Braunstein, Peter - "The Devil and Women's Wea...

The Devil and "Women's Wear Daily"

Peter Braunstein is escorted in shackles out of the Criminal Justice Center in Memphis on December 19, 2005—three days after his arrest. His self-inflicted stab wounds are visible on his neck.Lance Murphy/Polaris Images

"Look at that. Just look. It is incomprehensible," Braunstein says as he lights another Dunhill, even though it's close to midnight and the bottle of scotch is nearly empty. The nights, he says, have been the worst: "I try to sleep, but I wake up, and all I can do is worry and smoke." It is difficult to think about what will happen to his 43-year-old son—"with an I.Q. of 180" and "such a promising life ahead of him"—who has been in jail since December 2005, charged with arson, burglary, robbery, sexual abuse, and kidnapping in the first degree. The last count alone carries a minimum sentence of 15 years to life in prison. "Nothing in life prepares you for something like this," Braunstein says. Then he reaches under the coffee table, pulls out a stack of newspapers, and points at a very different photo of his son. This one, in the New York Post, shows Peter looking haggard and filthy, in a ripped T-shirt and a brown leather jacket. "How," Braunstein asks, "does one explain this?"

The newspapers—one screaming headline after another—chronicle one of the more lurid New York crime stories in memory. It began on the night of October 31, 2005, when, according to the police, Peter Braunstein—an author, playwright, and journalist—disguised himself as a New York City firefighter and lit two small fires in the vestibule outside the Manhattan apartment of a 34-year-old former fashion-magazine editor, forced his way into her home, and put a gun to her head. Then, police say, he drugged her, tied her up, and held her captive for 13 hours, during which time he sexually abused her.

.Braunstein and Donna Keane on their wedding day, 1989. Brigitte Stelzer/Polaris Images.

Over the next seven weeks, as he eluded the police, Braunstein became one of the country's most wanted fugitives, hunted by U.S. marshals, the N.Y.P.D., and law enforcement in four states. A frenzy of media coverage that started with New York's local TV stations and its tabloids—theDaily News and the Post—quickly went national, spreading to CNN, MSNBC, NBC's Dateline,Fox News's Geraldo, and scores of Internet sites. America's Most Wanted featured Braunstein on no fewer than five broadcasts.

The front page of the Daily Newsfrom November 6, 2005.

Day after day, the press breathlessly reported every detail of the manhunt. As the panic spread, criminologists and psychologists warned that Braunstein was "cunning" and "dangerous," a "psychopath" who was ready to "snap." Security guards patrolled the newsroom of Fairchild Publications, where Braunstein and the victim once worked, while his terrified ex-girlfriend—yet another magazine editor—went into hiding. After an erroneous sighting of Braunstein in Brooklyn, the N.Y.P.D. called in helicopters, a bomb squad, and bloodhounds to scour the area. Tips were phoned in from around the country as the police tracked the suspect from New York and New Jersey to Ohio and Tennessee.

Through it all, Alberto Braunstein made himself available to reporters. Languidly smoking his Dunhills, squinting into the cameras with world-weary eyes, he offered his theories about the case in his vaguely British accent. To him it seemed that his son had scripted the crime "like a play," and had acted out of a craving for attention, because he wanted "his 15 minutes of fame."

"I knew something was wrong with Peter," Alberto says now, gesturing at the stack of newspapers, "and I wanted to give him a human face, because the press was demonizing him." "Fireman perv," "monster," "sex-obsessed scribe," "ghoul," "sex fiend fire rat"—these were the terms the tabloids used to describe Peter Braunstein during the sensationalist romp that continued right up until his arrest, on December 16, 2005, in Memphis. Approached by police from the University of Memphis, who had been alerted by a woman who recognized him from America's Most Wanted, Braunstein shouted, "I am the guy you're looking for." And then he pulled out a knife and stabbed himself repeatedly in the neck.

Three months later, on March 23, 2006, Braunstein appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court for his fifth hearing since being extradited to New York. Sitting at the defense table, his head shaved, the scar on his neck hardly visible, he listened attentively as his attorney, Robert Gottlieb, informed the judge that Braunstein was pleading "not guilty" and that the defense at his trial, scheduled to begin this month, would present "evidence of psychiatric disease or defect" so serious that it prevented Braunstein from understanding the consequences of his actions.

