenatal (Patrick McMullan)

Ashley Dupre, Eliot Spitzer's high-paid call girl-cum-New York Post love advice columnist (hey, we're living in the era of MisAdvised, so we're barely judging) announced to--where else?-- Page Six today that she's Jimmy Choo backless flats and pregnant. And no, it's not the former governor's, so let's just get that right out of the way.

According to Ms. Dupre, the baby-daddy is none other than "New Jersey asphalt scion" (nope, sorry, that's not a thing) Thomas “TJ” Earle.

And now for the home-run: Not only is the 27-year-old pregnant, but she's six months along...and she's engaged! (Again, to the King of the Asphalt, and not to anyone who has ever held a seat in Albany.)

As she gushed to her place of employment yesterday, "“On the record, yes, I can confirm I’m almost seven months...I can’t tell you when the wedding date is just yet.”

If you're claim to fame is capitalizing off of being an escort, one shotgun wedding won't ruin your reputation, we supposed. But who we're really interested in is this Lord of the Cement that she's marrying. After all, it was only four years ago that Mr. Earle was telling his own wife--with whom he has two daughters--that he was "set-up" by Ms. Dupre to make it look like he was having an affair.

What a way to start a solid foundation of trust in your future partner. We just hope that someone has the sense to create an iron-clad prenup...though who it would ultimately be protecting is TBD.

Church-goers give Baldwin the evil eye (NBC)

Poor Alec Baldwin! Not only is the recent Vanity Fair cover guy better known for his hot head than for his new, cool marriage to Hilaria Thomas or his role on 30 Rock, but it turns out most of the country refuses to accept Mr. Baldwin as the last word on their lord and savior as well!

Mr. Baldwin, who has an eight-acre spread upstate, often goes to Sunday services at Trinity Parish in East Hampton during the summer. And because he is a celebrity, he is allowed to give sermons from the pulpit. (Is that how Christianity works?)

Except that some uptight parishioners were not so happy with Mr. Baldwin's recent sermonizing, and literally turned their backs on him while he read.

From Page Six:

“Alec loves to be the center of attention and often reads from the pulpit, which really annoys some in the congregation. It is so bad that, one recent Sunday, he went up to read, and part of the congregation stood and rudely turned their backs on him.”

The source said, “Even though he has generously given a lot of money to the town, there are people who just don’t like him. He has a need for attention and shows up at every event. When people go to the church, they don’t want to see the movie star up there.”

That is so rude ... if Mr. Baldwin gave the money to the church from his highly successful show 30 Rock, the least the members could do is show some respect and listen to him!

Besides, who would you rather deliver your Sunday-morning Jesus allegory: some boring priest, or the guy from the Capital One commercials?

Ms. Marnell, right, in February.

xoJane.com beauty writer Cat Marnell has left Jane Pratt's site after refusing to kick her extremely well documented drug habit. The former Lucky beauty editor recently returned from rehab, as mandated by xoJane.com parent company SAY Media, but sources told The New York Post she was still high all the time.

Ms. Marnell wrote Page Six a "Why I Quit" letter so beautiful it really puts that Goldman Sachs guy to shame.

“I’m always on drugs. [...] Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next. [...] Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers. [...] We can fake it [for a time . . . before we turn into coddled emotional vampire nightmares.”

We miss her already.

Hilaria Thomas and Alec Baldwin...almost newlyweds! (Getty Images)

Remember how Alec Baldwin was supposed to elope with yoga instructor fiancee Hilaria Thomas after the Cannes Film Festival? Whatever happened with that?

Well, the date may finally be set on the New York ceremony, and  according to new gossip, it sounds less like an elopement and more like a full-blown Hollywood wedding. Oh, that wily Alec.

According to Page Six, Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Thomas have set their date as June 30th:

The couple will tie the knot at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street in NoLIta, a landmarked church built in about 1810...The site has a Hollywood pedigree — it was where Francis Ford Coppola filmed the famous baptism scene in “The Godfather,” in which Al Pacino’s renunciation of Satan was intercut with the massacre of the Corleone family’s enemies.

Martin Scorsese used the church's walled graveyard for a scene in his breakout film, “Mean Streets,” and as a location in “Gangs of New York.”

But any Hollywood comparisons end there. Pope Benedict XVI bestowed basilica status on the historic house of worship in 2010.

That's a lot of history for one street! You'd think that when getting married, one would want to avoid all references to The Godfather and Mean Streets, but then again, we guess it's better than holding the ceremony in the sales office from Glengarry Glen Ross.

