After ESPN talking head Steve Phillips dumped his portly, production-assistant lover, the jilted woman posted a Craigslist ad offering $50 for someone to call Phillips’ wife and cruelly taunt her, The Post has learned.
A Connecticut waitress answered the ad for the “urgent job,” which didn’t mention Phillips and was posted on Aug. 5 by ESPN employee and ex-Phillips lover Brooke Hundley.
Hundley hid her identity by calling herself “Kelly Burns” — and even provided the woman a script to read over the phone, the waitress said yesterday.
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“She wanted someone to call her ‘friend’ that night to say her husband was cheating on her,” Courtney Arp, of Bristol, told The Post.
“She said she didn’t want to do it herself because she said her ‘friend’ would recognize her voice and wouldn’t take her seriously.
“She had a script all prepared, and she e-mailed it to me in advance.”
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Arp only learned yesterday from The Post that the woman she had been calling was the wife of baseball analyst Phillips.
“Oh, my gosh,” Arp said, covering her mouth with her hand.
Arp said she and Hundley met the day she answered the ad and first tried to call Phillips’ home in Wilton, Conn., from a payphone.
When Marni Phillips answered, Hundley handed the phone to Arp, who began reading from the script.
The script called for Arp to say Steve Phillips had been cheating with a “young woman at our work,” and that “if you want to catch them tonight, they are planning to meet after the show at 12:30ish in the Target parking lot of I-84 just down from work.”
The script even included instructions like: “Pause and act like this is really hard for you to tell her.”
Arp told The Post that after Marni Phillips answered her phone, “I got as far as saying, ‘You don’t know me, but I work with Steve,’ and she hung up.”
Arp said that the next day, Hundley had her call Marni again and leave two voice-mail messages.
“But [Hundley] seemed upset that I still didn’t talk to [Phillips’ wife] in person,” Arp said. “That’s when I started to think a little bit, ‘This girl is crazy.’ “