The only trouble is, Braunstein appears to have known exactly what he was doing. Indeed, the Halloween-night attack was meticulously planned, judging from the array of clues left for the police to find. At his mother's house, in Queens, investigators found books he had left behind, with marked passages in which, one police source said, "he highlights the pain and suffering of women." On his computer, detectives discovered notes outlining the crime, as well as records for eBay purchases of the explosive potassium nitrate and a New York firefighter's outfit. Police also easily tracked down a storage locker where, they say, Braunstein stashed items that clearly linked him to the victim, including her résumé, her driver's license, and her lavender Gucci fur coat.

Among Braunstein's friends and family, there was an uneasy feeling that the crime had been staged, to send a message. "It was a performance," says a longtime friend, one that was full of symbols, although nobody was sure of their meaning. There were the expensive designer shoes that he allegedly used to humiliate the victim. There was the video camera with which Braunstein, a devotee of Andy Warhol, appeared to record the assault, as if invoking some aspect of Warhol's oeuvre. There were also, as New York's police noted, the striking similarities between the Halloween attack and one of the best-known photographs by Guy Bourdin, the renowned, and savagely misogynistic, French fashion photographer. The 1968 image showed a woman wrapped in plastic sheeting, tied with packing rope—and holding Charles Jourdan shoes.

A former media critic of some influence in New York, Braunstein understood the press very well, and his crime seemed calculated to provoke a media uproar. It had all the elements of a tabloid melodrama: the single white female victim, the haute couture, the impersonation of one of the city's firefighters, who had become heroes after 9/11. But if, as his father hinted to reporters, Braunstein left all those clues because he wanted to be found out, the question as he heads to trial remains: Why? Why would an ambitious and accomplished man deliberately set out to destroy his life so completely in one night? Why would someone who saw himself as a feminist—"who was really good with women," according to one former girlfriend—become an abuser of women, the kind of man he once scorned? What gave rise to such viciousness? "To no one who once knew Peter do those 13 hours make sense," says one old friend. "Somehow he became a person with no empathy at all—or he couldn't have done that, because he would have felt her terror."

He tied her up with a green cord, according to the police, binding her hands and one leg to her bed. She would not remember everything that happened, because she was "in and out of chloroform," a law-enforcement official said, but she would recall the banging on her door, around six in the evening, the thick smoke in the hallway, and the fireman, who put a gun to her head, tied her hands behind her back, and held a cloth over her face. She passed out, and when she regained consciousness she found herself tied to the bed. The man took shoes out of her closet and put them on her. He had a video camera and she believed he was filming her. She later remembered that he groped her breasts and, according to the police report, "inserted his finger into her vagina," although tests would show that he did not rape her. The attacker wore a ski mask for most of the night, which is why she didn't recognize him, but he gave her some clues. He told her that his birthday was January 26 and that he had been fired from Fairchild Publications, the parent company of Women's Wear Daily (W.W.D.) and W magazine, where she had worked. At one point, before another hit of chloroform took effect, he removed his ski mask and she saw that he had dark curly hair.

It took police only a few hours to come up with his name. A former colleague at W says the victim called him as soon as she managed to untie herself, not long after Braunstein left. This man came immediately, phoned the police, and rode with her in an ambulance to the hospital. Then he went to the office to deliver the news to Patrick McCarthy, editorial director of Fairchild, which, like Vanity Fair, is owned by Condé Nast. "Patrick's face went white," the former colleague recalls, "because there are only two men who had been fired from Fairchild recently, and only one of them has curly brown hair. And Patrick just looked at me and said, 'Oh my God, Peter Braunstein? You've got to tell the police.'" The colleague did just that, that afternoon, in a state of disbelief. During the two and a half years that Braunstein and the victim both worked at Fairchild, they hardly knew each other. Says this man, "I don't think they exchanged even three words."

