Brian Dorsey Studios via nytimes.com

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand roundly admonished TheLadders CEO Marc Cenedella yesterday following a New York Times story about content pertaining to women, sex, and drugs on his personal blog—or at least a blog that featured a giant photo of him and the tagline "The personal blog of Marc Cenedella.” As politics wonks will note, Mr. Cenedella, an anti-tax activist, is a likely Republican challenger to Ms. Gillibrand's seat in the Senate.

A spokesman for TheLadders quickly responded that the posts in question, such as one that advocated for a holiday where women offer free oral sex along with a steak dinner, were not actually written by Mr. Cenedella, calling it a "staging site [that] contained testing content from a wide variety of sources, including spam from automatic spiders."

Nonetheless, it wasn't the first time that the Cenedella family has been in the news for its personal blogs. A source informed Betabeat that Mr. Cenendella's wife Angela Cenedella, née Angela Kim, is the author of the popular lifestyle blog Vie Society, known for its unapologetically girly take on the luxe life and coining terms like "moopig" and "amazeballoons."

Betabeat reached out to both Vie Society and TheLadders for confirmation yesterday afternoon and have yet to hear back. But it's not hard to find links between Mrs. Cenedella and Vie Society online, such as an application for a trademark for "Vie Society" made by Angela Kim in 2011 and a mention outting Mrs. Cenedella in the comment section of GetOffMyInternets from back in 2009.

Vie Society was also the name of a female social club launched at Harvard Law School in 2005. Its first ever cocktail party, "featured pink champagne and 'princess chic' attire, including tiaras," the Harvard Crimson noted through gritted teeth. Mrs. Cenedella, then a second-year at HLS and a member of the club, is mentioned in the article.

At the time an op-ed in The Record, the law school's weekly paper, quipped, "'Vie Society,’ by the way, wasn’t the group’s first choice for a name, but ‘Aspiring Trophy Wives Association’ was deemed too hard for future members to pronounce." In actuality, Mrs. Cenedella, who is 11 years her husband's junior, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard undergrad and also holds a master's in real estate development from Columbia. According to her public LinkedIn profile, Mrs. Cenedella, has worked as an attorney, a partner at Imedra Partners, her father's commercial real estate firm in Los Angeles, and currently as an operations analyst for the Thompson Hotels.

Update: We've also unearthed some photographic evidence to support our source's claim. In Mrs. Cendella's New York Times wedding announcement, Brian Dorsey Studios is credited as the couple's photographer. Here's a photograph from a (now deleted) Vie Society blogpost about the author's honeymoon from 2009 and a markedly similar photograph from the website for Brian Dorsey Studios of a woman who looks not unlike Mrs. Cenedella in the same Monique Lhuillier gown. "PS The photo? Me and the amazing Monique Lhuillier… as she fit me into my super-rushed custom dream wedding dress," says the Vie Society post.

via Vie Society

via Brian Dorsey Studios

For years, Vie Society, which appears to have deleted all of its content on Tumblr, blogged anonymously about "wondrous vacations, fashion fabulosity, technogeek adventures, her niece Baconbit, and, of course, sugary treats," Guest of a Guest wrote in a Q&A with Vie Society back in 2010. The site's mysterious author, wrote Guest of a Guest, seemed to come from "a privileged life outside of the public eye." In the interview she explains the origins of moopig: "'Moopig' is my nickname from Husby - He's alternatively enraptured and repulsed by how much I eat."

Vie Society caught the public's eye back in 2009 for blog posts about a pricing snafu at Gilt Groupe. (Vie Society publicly criticized Gilt for claiming a cashmere scarf retailed for $300 when it sold for $195 at Neiman Marcus and the response was covered by nymag.com's fashion blog, The Cut.)

As Betabeat noted back in October in a post about layoffs at TheLadders, Mr. Cenedella previously worked with Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan at Hot Jobs. Mr. Ryan also invested in a $7.25 million series A round that TheLadders raised in 2004. The two companies also share a venture capital investor, Matrix Partners. Nick Beim, a general partner at Matrix, sits on the board of directors at TheLadders, Gilt Groupe, and formerly, BuyWithMe. As we reported previously, BuyWithMe laid off nearly half its staff before being acquired by Gilt City, a division of Gilt Groupe. Yesterday, Gilt Groupe confirmed to Betabeat that it recently let go of 90 employees, or 10 percent of its 900-person staff.

