Ashley Gosik is the villain. She hears about it every day.
Posted by Cleopatra on Gosik’s blog – Monday, April 6, 2009, 5:03 p.m.
Hi Ashley, You honestly gross me out. So if you pride yourself in being the villain then have fun growing old and alone … I hope you get punched right in the babymaker.
Gosik, a 2008 graduate who spent last fall on the reality show “Running in Heels,” gets 30 to 40 comments like this for each post on the show’s official blog. On Facebook, she gets 15 friend requests per day from people she does not know. In all likelihood, they’re the same ones leaving the nasty comments.
“There has been so much backlash that I never expected,” she said about her time on the Style Network series, the season finale of which aired Sunday. “These people are just insane.”
The show followed Gosik and two other girls during an internship at Marie Claire magazine. As required by contract, each of the interns kept a blog. That’s where the comments come from.
On the show, Gosik seems to constantly put down the other interns in a quest to get ahead. She complains, steals other interns’ assignments and makes fun of her co-workers behind their backs.
“I’m supposed to be the über-bitch,” she said, “I definitely played that up, because that’s why I was there.”
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Posted by Beth – Sunday, April 12, 2009, 8:14 p.m.
Ashley, you are so ******* ugly. Inside and out but more so on the outside. Why would the show pick you?
It was only a year ago that Gosik was in a position familiar to many of today’s graduating seniors: jobless and looking for work. Tired of a “too political” GW journalism program and with internship experience under her belt, she applied to a multitude of fashion magazines.
The problem: Nobody was biting. The end of the summer and the end of her lease were fast approaching and she still needed a job.
During an online search, she stumbled across a vague casting call for a show about fashion magazine interns. She skipped it at first, then she reconsidered.
Shortly after submitting the application, she received a call from the network. They grilled her on all aspects of her life – how much she drank, if she smoked, if she was dating anybody. Then they asked her for another interview.
“When she applied, I just had this weird feeling that she would get it,” said Nacole Brown, Gosik’s friend. “There’s just something about her. She’s very confident, loves fashion . it was just something I could picture.”
Gosik went to Philadelphia for the ninth interview. Halfway through, she saw the producers’ eyes light up. She had just hit on something good.
“I remember saying something like ‘I’m not coming to New York to make friends,’ ” she said. “I could see it in their faces . they liked this.”
A few months later, she arrived at the “Running in Heels” apartment. Her lease in D.C. had expired only 24 hours before.
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Posted by A Viewer – Sunday, April 5, 2009, 9:18 p.m.
Ashley, as I am nearly twice your age I am going to tell you that I would be completely mortified and disappointed if you were my daughter.
Not everybody that watched the show hated Gosik. After all, one of them was her mother.
“She didn’t get the opportunity to show any positive side to her,” Kathy Gosik said about her daughter’s portrayal. “I know she can be bitchy, but all girls can.”
Kathy watched her daughter get catty with the other interns, complain about assignments and talk repeatedly of how she was getting to the top, no matter how many people she stepped on.
Even in her shining moment – getting a story published on the Marie Claire Web site – Gosik was portrayed in a negative light, having stolen the story from another intern.
Her blog got a lot of negative feedback that week.
“I would love to be able to go in and delete them all,” Kathy said of the comments on her daughter’s blog, which she reads weekly. “They put a dagger through my heart.”
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Posted by Maria – Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 10:28 a.m.
You walk like you are defeated. Your attitude is very immature and it shows. Why in the right mind would you run 35 blocks. Why didn’t you catch the train??? It would have been faster than trying to walk.
For her second assignment, a soon-to-be-married editor sent Gosik to pick up her wedding rings. All she had to do was hop on the subway, go to the jewelry store, pick up the ring and head back.
But large video cameras aren’t allowed on the trains. Cabs need to agree to be filmed. So Gosik ran, 35 blocks.
“And you can’t even run that fast because somebody carrying a 50-pound camera can’t follow you,” she said. She arrived two hours late with the rings and was reprimanded for it.
Gosik would complain, but it wouldn’t matter. She didn’t work for Marie Claire. She worked for the show.
It is a fact she admits in a defeatist tone when she describes how producers egged on her feelings of jealousy toward the other interns’ more glamorous jobs in the opening weeks.
“They’re kind of like the little devil on your shoulder,” she said of the producers, who interview the cast for their confessional voice-overs. “They say, ‘Why aren’t you getting all these assignments” and you start thinking “Yeah, why aren’t I getting all these assignments?'”
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Posted by Lils – Monday, March 23, 2009, 12:08 a.m.
For someone who claims that she’s the “smart” one of the interns, Ashley sure isn’t very smart about how to be on TV … Why would you want to be known as the jealous, mean, vindictive, condescending intern?
Ashley interviewed John Mayer on the red carpet. She traveled to Mexico with her editors. She had a story published in one of the largest fashion magazines in the U.S. and made friends in the industry.
Now the experience is over and she can’t even put it on her résumé.
“It really just isn’t getting me anything,” said Gosik, now unemployed and looking for work elsewhere in New York. Even though she now rooms with Marie Claire fashion editor Jeremy Spears, the connections she made on the show haven’t taken her very far. Spears’ contacts won’t hire her – based mainly on her reputation on the show.
Would she be better off if she never saw that casting call one year ago? Gosik thinks about it every day.
“It got me to New York, I met some great people, I got paid, it was great while it lasted,” she said. “Now the aftermath makes me want to regret it, but I think overall it was the right decision.”