Rockaway Beach: A well-established Hipster Hamptons of sorts for the last few years, a place many thought would hit fever-pitch sometime this summer, the moment when—like Williamsburg and Bushwick and Red Hook and hell, the rest of the entire borough of Brooklyn before it—well-heeled Manhattanites discover it, and then, ruin the fun for those who were ostensibly there "first."*

First came The Taco Stand.

Then, the Trend Pieces.

Then, The Hoteliers.

And now: The Page Six Item. 

Yes, if you're the ornery, traditionalist, orthodoxy-of-cool type, this is the moment you can singularly declare Rockaway Beach "over": When Page Six gets—and publishes—sightings there.

Which happened today.

In a "Sightings" column that also included the New York Giants' Victor Ortiz, Jon Bon Jovi, Harry Belefonte, and Josh Lucas, the top item was:

Patti Smith and MoMA PS1 head Klaus Biesenbach strolling the Rockaway Beach boardwalk . . .

Three things of note, here:

1. Patti Smith and Klaus Biesenbach rated higher than Victor Ortiz and his girlfriend. In the New York Post.

2. Unlike the majority of gossip column sightings entries, this one was clearly not a plant. Either someone tipped them off, or a Page Six-er hangs out in Rockaway Beach.

3. This is, as far as we can tell, the first Page Six sighting in Rockaway Beach, ever. The precedent for notable sightings in Rockaway Beach in the New York Post: A bloodthirsty "Shark (or Ray)."

This is how it begins.

Soon, Rockaway Beach will be flooded with all different kinds of Sevigny and Ronson. Pop-up French clubs with doors that only open for people with personal texts from Larry Gagosian or Daenerys Targaryen's dragons will be erected. The Walkmen will re-locate there, and record an album. Madras-sporting Conde Nast warlords and ink-merchants will eventually venture out via towncar, ostensibly in search of "authentic" lobster rolls at first, lying about being on a wayward detour to Martha's Vineyard—we got lost on the way to Teterboro, har har—but eventually bringing their friends, convincing them that putting $1M into renovating a local standby clam shack with leather banquettes, a hostess who can only read names printed in boldface, and a chef whose greatest talent is an ability to upsell the shaving of truffles over anything from a burger to an artisinal Ritz cracker. Finally, the Manhattanites who read about it on Thrillist and Daily Candy will clamor for entry, eventually getting it, and everyone who preceded them will have already started to repeat the process somewhere else (in all likelihood, 5.9 miles down the road, at Fort Tilden), but not before Kanye West has built a replica Coliseum nearby, where he will show a movie on twelve screens of him using King Tut's tomb as a urinal.

Or, of course, this could all be a matter of semantics, and not even remotely a tipping point inasmuch as a curious anomaly: A Page Six item in Rockaway Beach, oh my, how whimsical (but otherwise insignificant).

...Which may also be what they want you to think.

Summer at your own risk.

[*Excluding, of course, those locals who have been going to Rockaway Beach since its lifeguard union was basically The Warriors. They are simply an adorable accessory of the local charm, and nothing more.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Prince Pierre Casiraghi with Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, pre-fight (Patrick McMullan)

Updated: An earlier edition of this item suggested that Ms. Hilton was at the club at the time of the assault. She was in Las Vegas, celebrating her birthday and winning a lot of money. The New York Observer apologizes for the error.

Today's biggest headline in the New York Post wasn't about Jeremy Lin or Cardinal Tim Dolan. How refreshing! Instead, the story of the day is about a spat at the Meatpacking Club Double Seven club on Saturday night, between former owner of Hawaiian Tropic Zone, Adam Hock, and a group of very young adults with very old money. The night ended with a sprained shoulder for Mr. Hock and an alleged broken jaw for 24-year-old Prince Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Grace Kelly. Mr. Hock is now being charged with four counts of third-degree assault.

Fights between socialites and bar owners are usually relegated to Page Six. So how did Emily Smith's team make Saturday's punch-up front page news? The answer might lay in a throw-away reference to the rest of the prince's posse.

Hock, 47, said he was just defending himself and the bevy of models seated at his table after Casiraghi, Paris Hilton ex Stavros Niarchos and scenesters Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Diego Marroquin became “belligerent” and “aggressive” because he was at a better table than them.

Without getting into the he-said, he-said of the ordeal (Mr. Hock claimed that the kids were drinking his friend's bottle service, while party promoter Nima Yamini said that Mr. Hock "just went nuts") take a look at some of those names. Paris Hilton and her ex-boyfriend Stavros Niarchos were always a terrible combo: those two can't enter a bar without it basically exploding into a flurry of fists. Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld (the son of French Vogue's former editor, Caroline Roitfeld), Diego Marroquin, and Prince Casiraghi, on the other hand, might be well-known party-goers, but their names aren't usually tied to bar brawls.

