Mirror, Mirror

Anti-masking, glamour-maxxing media provocateur Melissa Rein Lively is back after romps in Mar-a-Lago and Europe. And she wants to do PR for you.

By Amy Silverman | Photography by Chris Loomis | Photographed at Bubble Planet Tempe

On one of the last chilly evenings in March, Melissa Rein Lively walks into The Phoenician like she owns the place – or like if she doesn’t, she will one day soon.

She’s wearing a soft, peachy pink sweater that perfectly matches the glass of rosé she orders as she settles in at a small table in the back of the lobby bar.

You might recognize the name from her years as a public relations executive in the Valley. But it’s more likely you know Rein Lively as “Target Karen” or “QAnon Karen.” She went viral and achieved instant infamy by filming herself destroying a mask display in a Scottsdale Target in July 2020.

And she’s been trying to figure out how to capitalize on it ever since – first with apologies and warnings about QAnon, which she blames for pushing her over the edge. Then by using it to connect with Turning Point USA and MAGA, culminating with her failed campaign in late 2024 to be President Donald Trump’s press secretary.

But these days, Rein Lively says she’s been trying to lead a quieter life. Well, less controversial, anyway. Her Instagram feed looks like an issue of Condé Nast Traveler – just last summer, she traveled to Dubai, Mallorca, Tokyo and Venice, among other places.

“Emperors of Eurosummer,” she captions a photo snapped in sunny Sardinia. One of those emperors? Her fiancé, Philipp Ostermann, a German working in private equity she met on the slopes of a ritzy European ski resort. They plan to split their time between Düsseldorf and Scottsdale, Rein Lively says.

She currently runs three PR companies, but declines to name a single current client.

Rein Lively, 40, is tiny. Five-foot-two (and a half), with high cheekbones, plump lips and long, flowing hair – a look that has recently drawn association with the term “Mar-a-Lago Face.”

But despite her well-documented desire to be part of Trump’s inner circle, she bristles at the suggestion she’s adapted her look to achieve that end. She looked like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and myriad female Trumps long before it was popular, she says. This is her look.

She doesn’t mind people knowing she has work done – mostly maintenance, a light touch with the Botox, and only twice a year.

She’s nothing if not unabashed. Vouching for the plastic surgeon who did her nose job, she posted a personal testimonial on her YouTube channel.

Just don’t accuse her of wearing false eyelashes.

“I have never once worn fake eyelashes in my entire life,” she says. “Maybe, you know, the stick-on ones for an event or whatever, but I do not put fake eyelashes on. I’m very proud of my natural long eyelashes.”

Rein Lively really can’t be categorized. Is she an influencer? A cautionary tale? Celebrity provocateur? One might describe her as part Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley, part Kari Lake – two other Arizonans who’ve ridden the MAGA wave to varying degrees of infamy. And profit.

Rein Lively has said there’s no such thing as bad press – yet admits how difficult the negative coverage has been for her, including coverage of yet another incident last fall, when she and Ostermann were accused of being physically and verbally abusive to another pedestrian after an altercation near a London tube station. That one made international headlines.

The question is: Can she stop? Does she want to stop?

She might not even know for sure.

Rein Lively was born and raised in the upscale Cherry Creek area of Denver. But her professional story really begins at Arizona State University. Fed up with the Colorado snow, Rein Lively graduated high school early, she says, and headed to Tempe to study broadcast at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She worked briefly as a TV reporter on Arizona Entertainment Weekly, a program that aired on CBS 5.  But she quickly discovered that her true calling was PR.

“I didn’t go to school for PR, it just was like, duh,” she says, nursing her wine as the decibel level in the Phoenician bar continues to rise. “Like put [clients] on TV, start telling people about ’em, you know, go around, talk to people, like, it’ll happen.” 

She jokes that she got “a minor in clubbing and partying,” which – in all seriousness – helped her find clients, she says. And she acknowledges how much of an influence her father, a real estate developer, was. He bought her a condo in Scottsdale (the dorms were “disgusting”), but also put her on a budget.