Braunstein was 36 years old in the spring of 2000, when he was hired to write for W.W.D., the fashion-industry trade newspaper. His friends were shocked, one says, that Braunstein had taken a "full-time corporate job." He hadn't had one since the late 1980s, when he worked as a reservation agent for British West Indian Airways. With money from his parents, and part-time work as an archivist, he'd managed to spend most of his adult life in academia, studying history at the Sorbonne in Paris, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, St. John's University on Long Island, and New York University, where he earned his master's degree in 1992 and then worked toward a Ph.D. in American cultural history and politics.

He was, one friend recalls, an unvarnished intellectual, a man who lived in the world of ideas and didn't much care about having money or status. "He was a guy who was making it on his own terms," she says. "A lot of us were personally wounded when he took the Women's Wear job. It was like our hero had sold out."

As a historian, Braunstein had focused on the 1960s. He wrote his master's thesis on the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, but it was his Ph.D. research that got him noticed in academic circles, particularly his work on the commercialization of the hippie culture. "Love for sale" was the expression he used. And he was credited with coining the term "possessive memory," to describe the power memory has over aging 60s activists—who, he wrote, not only possessed their memories "in a lover's embrace" but also were possessed, and shaped, by their memories. "He had an intriguing way of thinking," says one friend. "People loved his imagination and his irreverence … his sense that anything was possible."

But Braunstein never finished his Ph.D. In 1998 he suddenly dropped out of the program, announcing that he had grown tired of academic life; his new ambition, according to a friend, was to "get into magazines and be a cultural critic." The decision upset his father. "Alberto felt that he was safe in academia, that if he'd stayed he would have been all right," says Peter's half-brother, Allan Starkie, who gained some notoriety himself as the author of the 1996 book Fergie: Her Secret Life, an exposé of his years as a confidant and business adviser to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. Braunstein picked up some freelance assignments, but two years after leaving N.Y.U. he was running out of money. The job at W.W.D.—a training ground for many New York journalists—was a huge break.

Later, the press would focus on how odd he seemed to others at W.W.D.—a "really ugly" man, it was said, with a "weird hairdo" and the "wrong" clothes. And it's true that in the Fairchild newsroom, the media epicenter of the fashion world, Braunstein was different. He was a straight man surrounded by women and gay men, an intellectual in a culture that revolved around fashion and society. Braunstein came to work dressed as he always had, in vintage 70s clothing—polyester disco shirts, skinny black jeans, pointed boots, velvet jackets—which many people found bizarre. Even worse was his hair, which he wore long, in greasy jheri curls. There were some who regarded him, says one man, as "strictly the office weirdo." But others were intrigued. "It was so off, so wrong, as to be refreshing," says a former W editor. "Everyone in the fashion world is so conscious of fitting in, and he was in his own universe."

Whether they liked him or not, though, everyone agreed that Braunstein was brilliant. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, and he could deconstruct the history of fashion as a social phenomenon. "Most of the people at Women's Wear are very trade-news-oriented, scoop-oriented," says another editor. "Peter wasn't like that. He had style as a writer, and talent, and a bigger view of the world." Braunstein's work on W.W.D.'s media column quickly got him noticed. His writing style was clever and edgy, and when he began grading the glossy magazines—Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair—and poking fun at their editors' monthly letters to readers, his column became a must-read. "He was smart on that beat," says one magazine publicist. "And that was unusual."

In March 2001, Braunstein wrote his first piece for W—on the history of leather as a renegade fashion element. But it was his second article, on Guy Bourdin, that would be noticed by the police. Published in October 2001, the story explored the disturbed photographer's cruelty toward women, his mother fixation, and his sadomasochistic obsessions. The story ran alongside shocking images—the Charles Jourdan–shoe shot as well as another well-known Bourdin photograph, taken in 1980 for Pentax, of a nude woman, lying facedown, with blood-red paint flowing from her mouth. Braunstein contended that the beauty of the photographs was more powerful than their brutality.

The article was followed by others for W—on Helen Mirren and on Francis Ford Coppola's son Roman. But an editor who pushed to have Braunstein write more frequently for the magazine remembers being told to back off: "The word was passed down that Patrick McCarthy didn't want to encourage that. He didn't trust him."

