Among the tips that poured in after we started really asking questions about Huffington last month, in the wake of a New Yorker profile of the onetime socialite, was one claiming Huffington "had a breakdown (like bat-shit crazy person breakdown) in front of one male staffer who was working on Right Is Wrong," Huffington's recent political book. Another ex-HuffPo staffer subsequently confirmed the account to us, saying the staffer in question was shaken up, and pointing to Republican strategist Ed Rollins' book for more examples (it's on order!).

This second staffer said many HuffPo staffers are, at some point in their employey, witness to such breakdowns: Yelling, followed by an enraged denunciation of the person's skills and/or value as an employee and/or as a person, then tears and, perhaps, a later attempt at reconciliation.

Several other ex-HuffPo insiders said that general description of the quality and quantity of Huffington's rages met with their experience. "The breakdowns entail screaming and crying for a drawn out period of time," one said. Another:

Breakdowns are frequent... Although it's not so much crying as this wail-y, near-crying, cracked voice she employs when she is quite literally shaking with rage. When you hear that voice you know you're well past the point of no return.

Some breakdowns arose during Huffington's work on books, serious and stressful extracurricular projects that in many ways resembl, say, hosting a top-rated MSNBC show for a night. From that perspective, staffers have good reason to walk on eggshells (when not running personal errands) in the runnup to the Rachel Maddow Show gig tonight. It can't help Huffington's mood that she'll be working for a network where she was once reportedly banned for attacking Meet The Press host Tim Russert, the longtime Huffington enemy who has only grown more revered since his passing.

On the other hand, multiple former staff said Huffington's fits were often set off by trivial matters, disproportionately including minor issues with cars and drivers.

Take the subway, Arianna, for everyone's sake! Your show sounds fun.

If anyone knows how Huffington is doing, today, this week or at some point in her long past, we'd love to hear from you.

Prior Huffington coverage: The Huffington Posts

It's not clear how much Fuller is doing for OK!, other than hiring proper flacks to take up former editor and celebrity publicist Rob Shuter's PR duties. But recently-installed general manager Kent Brownridge was recently rumored keen to bring her on as editor. And it sounds like he's only become more desperate since:

According to multiple industry sources, sales for OK! have been very low. For example, last week’s issue featuring Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens was dramatically under 400K on the newsstand.

Already shaken by heavy turnover across the top of the masthead, Fuller's prospective underlings can't be happy at the prospect of working for a legendary office bully. Perhaps they should revive the "I Survived Bonnie" website as a preemptive strike.

Late last year, former staffers say, Huffington directed two Huffington Post employees to attend an Insight Seminar in Westlake Village, California. Though technically distinct from MSIA, Insight shares a founder, John-Roger, and a "Spiritual Director," John Morton (right) with the group. This sharing of staff goes back at least 20 years, when the LA Times reported Insight was rife with MSIA "volunteers" and obtained emails showing John-Roger was calling the shots. A former top-ranked church minister told the paper Insight was used to draw new recruits into MSIA.

One of the staff members made to attend the event was HuffPo's New York-based Living section editor, Anya Strzemien (left), according to two insiders. Strzemien did not respond to an email seeking comment, but Huffington Post is said to have paid the bill for her flight and multi-day stay in California, and by all accounts the trip occurred at Arianna's behest. Said one tipster: "It was kind of a joke in the office, like 'is she going to be brainwashed by the creepy cult.'" It is not clear if Strzemien was attending for personal development, to "cover" the event for HuffPo or both.

The other staffer was apparently an unnamed Los Angeles-based scheduler struggling to serve Huffington, an erratic and sometimes brutal presence over staffers who work out of her Brentwood mansion. It was made clear to this person, one source said, that attending the conference was necessary to keep her job. Huffington asked the staffer to think about how important her job was to her, then suggested the seminar as a way to refocus — a neat way of making the event mandatory without being explicit and perhaps running afoul of laws governing religion in the workplace, the source said. After struggling with the decision for a week, and supposedly making a fruitless plea to HR in New York, the scheduler ended up attending, only to leave the company a month or two later.