In that Guest of a Guest interview, the Vie Society author was asked if she had any advice for fellow bloggers. "Don't censor," she responded. "It's just infinitely more interesting - to you and to any potential visitor." On that note, we hope to see Vie Society's return to the blogging world. We have a feeling it could offer some unorthodox insight into the upcoming Senatorial race.

TheLadder's 250 Hudson St. offices.

BuyWithMe wasn't the only local company hemorrhaging jobs this week. Betabeat has learned that TheLadders laid off about 30 employees this week, across all departments.

"It was like Black Wednesday," said the source of the overlapping job losses. However, where BuyWithMe let go of 55 percent of its staff, TheLadders downsizing was less severe, with seven percent of its 420 employees, according to our source who was familiar with the situation.

Until a month ago, TheLadders focused exclusively on the $100,000+ jobs market--its key differentiator in the market. The source said the layoffs were related to flat revenue growth at about $80 million, adding that the company's two biggest expenses were people and marketing costs. "They already cut marketing significantly," said the source, who called the job losses "cost cutting to reforecast budget due to lower than expected revenue growth."

TheLadders would not comment on the number of employees that were let go, total number of employees, or revenue, but CEO and founder Marc Cenedella offered the following statement by email, "TheLadders made some departmental changes to better align our company focus and investment on areas driving growth, enabling us to continue our industry-leading innovation. We remain singularly focused on providing the best service offering to all career minded professionals and recruiters."

According to Crunchbase, the last time TheLadders raised funding was a $7.25 million series A round in 2004 from Matrix Partners, the same VC firm that backed BuyWithMe. Kevin Ryan, founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe, who worked with Mr. Cenedella at Hot Jobs also invested in that round. Matrix Partners has also backed Gilt Groupe. Matrix Partner's Nick Beim sits on the board of directors at TheLadders, BuyWithMe, and Gilt Groupe. We hear it's not uncommon for staffers from TheLadders to move over to Gilt Groupe.

At the start of the year, TheLadders launched a TV campaign that some called overly provocative, but Betabeat found rather amusing and in line with the new absurdist Old Spice mode of advertising. Nonetheless, that campaign focused on $100k job market, something TheLadders pivoted away from this September with Mr. Cenedella's announcement that, "We’re expanding, and today we say ‘bye bye’ to helping only those over $100,000 and ‘hello’ to helping all career-minded professionals." In the comments, some job-seeking members balked at continuing to pay monthly fees that start at $15 for the site.

We're still looking for additional information, so please email: ntiku@observer.com.

Mr. Cenedella

CEO Reed Hastings's letter to Netflix customers may have dominated yesterday's executive epistolary news cycle, but TheLadders.com CEO and founder Marc Cenedella also snuck in some pretty big news for the jobs site. In a post on his blog, Mr. Cenedella wrote:

"We’re expanding, and today we say 'bye bye' to helping only those over $100,000 and 'hello' to helping all career-minded professionals. TheLadders now takes all salary levels and shows the right jobs to the right person."

Based on a sampling of the post's 127 comments, folks were not pleased about a move that forgoes the company's targeted focus for something, they worry, will end up more like Monster.com, but still require a monthly fee.

In the announcement, Mr. Cenedella wrote, "We’ve talked about preparing for the day when we would expand to cover all professional jobs." He also tried to assure members that, "We won’t be letting in scammy jobs, work-from-home schemes, or commission-only opportunities — we’ll still be vetting every job and every recruiter before we allow them into our community."

The latest Compete numbers show an increase in traffic to the site and Mr. Cenedella noted:

"We’ve tripled the number of recruiters and HR professionals in our community this year alone.

And so now that we’ve grown to almost five million members in the United States and 43% of high-end professionals used TheLadders in their job search last year, we’re expanding to serve all career-minded professionals and all professional jobs in the country."

But the majority of commenters--admittedly not a group known for their willingness to embrace change--harped on the lack of differentiation between TheLadders and other job sites and the dilution of the brand. They wondered why TheLadder's didn't opt for the Netflix/Qwikster route and launch a separate line for generalists. They also zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Cenedella did not mention how the expansion would affect customer fees, which, on the job seekers end, start at $15 a month. One commenter named Billdwdg, whose note got 20 likes, was even moved to erratic punctuation:

"I subscribe because of the narrowness of the opportunties that pre-screen away the assistant to the assistant manager. Based upon this change you are making, I assume you will be also revising your business model to reflect a REDUCTION in your fees?!?!?!?"

Betabeat has reached out to Mr. Cenedella for comment and we'll update you when we hear back.