“To be honest with you, my dad treating me like that was one of the best things that he ever did for me, because it taught me the value of a dollar and how hard I needed to work if I wanted to have a nice lifestyle.”

A young future real estate broker named Jared Lively lived in the condo above her. She was just 19 when they met, but the relationship had staying power. The couple married in 2011.  

She worked for a couple of local firms before going out on her own with her first agency, The Brand Consortium. She opened hotels, worked the Old Town Scottsdale scene. It wasn’t hard to get attention.

One tactic: “Oh, I know. Let’s call over to the Ford modeling agency and hire 15 models to sit at the bar and make this place look cool, and then take a bunch of pictures of it.”

By 2019, she says she was at the height of her career. But there were signs that career was unraveling – or at least drastically mutating. 

Her social media posts were becoming more brash and extreme, a no-no for those in the PR world. Then, in March 2019, Phoenix New Times reported on a verbal altercation between Rein Lively and two other local public relations professionals, her former boss Jason Rose and his associate Jen Moser. When Rose and Moser raised questions about Rein Lively’s mental health, the interactions got uglier. Ultimately, Rose and Moser filed for restraining orders, which a judge signed.  

The episode left a mark. Several longtime Valley PR professionals refused to comment about her for this story, making it clear they didn’t want to touch the topic. 

Nonetheless, Rein Lively insists it was a golden era for her. Through her agency, she’d worked on several hotel openings, she says, including The James, a now-defunct luxury property in Scottsdale. And she scored a plum client in Nobu, helping open the high-end sushi chain’s Scottsdale Fashion Square location in January 2020. 

“Everybody was hiring me. It was great. Like, I had no competition this time, I was killing it. And then, you know, a week later, COVID hits and like, I have always been a very health-conscious person. I freaked out.”

She looks up, stops abruptly.

“Hi. Hi. Oh my gosh, this is Philipp.”

The Phoenician’s lobby bar is packed, but it’s impossible to miss Ostermann. The guy looks like a character out of a Bond film – so beautiful it’s hard to believe he’s real, tall with blonde hair swept off his face and an engaging smile. 

Ostermann excuses himself to get a cocktail – Rein Lively has already made it clear that he’s not interested in being interviewed. She picks up where she left off.

“I was the first one [to be] like, shut it all down, wear a mask, wash your groceries. Like, I was crazy. Like, it really affected me. And of course, being as media-oriented as I was, you’re seeing this death ticker [on the news]. It messed with me. It really did,” she says.

She started losing clients, she says, due to the shutdown. And that’s when the QAnon stuff started.

Of the pandemic and conspiracy theories, she says: “Honestly, to this day, [it] changed me. And I got angry about it. And that’s when I sort of took the approach of, there’s something not right here, there’s something going on here that I don’t believe.”

She also suddenly had a lot of down time. Maybe too much. She recalls that her husband encouraged her to read a book, play tennis, distract herself. That didn’t work.

“I’m not very good at taking direction from other people because I’m very intuitive, and I’m like, this is what I need to be doing,” she says of her attempts to alert the public about what she perceived to be COVID-related misinformation.  

“And so, you know, obviously hindsight is 20/20.”

But then it became bigger than 2020.

“This is when I was really starting to get interested with testing basically the science of morality and, like, if you push this lever, this happens,” she says, describing her mindset leading up to the Target incident. 

The “lever,” in this case, was the viral video she created – pulled to create a reaction. A lot of outrage. Some amusement. Maybe a little admiration. Attention-economy best-testing.

“Needless to say, I am out of the stunt game now for various reasons,” she adds. “But at the time, you know, I had tested it, and it worked.”

Rein Lively saw others becoming famous simply for being… famous. Why couldn’t she? 

