LIZZIE GRUBMAN, you can run – but you can’t hide.
That is the message the 30-year-old jet-set publicist, her lawyers and her powerful father, Allen, will be getting when they learn that a grand jury will be impaneled as early as today in the case of the Conscience Point carnage.
Although a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Jim Catterson said yesterday that the case would be sent to the grand jury in the next couple of weeks, I’m told on the best authority it will happen sooner – very likely today or tomorrow.
It’s the worst possible news for Lizzie and her people, who’d hoped the matter would somehow go away before it came to trial in September.
The Suffolk grand jury, meeting in the decidedly nonglamorous county seat of Riverhead, will have the widest powers possible to probe what really happened outside the Conscience Point nightclub early last Saturday.
The panel will be made up of solid East End citizens – for the most part retired, churchgoing folk who will have no empathy whatsoever with Grubman and her flashy crowd.
Catterson faces a tough re-election battle this November and might have been excused if he’d just let the Grubman case proceed through the courts. “But Jim knows this is a watershed issue – the ultimate example of rich kids coming out here and treating the locals like yokels,” one source tells me.
“He wants it all laid out before the grand jury, where everyone has to tell the truth or risk jail.”
The grand-jury process is tough. If Lizzie agrees to appear, she’ll have to stand there alone without lawyers coaching her.
The grand jury’s powers are unlimited. In this case, for example, I’m told the DA’s staff is going to re-interview every club patron and staffer and every one of Grubman’s friends and associates. They will be told: “Either give us a true statement of what happened, or we’ll haul you in front of the grand jury and you will be facing a perjury indictment.”
I also hear that the DA is prepared to use his powers to come down on Andrew Sasson, an ex-boyfriend of Lizzie’s.
Grubman apparently fled to Sasson’s Bridgehampton home after the incident. Catterson, if he wants to get nasty, can threaten the young British scenester with harboring a fugitive.
Likewise the Conscience Point owners. Catterson will tell them that if they don’t come clean about who drank what, who said what, who threatened whom, they will never hold a liquor license in New York again.
Catterson will also try to prove where Grubman was and what she drank that night. There is also hearsay evidence that a Conscience Point doorman, before things erupted, told Grubman to be “more discreet” about whatever it was she was allegedly doing near the club’s entrance.