Braunstein still had his media column, though, and for a time that was enough. It made him a player in a world he had once observed only as an academic, and friends had the impression that he liked the trappings of power and influence that came with the job. He got off on the fact that "people were a little bit afraid of him," a former colleague says, and that he was making important friends, among them writers at the Post's "Page Six," the most powerful gossip column in town.

By spring 2002, things were going well for Braunstein. His column was receiving favorable press coverage, and magazine editors were writing him obsequious letters in hopes of gaining his favor. At that point, one colleague says, "Peter's attitude changed; he began to get really obnoxious"—talking about "how he had saved Women's Wear" and becoming "obsessed with his own press." As the summer wore on, Braunstein, always somewhat moody, began erupting in increasingly frequent outbursts of anger. "He had a manic, type-A tendency to rage," another associate says, "an anger that worked for him as a writer until it veered off into insanity. He would start out funny and then, suddenly, it wasn't funny anymore.

Repression wasn't his problem. Peter had no filter." One friend believes that his first taste of media success was triggering anxiety, making Braunstein more aware of what he had not accomplished: "Peter had very lofty ideas about what he wanted to do, politically and culturally, and the reality kept crashing in on the bigger dream." The reality, says this friend, was that "Women's Wear didn't want a cultural critic." He started to flail. "He was one of these guys who is really smart but outside the gates all the time," says a W editor. Braunstein had an opportunity "to work on the inside," but he was too fragile, too angry, too idealistic to play the game.

The crisis came to a head in early October 2002, when the word got out that Plum Sykes, a young editor at Vogue, had received a $625,000 advance for her first novel, Bergdorf Blondes. Plenty of writers were taken aback by the news, but Braunstein was outraged. The fact that someone he regarded as frivolous and marginally talented would be paid so much money struck him as proof that the New York media world was corrupt.

The following week, Braunstein called a publicist at Vogue to ask for a second ticket to that year's VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards show for his girlfriend, Jane Larkworthy, who was the beauty editor at W; when his request was turned down, he blew up. The publicist managed to get him the ticket, but two days later Braunstein received an e-mail from his editor, reprimanding him. He sent one back, says one colleague, "saying, in effect, 'Go fuck yourself,' and then he walked off the job." Braunstein refused to apologize and was fired, but essentially he had fired himself. He left "with contempt," says a former Fairchild editor. "I think Peter was offended by the hypocrisy. Everyone in fashion journalism gets tickets and favors, free clothes, Gucci bags, things we all get but aren't allowed to keep, and the more powerful people get things others can't. So, big deal. He wanted a ticket for his girlfriend."

Later it would be said that Braunstein was "obsessed" with beautiful, powerful women, and that he was driven to destroy them. As evidence of his fixation, reporters would point to the articles he had written about iconic women, including Jane Fonda, Helen Mirren, and Kate Moss. Braunstein's friends found all this perplexing because, until he met Larkworthy, they saw no sign that Braunstein had any animosity toward women.

On the contrary, says one woman who knew him well, "he loved women." In fact, most of Braunstein's friends were female. If anything, he was unusually dependent on women.

Braunstein was 22 when he met Donna Keane, a fellow reservations agent, and they married three years later, in 1989. A sweet, nurturing woman who was five years older than Braunstein, Keane supported her husband as he returned to school for his master's degree. "Donna was devoted to Peter," Alberto Braunstein recalls, and she was devastated when they divorced, in 1994. "He'd taken up with another woman," says Paul Shemin, Keane's divorce attorney. Her only request in the settlement was that Braunstein cover his portion of the credit-card bills. "There was no allegation of violence, nothing like that," Shemin says. "He just appeared to be a spoiled kid."

Braunstein had met Debra Michals a year before his divorce, and their relationship would last for nine years. A former journalist who'd worked at W.W.D., Michals was pursuing a Ph.D. in feminist history at N.Y.U. Michals was two years older than Braunstein and almost as brilliant. She was also "just gorgeous," says one man, "with intense intellectual energy, and very glamorous." Like Braunstein, Michals was married when they met, but after her divorce, in 1995, she and Braunstein moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village. Although their relationship was fiery and marked by repeated breakups, they were regarded, one friend said, as "a cool, cool couple."