At the time, her husband (the divorce is not yet final, though she says they’ve split and are finalizing details) had a much different take. He famously told media she was struggling with mental illness, and after the Target incident she spent 10 days at The Meadows, a high-profile treatment center in Wickenburg. 

Lively did not return messages seeking comment for this story. For her own part, Rein Lively insists she has no mental health diagnosis, no issues.

Though the mask incident quashed most of her mainstream client-service prospects, it did create intriguing new ones, she says. 

“So, quickly I became totally a household name in conservative politics.” 

And a member of the Mar-a-Lago crowd.

Rein Lively laid relatively low during the Biden years, cultivating connections in Florida and elsewhere, attending parties and fundraisers, taking photos with the likes of U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. As the 2024 election neared, she stepped up the pace of her engagement and publicity. Her time in Florida was documented in photos on her social media accounts and in stories by several national outlets. 

“We were trying to get [Trump] elected. It was like a movie, it was totally like I imagined, but even more. Because I felt like, even despite the fact, like how destroyed I had been with all the Target stuff and everybody saying I was crazy and everything, in the back of my mind, I was like, they could say whatever they want about me. But it worked. It worked, it worked.”

She started her second PR company, America First. When Trump famously issued an open casting call for his new White House press secretary, Rein Lively lobbied hard, even scoring space in a Politico piece. After she was passed over for the job in early 2025, she flew to Vienna for a work conference. That led to a ski trip, where she met Ostermann.

She’s since started a third PR firm, Europe First. But while she loves being abroad, she’s realized that Arizona is home.

“I hated Florida. My hair, first of all, it did not cooperate at all… I love living on the beach, but just the quality of life in Florida versus Arizona, I missed it. And I couldn’t put a finger on it until I came back, and it was like, ‘I love Arizona. I’m a Scottsdale girl through and through.’”

She and Ostermann haven’t set a wedding date because they can’t decide where to get married. The Breakers in Palm Beach? Europe?

This is his first marriage, she says. Her first wedding – to Lively – was in Napa. “I don’t need a whole crazy nonsense thing,” she says. “I already wasted a couple hundred thousand dollars on people who I never talked to again.”

She looks wistful. She says repeatedly that Lively is a good man. “I got married, I thought we would be together forever.”

Ostermann returns with his drink.

“Grab a chair, babe,” she says, perking up. “How are you doing? Good.”

She turns to me, suddenly all business.

“Should we conclude?”

The following day, Rein Lively emails her thanks. She wants to meet again. There are so many topics we didn’t have time to cover, she says, and the patio at Zinc Bistro at Kierland Commons should be wonderful this time of year.

When I arrive, she’s already got a glass of rosé in front of her and orders the Dungeness crab salad, her usual.

The conversation turns to politics – and Mar-a-Lago. 

“It is an absolutely beautiful club. And the food is better than people like to gossip about. I think the food is great. You just have to know what to order. But I have been at dinner with the president probably a dozen times, and it is so – whatever you think about him, the guy is a consummate host.”

She says when someone asks, “What’s your dream dinner party?” she tells them she’s already been to it.

“You look around and you’re like, oh my gosh, Dr. Phil is here, and Elon Musk. It’s like a fever dream. Oh, JD Vance is here. Elon, one night I was there and Elon’s little kid decided that he wanted to stand next to me all night.”

Did losing the press secretary job sting? It actually worked out OK, she says. It was more fun to drink Aperol spritzes in Europe that summer, watching White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt get “sliced and diced,” than to be in D.C.

She does still think about what it would be like to have the gig. “It would be completely different. It would be like I was running cocktail hour. It would be laughing, jokes. I mean, you defuse people with humor. That’s always been something I’m really good at,” she says.

She’s got some advice for the White House.

“I think that the best route that they can go with Trump is really leaning into, ‘He’s an adorable grandpa and he just says anything. He’s just that type of guy. Don’t take it personally’… I have a different perspective of it, because I have been around him. And I think he is so cute and so adorable, and he means so well.”

