NY [radaronline.com] There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of self-professed “international celebrity journalist” Chaunce Hayden. There’s an even better chance you’ve never heard of Steppin’ Out, the free New Jersey–based gossip weekly he edits that is distributed in strip malls, diners, movie theaters, street boxes, and fine drinking establishments throughout the Garden State.

But if you’ve read Page Six or any of the gossip columns that have run in the NY Daily News over the past decade, you’ve definitely seen Hayden’s imprint: According to LexisNexis, the tattooed 49-year-old has provided the two tabloids with a combined 262 items since 1995—more than any other single source.

That track record, however, is now in jeopardy: Earlier this month, Hayden was banned from contributing items to Page Six for being the source of a false item about a sex tape starring Jackass player Bam Margera and Lynsi Smigo, the fiancée of jackass radio shock jock Gregg Hughes, aka “Opie.” The details, predictably, are murky.

Hayden claims he simply told Page Six reporter Bill Hoffman that he’d heard a tape may have been made, and says he was shocked that the item ran the next day without anyone at the paper authenticating its existence. Page Six editor Richard Johnson was eventually forced to issue a retraction after it became apparent there was no tape, though he placed the blame squarely on Hayden and vowed to never use him as a source again.

Now Smigo has filed a $10 million defamation suit against Johnson, the Post, and Hayden, in which she claims that Hayden is culpable because he mentioned the tape in a column in Steppin’ Out that ran a week after the Post broke the story. (For the record, Hayden indeed mentioned the tape, but only to say he doesn’t think it exists. He did, however, anoint Opie “Asshole of the Week,” which probably didn’t go over well. He also claims he’s talking to a lawyer sometime next week about countersuing Smigo and Opie, so don’t expect this thing to go away anytime soon.)

“This is the type of shit that makes me really hate this job,” Hayden told us recently over drinks at the Thompson Hotel in SoHo. “The people in this business are the worst people in the world. I can’t stand them one bit. Everyone’s such a sleazebag.”

It’s the type of statement you’d expect from someone who has spent the past 18 years dealing with people who deal with the minutiae of other peoples’ lives. Hayden, 49 and still built like a cinder block, fell into gossip reporting mostly by accident. He held a variety of dead-end jobs—male stripper, car washer, failed punk rocker, bartender, swimming pool digger—after finishing up a four-year stint with the navy in 1981, and had settled into a gig in Ridgewood selling blood chemistry machines to hospitals in Kuwait and Iraq. (“They check your cholesterol levels and stuff like that,” he says.) Sinead O’Connor was performing at the nearby Garden State Arts Center, and Hayden desperately wanted to meet the bald-headed singer, on whom he had a crush.

“I figured the easiest way to do that would be by trying to interview her,” he explains. “I’d seen this magazine called Steppin’ Out at a bar across the street, so I took a copy, pasted the logo onto some fake stationary, and sent a press request to Warner Bros. I figured I’d get away with it because who the fuck had heard of Steppin’ Out?”

He got the press pass. And then when O’Connor caused a minor firestorm by refusing to go onstage if the American national anthem was performed beforehand, Hayden ended up with a compelling interview on his hands. He immediately called up Larry Collins, the magazine’s publisher, and offered to sell him the interview. Collins gave him $25 and told him that he’d pay him for any future interviews. Hayden’s been wrangling celebrities for Steppin’ Out ever since.

Today, Steppin’ Out has a circulation of around 85,000 and is distributed throughout New Jersey and New York City by a team of 30 drivers. Hayden is the editor, but, more important, also serves as the magazine’s de facto publicist: Since no one actually reads it, it’s up to him to feed the best material to the various gossip outlets around town, most of which are desperate to fill column space each day. In this capacity, Hayden has proven fairly adept.

“It’s actually not that difficult to get people to appear in the magazine,” he says. “I just promise them the cover. Of course, no one has ever seen the damn thing, but publicists have usually heard of it, which is good enough. Everyone’s a fame whore in this town.”