Peter Braunstein

Sex and the City: The Horror Movie
Peter Braunstein had a full pantheon of female style icons (Edie
Sedgwick, Jane Fonda, Kate Moss) and a passion for Manolos as intense as
Carrie Bradshaw’s. Then, fired from his job at Fairchild, jilted by a
girlfriend, he descended into a world of dark fantasies—into which he
allegedly brought a former colleague in a bizarre assault. The making of
a tabloid monster.
By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Illustrations by Jeff Darrow
Sometimes in the afternoons, they would come to the filing cabinet
across from his small beige–paneled cubicle, these fashion girls. This
was the sliver of newsroom designated for them to lay out some
accessories for upcoming shoots, the python–embossed leather belts and
Dalmatian–print fingerless gloves, the diamond–flecked lavender jade
earrings and quilted pastel Provençal scarves. They paid no regard to
that guy with a weird hairdo and the wrong clothes, finally a straight
guy in the office and of course he had to be totally undatable. They
stood in front of him, swaying. The refreshing smell of citrus hung in
the air.
A journeyman in the world of fashion, Peter Braunstein, 41, had found
himself employed at Fairchild Publications, home of W magazine, the most
culturally elitist and wealth–driven fashion magazine in the country
and, consequently, the stomping ground of some of Manhattan’s most
rarefied females. Once a well–regarded Ph.D. candidate in the history
department at New York University, Braunstein had thrown over his thesis
for the lesser rigors of journalism at W’s sister publication, the
fashion–business trade paper Women’s Wear Daily. Braunstein was a media
reporter. He was part of a team that reported on the time Gisele was
carried into a Balenciaga show because she may have had food poisoning;
provided a sneak peek of an all–fur issue of French Vogue, a shock
because editor Carine Roitfeld’s only furs were a short Cerruti jacket
and a Helmut Lang shearling; and chronicled André Leon Talley’s visit to
a Persian nutritionist, who encouraged Talley to eat egg whites and
strawberries for breakfast. In longer articles, he wrote sometimes of
sexual politics, and these had some nice grace notes. A dispatch on
men’s magazines began with a line from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr.
Moreau—“Are we not men?” He was referring to manhood’s indeterminacy as
displayed in titles like Maxim and GQ. He could have asked the same of
himself.
The girls who used the filing cabinet in front of Braunstein were
market–department girls. At a fashion magazine, the market department is
not about creativity—it’s about shopping, and shopping is these girls’
lives. They are mental for clothes. On weekends, they go to Balenciaga
to check out the new bags; they save up their meager salaries for what
they are not gifted, like a new Louis Vuitton, and daydream about which
style they’re going to get. Market is about satisfying the fashion
department’s needs. When a stylist asks for topaz–colored slim–fit
leather pants, these girls have to know who has the best ones, and these
pants must arrive immediately, so that in a few days, a neat rack of 30
topaz pants stands in the closet for the stylist to peruse—and if Vogue
or Harper’s Bazaar wants the same pants on the same day, a good market
editor can muscle the publicist for first dibs. At Vogue, they say that
Anna doesn’t care what you look like unless you’re in the fashion–market
department, in which case you’d better look good.
So some days the market girls were working on bangles, and 30 glittering
objects would appear on the cabinet; other days there were scarves, or
bags, or shoes, and these were the happiest days—the lacy leather
matador heels, ostrich–and–crocodile–trimmed snakeskin heels, leather
kitten–heel pumps, velvet peep–toe slingbacks, all these size–9
beauties. The only time Braunstein saw better shoes was on one Woman in
Market, a striking, brusque thirtysomething with bronzed skin, Dolce &
Gabbana blouses, and a thick mane of hair that swung back and forth
while she arranged the delicate soles on the countertop by height and
color. This woman was dating a man who was a real man, a man who wore
pressed oxford shirts and a Rolex on his hairy wrist. This woman only
wore stilettos. It seemed like every day she had a new pair. A python
with marabou feathers, the laces extending up her slender ankles to
muscular thighs that disappeared under a Miu Miu wool miniskirt;
patent–leather T–strap stilettos, red–painted toes poking out the front;
velvet Christian Louboutin boots, the steely gray heels hitting the
carpet with a dull thump as she approached.
It was the shoes that always got him.
Shoes have become the prevailing synecdoche for the powerful New York
woman—sexually liberated, sharp, expensive, able to do all a man can do
and in those shoes. In his dreams and now reality, Braunstein was
surrounded by such women. He had no interest in the weak. Long before he
became known as the “fire fiend,” his icons were Faye Dunaway in Bonnie
and Clyde, Jackie Onassis, Jane Fonda, any woman of the postwar era who
struck a pose of stylish defiance of societal rank and file.
Braunstein’s desire to subvert normative ideals and his taste for
mainstream success were deeply in conflict. He had a crippling
insecurity and an enormous sense of his own intellect, and was possessed
of a desire to court the most powerful New York women and an equal, and
then overwhelming, need to destroy them.
From his desk in the Fairchild office, Braunstein had a view of the
women in the market department as they laid out clothes, accessories,
and shoes they’d called in from different fashion houses.
How else to explain the acts of Halloween night, when Braunstein
allegedly set two chemical fires in Dixie cups on the landings of the
Woman in Market’s Chelsea apartment building wearing a firefighter’s
uniform he had bought on eBay under the I.D. “gulagmeister”? He had
changed it from “dr–groovy” a month prior, explaining to one seller,
“Same loyal customer. I just don’t feel like Dr. Groovy anymore.” All
Braunstein had to do was say “fire” and knock on the victim’s door.
While neighbors made their way downstairs to the wail of fire trucks, he
allegedly drugged her with chloroform, bound her to her bed with duct
tape and leg shackles, and assaulted her for eleven hours. He gave her a
sleeping pill and took one himself. In her closet, he selected choice
pairs of shoes from her abundant store of stilettos, outfitting her in
them as a video camera ran.
In the month since the attack, the New York Post and Daily News have
devoted more than a dozen front pages to the case, encouraging the
notion of Braunstein’s crime as Jacobean revenge drama, and perhaps only
Act I. With security posted on the floor of th