Huffington's commitment to MSIA may well go beyond seminars for her staff. One tipster said that while Huffington is reported, including by the New Yorker, to give to 10 percent of her income to charity each year, that money flows as a tithe to MSIA, and/or to charities closely linked to the cult. That would be in keeping with church principles, as described in a lengthy 1988 LA Times article:

Tithing, or giving a percentage of one's monthly income to MSIA, is also recommended. Because of its tax-exempt status as a church, MSIA is not required to make public its financial records, but by all indications people contribute money freely — in some cases in large lump sums.

One devotee happily told the newspaper about handing over a check to the group for $500,000, without even knowing how it would be used.

Why would Huffington tie her enterprise, which depends for its continued success on access to celebrity contributors and other influential people, to a controversial organization like MSIA? Perhaps because making the Huffington Post a faithful reflection of her own personality has worked so well thus far. Despite its turnover problem, the website has posted truly astounding traffic growth just in the past few months, to 262 million pageviews per month, as the election draws near. And as the New Yorker noted, HuffPo has become an influential hub for liberal political discourse, drawing op-eds from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. More importantly, its reporting has figured prominently in the election, particularly Mayhill Fowler's scoop on Barack Obama's comments about "bitter" small-town Americans and Sam Stein's scoops, including on John McCain's fake campaign suspension.

But it is all but impossible to read the LA Times' three exhaustive articles on MSIA, dating to 1988 and 1994, without coming to the conclusion that the movement is, in fact, a scary cult, and among the last organizations Huffington should be calling on to prepare HuffPo to keep growing as the economy, and soon politics, cools down.

John-Roger is depicted as a paranoid leader who secretly wires each room in Insight headquarters with a microphone connected to his office, who taps the phones, and who warns that his critics "had been infected by a powerful and contagious negative force known as the Red Monk," a spirit of whom members were terrified. He removed "negative entities" in a popular "exorcism-like" ceremony known as the "Super II's," organized hours-long "Prana Awareness Trainings" involving "repeatedly answering a simple question," and organized followers into a complex hierarchy, including a Melchizedek Priesthood and an inner, elite circle of attractive young male ministers known as "the Guys."

The LA Times said one of these favored sons was among at least three close John-Rogers associates who said they had sex with him "as an important spiritual favor:"

In July of 1977, John-Roger put [Victor] Toso on staff, and he joined the rarefied ranks of "the guys." But things didn't go smoothly. "He kept telling me I didn't have what it took to be on staff," Toso said. Finally John-Roger told him that he would have to move from the hillside estate to the movement's Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age in downtown Los Angeles, he said.

Toso says that he dropped to his knees and sobbed, begging John-Roger to tell him how he might become a better servant of the Traveler.

"It dawned on me what I had to do," he said.

To stay on staff, Toso said he knew he would have to engage in sexual relations with John-Roger. "I decided to make the Faustian pact," he said. "And, indeed, I was admitted into the brotherhood."But the pact didn't sit well with Toso, even as he found his life with the Traveler vastly improved. And one day "I walked in on another staff member having sex with J-R. I had been naive enough to believe I was the only one," Toso said.

In last year's interview, John-Roger denied he had sexual relations with Toso or any other staff member.

Toso said he was later "defrocked" in front of other church members and stripped of his wallet, credit cards, watch, ring and airline tickets, and had to write a "dishonest" letter to get them back. Other former members, named in the series, testify to brainwashing and other forms of manipulation. "My God, I was manipulated and used," former MSIA newspaper editor Victoria Marine told the newspaper.

In the articles, John-Roger denies having sex with or brainwashing his followers.

Whatever his flaws, and whatever it is that has drawn so many to look to him almost as a messiah over the past 38 years, a "Mystic Traveler" to be physically envisioned while chanting and to be paid for "polarity balancings," "John-" Roger Hinkins shares with Arianna Huffington a reputation for having two faces, one of seductive, overpowering charm and the other for a nasty temper.

