Vertigo-inducing heels. White mini-dress. Full warpaint. For someone wanted for questioning by the police back in Britain, Melissa Rein Lively couldn’t have looked less like a woman keeping a low profile as she strode out, blonde hair flowing in the Arizona sunshine, from her home in an exclusive gated community.
It was almost as if she had dressed for the camera. She certainly didn’t seem to care if she was photographed. If anything, the 40-year-old Maga (Make America Great Again) influencer and PR consultant appeared, well, more Maga than ever.
Hard to believe, in the circumstances, that she is wanted by the British Transport Police in connection with an incident of racially aggravated assault and abuse outside Bond Street Tube station at 7.30pm on October 11.
Detectives believe Ms Lively and her financier boyfriend Philipp Ostermann, 37, can ‘assist their enquiries’ – to quote the time-honoured phrase.
The glamorous pair seem utterly out of place on the BTP’s website, which features hooded youths being sought in connection with a robbery at Clapham Junction railway station and a shaven-headed individual being hunted following a sex attack on a train in the West Midlands.
And yet there among them were this gilded couple.
Behind the picture of them in the line-up – Ms Lively was wearing leather trousers on this occasion – published on the force website on Monday, is a story which is both disturbing and intriguing.
Ms Lively vied for the role of White House press secretary and founded the America First ‘anti-woke’ PR firm. Ostermann, 37, is associate director of a Munich-based private equity firm called Aequita with offices in Tokyo and South Carolina.
MAGA influencer Melissa Rein Lively pictured back Stateside in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday
The question is: are they just witnesses who have not yet come forward or the unlikeliest-ever fugitives?
The fact officers wanted to speak to two such successful, high-profile people, and the nature of the altercation itself, made the news on both sides of the Atlantic.
Pepper spray, banned in the UK under the Firearms Act because it is considered an offensive weapon which can cause temporary blindness and chronic breathing difficulties (and, on rare occasions, prove fatal), is believed to have been used in the incident.
Yet the confrontation could not have begun more innocuously – one of a number of particularly unsettling elements which characterise what happened.
A woman travelling with her sister and two young children told officers their pushchair had accidentally bumped into a woman walking ahead of them into the Tube station.
The man she was with, they said, immediately responded by hurling racial abuse at the family and squirting a bottle he said contained pepper spray in their direction – no one was hurt, thankfully – as his female companion grabbed the hair of one of the sisters.
The escalating violence is hard to comprehend; all over a buggy clipping the back of someone – an everyday occurrence on high streets all over the country. It should have passed without incident.
BTP would not confirm that the couple in the picture on the ‘wanted list’ were in fact Lively and Ostermann. They were identified from that photograph by American news giant CNN and subsequently named in other media outlets.
Ms Lively and her financier boyfriend Philipp Ostermann, 37, are wanted by the British Transport Police (BTP) in connection with an incident of racially aggravated assault and abuse outside Bond Street Tube station at 7.30pm on October 11. Pictured: The image of the couple released by BTP on October 10, 2025
The force said there had been ‘no significant updates’ since the image was released and declined to comment on whether the two they are so eager to question were still in the country or if any measures had been taken to stop them leaving.
We now know the answer to that question.
Today, we publish a much fuller picture of the couple whose visit to Britain coincided with Dusseldorf-born financier Mr Ostermann being listed as a speaker at a private equity conference at Syon Park, a stately home near Heathrow, last month – shortly after the fracas in the West End.
At around the same time, Ms Lively posted a picture of herself on Instagram outside Sotheby’s auction house, also in Bond Street, in the same outfit as the woman in the photograph. The caption read: ‘With Love from London.’ The account has now been deleted.
Up until their trip to the UK, the couple are thought to have been in Germany where Mr Ostermann, whose CV includes spells at blue-chip accountancy firms KPMG (in Berlin) and PwC (Frankfurt), is based and where Ms Lively was PR for one of his most recent corporate ventures.
But our information – from an authoritative source – was that Melissa Rein Lively arrived back at her home on Thursday night. It is in upmarket Scottsdale, a city near Phoenix, the state capital of Arizona where she used to live with her husband Jared. They are separated, not divorced.