And reading the testimony of events, it did seem as if the original beef was between the shipping heir and Mr. Hock. While the first Post story assumed Prince Casiraghi as the instigator:

Hock, 47, had been partying with friends — including Double Seven owner Jeffrey Jah, hairdresser-to-the-stars Joel Warren and catwalk stunners Natasha Poly, Valentina Zalyaeva and Anja Rubik — when Casiraghi strolled over to their table with shipping-scion pal and Paris Hilton ex Stavros Niarchos III and two other men at around 2:30 a.m., witnesses said.

...the front-page story today had Mr. Hock switching his story over to blame Mr. Niarchos:

“My friend Peter Bakker [supermodel Natasha Poly’s husband] (editor's note: yes, this would be the same Natasha Poly who just purchased a posh condo at 100 11th Ave) was there at our table with his wife and two other top models. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I could see there was hostility between Peter and Stavros Niarchos,” Hock said.

Dhiraj Arora (Photo via Sean John)

Shortly after meeting The Observer in the lobby of the Ace Hotel last Wednesday, Dhiraj Arora—who is the owner of the spice company Arora Creations Inc., but is perhaps better known for losing his temper and a good portion of his clothing one wild night at the Four Seasons Hotel—offered up a sly word of warning.

“The last woman who tried to profile me was an editor at Trace magazine,” Mr. Arora said. The editor had overseen a 2007 article in the magazine called “Delhi Rising,” which profiled several successful South Asian Americans. A cover story on Mr. Arora was considered, he said, “but she was eventually like, ‘Yo, D., I can’t keep up with you!’” The two ended up dating, a whirlwind romance that saw the duo jetting around the globe. That was the last time Mr. Arora truly felt he was in love.

We were a little unclear about just what this disclosure had to do with us, until the handsome 36-year-old asked if we were currently seeing anyone. We were. Did our significant other treat us right? Did he take us all over the world? Well, as a matter of a fact, he did.

“That’s really great,” Mr. Arora replied effusively.

Mr. Arora—who according to his company’s website owns the only USDA-certified organic Indian grocery-product line in existence and whose spice packets are carried by more than 4,000 outlets, including Whole Foods—distinguished himself from other, more wholesome members of the organic food world in November. That’s when Page Six ran an intriguing item about a New York “Spice King” and his “naked rampage.” The story, which quoted law enforcement sources, claimed that Mr. Arora had been running around the hotel in the nude, “sucking down tequila,” and screaming at the police to “suck his million-dollar cock.” This behavior resulted in an arrest and a two-hour stay in St. Luke Roosevelt’s hospital, where he underwent a psychological evaluation. No charges were ever brought.

For readers who may be unaware that New York had a Spice King to call our own, a little background: Mr. Arora is a big man with jet-black hair streaked with silver, a large smile and a somewhat crooked nose marked by a jagged scar, the product of a fight he got into “when somebody tried to front” a couple years back. He was born in New Jersey to a family of Punjabi descent, though his affect is way more Entourage-meets-The Godfather than Bollywood.

Mr. Arora went to school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was part of the notorious “high times” fraternity, Fiji. In fact, Mr. Arora likened his first couple tries at the spice trade—mixing packets together in his mother’s kitchen to sell at street fairs—to dealing dime bags of marijuana. “At the end of the day, it’s a similar game,” said the Spice King, who over the course of a long, boozy lunch at the Breslin managed to compare himself not only to Tony Montana but to Steve Jobs and Martin Scorsese as well.

Mr. Arora’s grandiosity was on flamboyant display during our meeting—from his style of hailing waiters by physically grabbing them to his insistence, despite the early hour, on introducing us to the joys of Caffè corretto (two pulls of espresso with a splash of Sambuca) and “pickleback” shots. But even his offer to take us back to the Four Seasons Hotel—just to see if he could sneak back in—and his tendency to raise his eyebrows and refer to “good times” came off as charming (though not charming enough for us to take him up on the offer).

About that Four Seasons story: Mr. Arora, of course, has his own version of that night’s events. There was never any “public nudity” or drunkenness, he insisted. He had simply been working out at the gym when he accidentally crashed some weights. “So now people are looking and thinking, ‘Oh, shit, there’s this al-Qaeda operative.’” (A mark of Mr. Arora’s stories, almost all of them, is that somebody mistakes him for a terrorist.) Subsequently, he doffed his clothing for a few minutes in the steam room and in the cool-down shower area. Several of the hotel’s security guards, whom Mr. Arora tends to speak of as if they’re his posse, escorted him back to his room, where he began preparing leftovers and running himself a bath. By his account, the police were called when Mr. Arora was opening a bottle of wine and attempted to show the guards a flourishing maneuver with a corkscrew.