Wrote the LA Times:

Two [former staffers], Toso and Wesley Whitmore, recall thinking that in contrast to his public behavior, John-Roger in private was often angry, vindictive and bizarre, occasionally shouting that he was under attack from negative forces. But their devotion to John-Roger kept them from addressing these issues, they said.

And so it is with Arianna and her badly battered staff. She could hardly have picked a more appropriate guru.

On the strength of its left-leaning political coverage, the Huffington Post has become a breakaway success, with more traffic than Drudge and more inbound links than TechCrunch. But advertisers hate politics, Arianna's favored and strongest topic, so the site is trying to diversify. As it does so, Arianna's skills — and flaws — as a manager will become more visible and more important.

Why does Huffington push herself to the point where, as both the recent New Yorker profile and those who have worked with her made clear, she has few, if any, serious friends outside of HuffPo? Why is she focused on her project to the point where associates wonder when she could find time for an affair with Cory Booker, as was bizarrely (in their eyes) rumored?

There is speculation as to the reasons. Bipolar disorder, perhaps? (There is no known evidence, only the guesses of laymen.)

Or maybe Huffington's priorities come from the teachings of the cultish Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, with which she has long been involved, for which her frequent contributor Russell Bishop launched a lucrative series of corporate "Insight" courses, and to which her live-in sister Agapi is said to be an especially fervent devotee?

Or perhaps Huffington is driven simply by ego. Within her publication it is understood, after all, that videos of her own media appearances are to be posted posthaste, top priority.

The cost of Huffington's poorly bounded ambitions are not born by her alone but also by her beleaguered staff, including aspiring journalists who until recently were hired, some claim, with no knowledge whatsoever they would take on some of the duties of administrative assistants or household servants. Duties like:

• taking heavily accented email dictation,
• arranging haircuts or troubleshooting BlackBerrys for Huffington's daughters,
• fetching lunch or coffee,
• or writing talking points for Huffington's television appearances.

There are far worse jobs, to be sure, than editor and part-time admin for one of the top sites on the internet. But a great many of those who have worked with Huffington seem bruised, and compelled to talk about — vent about — their experiences and those of others. (And yes we, of all sites, should know this sort of thing when we see it.)

From their stories one can piece together a kind of coterie of miserable self-sacrifice. Here are three members of that dubious clique:

The Passport Mule

Huffington is known for forgetfully leaving essential gear behind as she jots around the world, including, most frequently, between her Brentwood home office, HuffPo's New York office and the Mercer Hotel in SoHo. The most infamous example of this, multiple sources said, occurred when Huffington, or more likely a carelessly-instructed housekeeper, neglected to pack Arianna's passport for a trip from Brentwood. Once in New York on the first leg, Huffington realized she needed the passport to enter Canada for a fast-approaching trip to Toronto.

There was no time. An unnamed female HuffPo staffer was dispatched in the wee hours on a flight to New York. She delivered the passport to the Mercer and was promptly placed on a return flight to Los Angeles, another 18-hour day in the service of Arianna's Vortex. She may or may not have been treated to lunch in between!

Young Colin Sterling

Sterling became blog editor at the Huffington Post, and a top conduit between Arianna and the New York office, following the departure of two seasoned journalists, BBC's Elinor Shields and Rolling Stone's Frank Wilkinson, who did not fit into the publishing culture Huffington had created. Maybe Huffington couldn't let go of the site and provide them sufficient autonomy, or maybe they just couldn't mesh with Web publishing, it's not clear. (They each lasted at most a year.)

Today in his mid-20s, Sterling earned Huffington's trust as a researcher for her out West. By all accounts, his new job, with crushing demands from the very top, has taxed him. Called upon to, say, cram together TV talking points on less than half an hour's notice while riding herd over a massive, oddball stable of blog contributors, most of whom will be relegated to vertical sections far from the coveted front page, Sterling has been known to pound his desk with his fists and yell curses (a simple "Fuck!" being a favorite) immediately after hanging up on a call from Arianna, an act guaranteed to be noticed in HuffPo's open-plan 15-person Gotham newsroom.