She can relate to the plight of the immigrant because last year she overstayed her visa and couldn’t spend Thanksgiving with Ostermann and his family in Europe.

Instead, she was detained in Zurich and sent home on a flight. Coach.

Looking back, she realizes she was acting entitled.

“I was like, well, I’m an American and I’m cute. They’re gonna just look the other way and say, don’t do it next time. They said, sorry, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s – you’re outta here, lady. It was sad. I pretty much spent the holidays alone. It was awful.”

She and Ostermann did make it to the Bahamas and Mexico. And she completed the visa paperwork, saying that now she’s a European resident.

“For better or for worse, you know, I like who I am today. I like who I am in the mirror. I’m not proud of every single thing I’ve done in my life, but there are many, many things that I am proud of, and a lot of things that I’ve accomplished and a lot of things that I still want to do. And I still see myself as very young and very agile and active and excited, and I have 40 years ahead of me. So, the way I see it, I’m just getting started.”

A couple weeks later, Rein Lively is in Düsseldorf but takes time to answer a few more questions by phone.

The incident in London hadn’t yet come up, and when it does, it’s pretty obvious Rein Lively was hoping it wouldn’t. The press clips are ubiquitous but vague. There was an alleged incident involving Rein Lively and Ostermann, a woman with a baby buggy, a substance that might have been pepper spray and possibly hair pulling.

The British Transport Police acknowledged there was an incident last fall and promised to follow up with details, but hadn’t as of press time.

Rein Lively says she can’t talk about the case because it’s ongoing, but mentions that she and Ostermann do have lawyers in the United Kingdom “working through the details.”

She says the whole situation got out of hand – and she knows why.

“My brand, my personality, made it 10,000 times worse. It affected Philipp, who has no political affiliations at all whatsoever. And I mean, just really turned what ultimately was a brief altercation, where we were attacked from behind, into a global manhunt.”

In a weird way, she says, she feels like Kim Kardashian.

“I’m famous for being famous, and this is just never gonna go away because everything ties back to this 2020 incident. 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.”

This is very different from what Rein Lively has said in earlier interviews. She’s pretty much always insisted that the Target incident was good for her, good for business.

Since she won’t name any clients, that’s hard to quantify.

Her off-spotlight preference for privacy extends to her personal life. When asked for a list of people to talk to about her, Rein Lively offered her fiancé, who ultimately declined, and one old friend. 

Arielle Hayat is a clinical herbalist and lives in Miami. She and Rein Lively met at ASU. She was traveling home from a business trip to China, so communicated via WhatsApp. 

First, she offers Lively’s astrological profile. “She is an Aquarius rising with Jupiter in the 1st house and a Scorpio stellium in the 10th, which describes someone with a striking mix of visionary presence, magnetic depth and public power,” Hayat writes. 

“Wherever she goes, people seem to understand her magnetic energy and want to know who she is. She’s social[ly] aware, but a little detached and mysterious.” 

Rein Lively continues to post liberally on social media – although recently seems to have tamped down her coarsest interactions,  including name-calling, some of it arguably hateful. People shouldn’t take it personally, she says. She doesn’t mean it in a hurtful manner.

“I know I’ll never win on this one, but I just think that the language argument is just, to me, it’s just words. I mean, think about the words that people use to describe me.”

And it’s not fair, she says.

“I said this from the very beginning, the more that I protest this, the crazier I sound. So, yeah, there is a point where I am bottling up with just absolute rage because the way I am treated constantly is unfair. And even if I wanted people to listen to me, like I was willing to participate in this story, and to be honest, I’m not real happy that I did,” she says through tears.

Would she say social media has played a big role in all of this?

“I would. It’s not what it is now. I mean, it’s grown into this beast. It was fun, it was effective. And now it’s your worst enemy.”

One last question.

“I did want to ask you – when all is said and done, is there such a thing as bad press?”

She pauses for a moment.

“To be determined.”