He claimed he wasn’t drunk at the time. “I never even got the shot of tequila that I ordered to my room,” he insisted. “Security canceled it. So I don’t know how they were saying that I was ‘drunk.’” In fact, the shot wasn’t even to drink, he insisted. His plan had been to douse his toes in it … to cure himself of athlete’s foot.

Mr. Arora pleads guilty to then telling the two female police officers to “suck my $57 million dollar dick.” To which, in his telling, they replied, “Suck our dicks.”

“And I’m like, ‘Yo … you ladies have dicks?’” he recalled.

While he acknowledged that some of his behavior that night might have aggravated the situation, he noted that soon after the Page Six item ran, the William Morris agency, which he dubbed “the fucking A-team,” called him to schedule a meeting.

Besides, he pointed out, such incidents come with the territory of being a high-profile North Indian trying to make it big in America.

Mr. Arora with one of his creations

“I always, always get stopped at airport security,” Mr. Arora said. “But it’s not just that. I’ve lost millions and millions of dollars to jealousy. There are crews of people in the organic food industry that came out of retirement to step on my relationships and shut them down.”

He took a sip of Jack and Coke. “That’s what jades me,” he went on, “when you have these great images of local, organic farmers. I’m dealing with devils who are sitting on billions of dollars.”

While this secret organic food cartel sounds a little like a Portlandia sketch, it’s no doubt true that Mr. Arora’s success has inspired jealousy. He admitted that he didn’t have a background in food before starting his company while a student in Ann Arbor. “Myself and a lot of my friends were vegetarian and some were vegan, and they wouldn’t know how to feed themselves,” he recalled. “And so much of North Indian food is vegan … I just remembered how my mom used to cook for me growing up.” So Mr. Arora called his mother and asked for her to send him some spice packets in the mail. He began giving these packets to his friends and fraternity brothers, and Arora Creations was born.

After graduating in 1997 with a double major in anthropology and international business, Mr. Arora returned to his mother’s house in New Jersey and kept churning out those spice packets. He’d combine cumin, turmeric, amchur powder, ajawayan seeds and minced onions, for example, and sell the mixture as “Gobi spice blend” (just  add cauliflower and potatoes). By 2002, he was hawking his concoctions at flea markets and food stalls (four spice packets for $10) as a full-time venture. Just five years later, Arora Creations could be found in 4,000 outlets around the country, and revenue was in the low millions. Today, he said, it’s in the tens of millions. The company was up 43% in the first quarter of a year marked by recession.

Much of that success is attributable to Whole Foods. Mr. Arora first gained the attention of the organic food chain by sheer moxie. He’d walk into a store, ask to speak to the manager, and deliver his best pitch.

“I’d tell them to take a couple samples, put them on shelves, see if they sold,” Mr. Arora reminisced. He’d show up for in-store demonstrations, and use his large personality to draw a crowd. He also became a fixture at international trade shows, like the BioFach organic trade fair, where he built international connections to buyers and sellers.

Mr. Arora now works with a small group of “core” Arora Creations employees in his office on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. He has four factories scattered around the country, with a total of 80 employees. In 2009, he sold his “sick” Tribeca loft on West Broadway, temporarily relocating to San Marcos, Calif., before bouncing from San Diego up to Venice Beach. Last year he came home to New York, taking up residence in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

“I think I was coming off a little too strong with that New York flavor,” he said about his move back East. “There were a lot of eco-maniacs out West.” Still, the time out there calmed him down. “When I was living in Tribeca, I’d be out all the time partying. So I needed that life in Los Angeles, even though I hated it.” He is now done with the party scene, he insisted, preferring restaurants to bars and clubs.

Recently, Mr. Arora has begun diversifying. He’s involved with a music label, called Nossa Music, as well as a spin-off Nossa Designs, and he referred to an ill-fated clothing label that he refused to name. And he wouldn’t mind doing a show for the Food Network. Mr. Arora is no longer a vegetarian, he said, because “after a certain point working in the food industry, not eating meat is torture.” Plus, it must be noted, his chicken tikka spices are one of his best-selling items.

As to his tabloid notoriety? “Not to sound cocky, but I’d like to think that other things I’ve done with my life were more important than a New York Post item,” he told us. “But were they? You tell me.”