Sterling is also, at times, short tempered with those underneath him: The public yelling and cursing are not directed only at the Gods in the wake of Arianna's calls, it seems. His "nasty" temper has made enemies, one person said, and contributed to a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere during the three or four weeks of each month Huffington is not in New York. Other observers are much more sympathetic, but still concede his personality seems to have bent sharply to fit that of his loved and hated boss.

In fairness, it should be noted that Huffington is said to have her own short temper. Though no one has been able to confirm that she called one editor a "retard" before he quit in protest, as we reported in our last HuffPo story, none doubted she would have said it, and some insiders said it would be in keeping with other nasty slights — calling people "fucking" liars, incompetents and worse.

Thanks to Arianna's manic work schedule, hours never quite end at HuffPo for anyone on staff, by all accounts. Fairly or not, Sterling seems to have become a bit of a poster child for the ill effects of that phenomenon.

Roy Sekoff

This is the man who, everyone seems to agree, writes Arianna's blog posts, the ones she pledged would "never" be ghost written. The process will be familiar to anyone who has similarly ghosted a column for an EIC: Huffington briefly sketches an idea, Sekoff (or perhaps, on occasion, another editor) researches it and puts it to words, and Huffington does a quick check prior to publication.

Sekoff also happens to be HuffPo's top, founding editor and Huffington's right-hand man, based in Los Angeles. A family man in his late 40s, he is described as not only older but more loyal than Huffington's other editors, many of whom are in their 20s. Thus eyebrows were arched when he gave this quote to the New Yorker, implying that Huffington is often unfamiliar with the topics she is called upon to discuss on television:

I’ve literally seen her stand somewhere, look at a piece of research, and then—boom!—go on TV and, word for word, nail the three most important points and leave out everything else.

One wonders how often the research in question came from Sekoff himself, and if his quote to the New Yorker wasn't a bit of subconscious revenge on Arianna for taking credit for so much of his own work.

If anyone has more information from inside the Huffington Post, for example on the clubby process of front-page story selection, or on the parade of editors through New York, we'd love to hear from you. And we're not even sure we could stop you guys from writing in at this point if we wanted to.

This terror goes a long way toward explaining what innumerable editors and editorial assistants refer to offhandedly as her "pathologies." Her behavior would make a case study for a favorite regular pictorial feature in the new Star, "Stars Who Are Normal or ... Not Normal," wherein she analyzes just that. "Everybody knows stars do over-the-top things," Fuller says. "That's what makes them stars."

And for a star editor in chief? Having a clothing allowance: Normal. Not being able to find the right bra for an event, even after having your fashion editor call in numerous freebies, driving her to hand over the still-warm bra off her back: Not normal. (Fuller denies this, claiming, "I'm not a big clothes sharer.") Asking an editorial assistant to do a certain number of personal errands, like picking up the dry cleaning or wrapping presents: Normal. Purportedly asking assistant to wash out your breast pump: Not normal! (Fuller does not recall asking anyone to do this. "Could one of my assistants, being thoughtful, have done it? I don't know. I'm oblivious.")

Certainly her most glaring "Not normal"s revolve around perks. "Oh my God, the town cars!" says Kent Brownridge. "We'd discussed this pointedly several times. We'd say, If you worked late, you can take a car home. Jann wanted to support her when her daughter was in the hospital"-almost the same day she started at Us, her daughter, Leilah, then five, was diagnosed with leukemia (and 10 years earlier, her older daughter Sofia had a benign brain tumor removed)-"so we'd say, Take a car up there-it's hard to get a cab up to Columbia [Presbyterian hospital, where Leilah was being treated]. So somehow that got turned into taking a car to work, then taking a car to the gym, then having it wait while she worked out, then having the car take her to work. Her rationale was: I'm working my ass off-you should do this for me." Regarding Bonnie's perks-or lack thereof-at Us, an incredulous Michael Fuller says, "Do you know when she worked at Us she had to take the train in every day? The train!" (At Conde Nast, where she'd worked before Us, the policy for editors in chief using company cars is known to be more liberal.)

