International Incident Ch. 09

February 7, 2027

The New York Times Book Review

Sophie Nakamura, Chief Critic

MY JOURNEY

By President Mark Robinson

560 pp. Random House. $39.99.

Did Elle Macpherson destroy a presidency?

That's the impression one can't help taking away from former President Mark Robinson's new memoir, "My Journey," released a little over a year after Marty Fox's "Fucking and Fury: The Fall of the Robinson White House," the salacious bestseller about the Threegate scandal that led to Robinson's resignation in July 2025. The book is a fascinating chronicle of sex, faith and regret-and reveals its author to be a man whose personal flaws are as great as his political talents.

As Robinson, who was born in America's bicentennial year, tells it, a seminal moment in his childhood was watching Macpherson's famous commercial for Tab soda as a six-year-old in 1982-and immediately falling in love with the Australian supermodel. "Elle was my introduction into the beauty of the opposite sex-she was my first, last and only celebrity crush," Robinson writes. "I knew instinctively that I would be destined to be with someone like her."

Robinson's obsession with Macpherson continued well into the 1990s. He recounts seeing her motion-picture debut, "Sirens," as an eighteen-year-old in 1994: "When I saw Elle nude onscreen, an arousal stirred in me as intense as anything I could ever imagine. She was the epitome of loveliness and sensuality-I would have given everything to be her partner."

That year, Robinson, who attended private Catholic schools as a child before graduating from New York's prestigious Stuyvesant High School, entered Columbia University, where he spent a semester studying at the University of Sydney. Robinson doesn't discuss whether he had any sexual escapades during his semester overseas, but one can't help wondering.

After earning his undergraduate degree in English literature in 1998, Robinson enters Columbia Law School, where he undergoes a political awakening during the 2000 Bush-Gore recount fight: "When the Supreme Court issued its ruling [ending the recount in Florida and effectively making Bush the 45rd President], a deep anger rose in my soul. I knew that a profound injustice had been done, and I made a commitment to myself to remedy that injustice in whatever small way I could."

After graduating from law school, Robinson spends several years working on civil rights cases before deciding to run for office, winning a seat on the New York State Assembly in 2012. He dates a few Aussie expats in New York, but the relationships are complicated by the fact that he keeps subconsciously comparing his partners to Macpherson and by concerns that his personal life will impact his professional life: "Every black man in public life struggles against the stereotype that he is thoroughly obsessed with sex, especially sex with white women. The struggle is even harder when, as in my case, the stereotype is true."

When he meets Sydneysider Kylie Connolly in a Brooklyn bar in the summer of 2018, his entire life changes: "There was a glow to this young lady-she was every bit as sexy as Elle was, if not sexier...the unique softness of her voice blew me away. I was so turned on that even if she asked me to rob a bank or bark like a dog, I probably would have done it."

Kylie did neither, but what happened after the two left the bar that night changed the course of American political history. The same can obviously be said for the infamous Lincoln Bedroom romp involving Mark, Kylie and Fleet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Emma O'Donovan. Mark's description of the Threegate incident and its aftermath can best be described as erotic remorse, or carnal Catholic guilt:

"As long as I live, I will never forget the profound sexiness and extreme temptation of Emma's nude body. I absolutely loved kissing her, fondling her, entering her. As everything happened, an image flashed in my mind of Eve offering Adam the apple; were I Adam and Emma Eve, not only would I have eaten the apple, I would have eaten her right afterwards...As the fallout continued, it occurred to me that I wouldn't have found myself in this mess had I taken to heart all the lessons I had been taught about lust and sin and hell, had I remembered the story of King David and Bathsheba-had I remembered any of the cautionary tales I heard growing up about power, passion and principles."

In perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the memoir, Robinson writes that before Threegate, "I had dreamed of possibly being remembered by history as the patriarch of a family devoted to public service-the head of a new Kennedy family, if you will. That's a dream that's been destroyed...and destroyed by my own hand. It was my own weakness that destroyed it. The day after I resigned, a friend from Columbia Law called to say I had Franklin Roosevelt's politics and Ronald Reagan's charisma, but Richard Nixon's judgment and Bill Clinton's sex drive. That's one way to put it."

"My Journey" avoids addressing the elephant in the room that is then-Vice President Jonathan Cahill's alleged role in the leak of the Threegate footage, supposedly to force Robinson from power after he expressed skepticism about the Helping the Homeland Act. (The bill, which President Cahill signed into law in November 2025, has effectively made the United States the surveillance capital of the world.) Robinson concludes the book by declaring that he and Kylie have rededicated themselves to their Catholic faith, and hope that if their son, Edward, follows his father into politics, the kid will hold fast to the values the former President feels he abandoned that steamy evening in the Lincoln Bedroom. Perhaps little Edward will be the only prayer this country has.