Calif. City Riled at Vanity Fair Description of City

Chula Vista, Calif., officials are riled over the way their city is portrayed in an article in the upcoming December issue of Vanity Fair profiling the famed Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler.

The rowing twins are training at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, and the article focuses on their continuing legal battle to prove they created Facebook.

But the story’s author, Dana Vachon, described the city in very unflattering terms.

Vachon wrote: "The Winklevosses have been living and training in the California border town of Chula Vista since last December. It is a sputtering neon error of beauty academies and pawnshops, recently terrorized by a homicidal Tijuana drug gang skilled at dissolving bodies in chemicals."

The paragraph outraged city officials, reports 10 News in San Diego.

"This author wrote such false and inappropriate statements," Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox told 10 News.

Chula Vista is 7 miles from the border, and it has only one beauty school and six pawn shops, 10 News reports. It also has the third-lowest crime rate out of all the cities in San Diego County, according to FBI crime stats, despite being the county’s second-largest city.

Cox wrote to the magazine's editor to rebuke the author's depiction of the South Bay city.

"I was appalled," Cox said. "This was sensational journalism, but I hesitate to even call it journalism."

The TV station contacted Vanity Fair, but a spokeswoman declined to comment until the magazine received the mayor's letter.