Jacob Soboroff stood by his decision to include the conversation he had with Katie Miller during the Palisades Fire in his new book, “Firestorm,” noting it was his “duty” as a journalist to highlight “the irony” of the situation.
As Soboroff explained while promoting his book in Los Angeles, Calif., Miller reached out to him with a request as the wildfire raged in Pacific Palisades last year.
“Before I could call her back, she had sent me an address,” he recalled. “And said, ‘It’s Stephen [Miller]’s parents house. Can you go check on it?’”
Per Soboroff, he hesitated at first and even asked himself, “Am I really about to go to Stephen Miller’s parents’ house?”
Ultimately, he agreed to go and drove by the property, which had burned down in the devastating inferno.
“I felt, honestly, the same. Awful, Really, really sad,” he shared. “I took a picture and I sent it to Katie, and I said, ‘The Palisades is stronger than politics.’ And I sent a heart emoji.”
However, not long after doing this favor for Miller and her in-laws, her husband’s boss (as well as Katie’s former employer), Donald Trump was “tweeting the craziest s–t about the fires.”
“I thought about not including the story about Katie calling me,” Soboroff noted. “But to me, the irony of it, that the incoming administration … Elon Musk going down to the command post and pressing the firefighters in this live stream, when all anybody wanted was just some space to do the work, underscores that this is just part of this moment that we live in.”
He added: “They were pouring rhetorical fuel on the very real flames of the fire. And it hurt her parents too.”
Soboroff defended that he expressed sympathy to Miller and her loved ones and asked if Trump, who was president-elect at the time, had any statement to share.
“She was pissed,” he said. “I just didn’t hear from her again, really. There was a couple of back and forths, but I really didn’t ever hear anything from her.”
While Soboroff acknowledged that the situation was “a very, very painful thing” for those involved, he also said he couldn’t ignore “the irony” given what her bosses were doing at the time.
“The fact that it was so damaging to people,” he said. “As a journalist, it’s my duty to report that, actually.”
Watch his comments in the video above.
“Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster” is now available.