The Bond Street incident is but the latest episode in her colourful – and at times controversial – past.
‘I have nothing good to say about her,’ someone who knew her well told the Daily Mail. ‘She’s a total loose cannon. It was just a matter of time before she did something else that’s crazy.’
Melissa Rein Lively grew up in a Jewish family scarred by Holocaust trauma.
Her grandmother Frieda Reinstein survived Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and the death marches in the 1940s, but ‘96 per cent’ of her relatives were murdered and only a few cousins survived.
Her grandfather Alex Reinstein was also a survivor of the Nazis, meeting Frieda in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany.
Her father Solomon later changed the family surname from Reinstein to Rein to escape anti-Semitism, before tragically dying in a freak accident eight years after her mother Randee died from an overdose when Melissa was 14.
Ms Liveley (pictured in front of a painting of Donald Trump) is understood to have been first linked with Mr Ostermann, an international business graduate from Maastricht University with an impressive track record in finance, in July this year when they worked together for a company producing electric minibuses
By the early 2000s, Lively was married to Jared, living in Scottsdale and running a flourishing PR and marketing agency.
She is known in the US as a Maga influencer and has what is known as a ‘Mar-a-Lago’ face beloved of certain Republican women – blonde hair, gleaming white teeth, heavy make-up and dermal fillers.
‘By absolutely nobody’s volition other than my own, do I spend two hours in the gym every day, get my hair done every three and a half weeks on the button, get my nails done, get my eyebrows done, get my skincare done, get Botox,’ she told the AFP news agency in a recent interview.
She moved into Breakers Hotel in Florida to be near Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to conduct her campaign to be the White House press secretary and attended the election night party at Mar-a-Lago last November. Nigel Farage was a guest.
Her tilt for the key job won the attention of several major news organisations and an endorsement from a former national security adviser at the Oval Office.
In the end, she lost out to Karoline Leavitt, who still holds the position.
Her public relations company America First (America’s No 1 Anti-Woke PR Firm) was launched in 2022 and, in the words of the marketing blurb, represents ‘candidates, personalities and companies who think on the right side of things and are unapologetically patriots’.
So much for the colour but, aside from recent events, what of the controversy?
In 2019, a feud with the co-founders of a PR company she used to work for ended with two restraining orders being issued against Ms Lively after she was accused of mounting a campaign of harassment against the two executives on public forums.
In one incident, she taped a ranting phone call with one of them and posted the full audio recording on YouTube.
‘You’re a mean person, and you run with a mean crew,’ she is heard saying, an article in the Phoenix New Times newspaper revealed.
One of the stipulations of the restraining orders was that she stay away from the homes of her former bosses.
Ms Lively, inquiries in the US have established, was also removed by police from several resort hotels, for among other things, using racial slurs towards guests. Remember, the family on Bond Street said they were racially abused.
Not long after the report in the Phoenix News Times, Ms Lively was in trouble again.
This time, she filmed herself trashing Covid masks from a Target store in Scottsdale at the start of the pandemic. The footage went viral.
She would later say she had been brainwashed by the sinister QAnon conspiracy movement which believes that a cabal of child-trafficking paedophiles – including Hollywood A-listers, leading philanthropists and politicians – secretly rule the world.
Among their many other dangerously fabricated claims, is that coronavirus did not exist or was not fatal.
Ms Lively’s involvement with QAnon contributed to the break-up of her long-standing marriage. Indeed, within days of the Target affair, her realtor husband called the police when she came back to the marital home, concerned for her well-being because of her irrational behaviour.
Ms Lively livestreamed that, too. So she is well known – perhaps infamous would be more accurate – back in the US.
She is understood to have been first linked with Mr Ostermann, an international business graduate from Maastricht University with an impressive track record in finance, in July this year when they worked together for a company producing electric minibuses.
They could be seen embracing each other in various exotic locations on social media before their accounts were closed after of the Bond Street incident.
The question remains: are Melissa Rein Lively and Philipp Ostermann simply witnesses who are clearly in no hurry to contact the police – or on the run?
Both Ms Lively and Mr Ostermann have been approached for comment.
