Skip to content
New York Post Columnist, Steve Dunleavy
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Discovery
New York Post Columnist, Steve Dunleavy
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

New York tabloid legend Steve Dunleavy died in his Long Island home Monday. He was 81.

Dunleavy spent more than 40 years at the New York Post, and made his name as a hard-drinking city editor and columnist. He retired in 2008.

“He was a great man, he lived an amazing life. It’s not a time to mourn. It’s definitely a time to celebrate,” his son, Sean, said Monday night.

Dunleavy died in his Island Park home, his son said.

“It just was very sudden,” Sean Dunleavy said. “But he was home, it was peaceful. But we don’t know what the cause of death was.”

“Steve Dunleavy was one of the greatest reporters of all time,” Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Post, was quoted saying in the paper’s obituary of Dunleavy.

“Whether competing with his own father in the famous Sydney, Australia, tabloid wars, or over the last 40 years in New York, Steve’s life story is littered with great scoops. He was much loved by both his colleagues and editors.”

Dunleavy — who Oliver Stone said inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s tabloid journalist character in the 1994 movie “Natural Born Killers” — started his 55-year journalism career at The Sun in Sydney, Australia.

Dunleavy’s dad at one point worked for a rival paper. One yarn about Dunleavy has it that he punctured the tires of his dad’s car to avoid getting beaten on a story.

He was a pioneer of tabloid TV, and gained fame on the mid-1980s syndicated show, “A Current Affair.”

At the Post, Dunleavy was famed for standing up for the city’s cops and firefighters. His columns staunchly defended three cops involved in the horrific stationhouse assault of Abner Louima in 1997, which landed one cop a 30-year prison sentence.

He’s also remembered for his hard living. Stu Marques, a former Daily News managing editor who worked with Dunleavy at the Post, said that if he got to write Dunleavy’s obituary, the lead would have been: “There are a million Steve Dunleavy stories, and they’re all true, even the ones that never happened.”

“He worked hard and he played hard,” Marques said. “The way he lived, he shouldn’t have lived past 30, the drinking and the partying. I was always In awe that he was still alive. I was just always in awe of him, how good he was as a reporter.”