One highly placed executive at a rival company said Fuller had someone on staff, Kelli Delaney, whose title was creative director but whose real job description was procurement officer. "Kelli Delaney's job? To get Bonnie free shit," says an editor at Us who worked with Bonnie and Kelli when they were there. "There wasn't really tons of fashion at the magazine. But Kelli would be made to fetch her everything from high-end label goods to underwear." Delaney says, "I have no problem telling you that people are giving Bonnie stuff," referring to the common practice of designers sending samples to editors with the hope of being featured. "I guarantee you they send a heck of a lot more to [other editors] than to Bonnie."

"Do you know the Make-a-Wish story?" asks one former editor who worked closely with Bonnie for years. "This is the most unbelievable story about entitlement. I say this as someone who really likes her, but there are things about her you can't fathom." Right before Bonnie quit Us, she had planned a family trip to Hawaii. The Make-a-Wish Foundation, an organization that arranges for the dreams of critically ill children to come true, was sending all six members of her family there owing to Fuller's ill daughter. What startled the editor was not so much the trip but the conversation that ensued right before Fuller left. She was overheard in the office shouting at one of the Make-a-Wish officers: "I just can't believe I'm going coach! How am I going to make that flight in coach?" Fuller says she did bump her family's fares up to business class, at her own expense. "Clearly," she says, "whoever [said that] doesn't know what it is to travel with four kids."

"I feel for her, I do," says the editor. "She's tortured by this money stuff. But she has these compulsions."

Fuller's worry may be fueled by factors in her life she doesn't discuss much. She is, more or less, the sole support for her family of six. Husband Michael is an architect but mostly oversees their four children: Noah, 17; Sofia, 13; Leilah, 7; and Sasha, 3. (Along with the housekeeper. "Don't buy all that Mr. Mom stuff they tell you," says one former assistant. "Michael's a great guy, but he thoroughly enjoys the lifestyle Bonnie provides.") Some insiders say Michael may be her Iago, whispering in her ear about how undervalued she is. Certainly she's provided him with the means to renovate one lovely, unpretentious home-a traditional stone-and-stucco house with a terra-cotta wraparound porch, overlooking the Hudson River, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York-and build from scratch a vacation home nestled in the mountains of Alta, just outside Salt Lake City. But on top of the support for her own family, there are hints from her mother that she also helps out members of her extended clan. "Nobody could ask for a more generous, thoughtful daughter," says Warsh.

The problem is that being the perfect daughter doesn't translate into being the perfect boss. Fuller is a perfectionist, and perfectionists annoy anyone who's not; that's self-evident. But how many editors have entire Web sites devoted to their malfeasance? Some former peon-no one knows who-started a site called isurvivedbonnie. It features a lovely head shot of Bonnie, flaming horns on her head, with the words "El Diablo."

In the past, her staff has retaliated with revenges large and small. "Bonnie had gotten a Michael Kors dress sent to her, and it was wool," says a former assistant. "It had a tag on the arm that said, 'Lavare a Mano'-'Wash by Hand' in Italian. It was supposed to be snipped off, but she didn't seem to know that. She had this tag on her sleeve and she loved wearing this minidress. I knew what it meant, but I didn't tell her. She wore it like that and I was like, That's for keeping me here till 11."

And here's a cautionary tale for all those who are cavalier with their minions: "I've never admitted it to a stranger over the phone, but, yeah, O.K., it's true," says one of Fuller's former editorial assistants about a story whispered to me that I was sure was the magazine equivalent of an urban myth. Bonnie had a free meal prepared. Then her assistants were ordered to pack it up and send it home in a company car, so that she and her husband could enjoy it later. "And she was just being so, so horrible to so many people and ... look, I swear to God, we're really nice people. You just don't know what we went through." One assistant "had a bad cold, so she, um, pulled some stuff out of her nose. That went in the mini souffle chocolate cakes. And the loaf of bread ... that went inside my pants."