It was during this time, in 1996, that Braunstein wrote a draft of an article that would eventually be published in BlackBook magazine, under the provocative headline stalking kate. In it, Braunstein claimed that he had fallen "hopelessly in love" with the supermodel Kate Moss because she was stalking him—staring at him from billboards and magazine ads, seducing him every time he turned on E! and VH1. His stalkee love for Moss had grown so deep, he wrote, that he even kept a picture of her by the bed he shared with his girlfriend. The piece would later be cited as evidence of Braunstein's dangerous obsession with women, but it had been meant as a gag—an ironic commentary on the intrusive power of celebrities in American culture. "There was no picture of Kate Moss by his bed. It was a joke," says a friend of Michals's. "Debra read the original article. She thought it was very clever."

Michals's interest in gender and sexual politics would rub off on Braunstein and show up in his work, including an attention-getting piece he wrote for The Village Voice in 1998 on the disco era—particularly the hostility and "castration anxiety" the music stirred up in white, heterosexual men. Later, the police would ask whether Braunstein was "latently gay," according to one friend who was questioned by detectives. "They didn't get Peter at all," says this man, who is gay. "I told them, 'Absolutely not.'" If anything, says a friend of Larkworthy's, Braunstein seemed uncomfortable with men, even "afraid of men."

In the fall of 2001, Michals hosted a party to celebrate the publication of Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's, a collection of essays co-edited by Braunstein. Shortly after that, while still living with Michals, Braunstein began seeing Larkworthy.

Michals, a friend says, "wanted a real home. She was becoming more stable and he wasn't." As their relationship deteriorated, his explosions of anger grew more frequent. But while Michals had always been able to calm Braunstein down, Larkworthy would not have the same hold on him. On the surface, they seemed to be well matched, a sophisticated New York media couple. Larkworthy, says one W editor, was "this cool, Hitchcockian blonde," who, like Braunstein, always wore vintage clothing—little Jackie Kennedy dresses and Mary Quant shifts. She was well liked and socially connected, hosting dinner parties in her sleekly decorated Beekman Place apartment. He was the intense, brooding intellectual, her "Dark Prince," as Larkworthy called him. "There was a real spark between them," says one friend—at least at first.

Some of Larkworthy's friends, however, found Braunstein arrogant and domineering from the outset. And their distaste, says one, turned to genuine concern for Larkworthy after he was fired, in October 2002. "His need to control, to possess her and change her, makes me think of Pygmalion," says this friend. Publicly, Braunstein had been able to cast his firing as a confirmation of his power, telling the Daily News and the Post that he had displeased the powers that be at Vogue. Privately, he was devastated. Perhaps forgetting that he was financially dependent on her, Braunstein insisted that Larkworthy quit her job to protest his firing, and became incensed when she refused. At a dinner party Larkworthy gave that fall, which was attended by a number of journalists, Braunstein turned on the television during the meal and sat at the table taking bong hits and watching videos. The next day, Braunstein lashed out at one of Larkworthy's guests in an e-mail, calling her a "fat cow" and accusing her of ignoring him. "He was vicious," this friend says. "He felt betrayed by everyone, not realizing that he'd dug his own hole, because of his own behavior, and because of his nastiness."

As the months went by, Larkworthy began to lose so much weight that "she looked ill," says this friend, all "because Peter wanted her to." He had begun writing a play about Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, the waifish, drug-addicted heiress who in 1965 became one of Warhol's first "superstars"—famous for nothing but being famous. Braunstein wanted Larkworthy to look like Edie. Larkworthy went along with this, her friend says, "because she really loved Peter." In return, at least in private, he treated her with "total adoration."

But then Larkworthy tried to end the relationship, and Braunstein became savage. "It's odd," says Larkworthy's friend. "I would never say that Peter was a misogynist. He loves women, but they are regarded as the weaker sex and, so, easier to control, and who knows what made him need so much to control and dominate?"

Alberto Braunstein remembers having lunch with his son and Jane Larkworthy in August 2003 at Picasso, a Spanish restaurant on East 56th Street. Peter had finished his play and was talking excitedly about his plans to produce it when Alberto said, "But Peter, the play isn't a success yet." As Alberto remembers it, Peter started shouting at him, "cursing," and stalked out of the restaurant. Three weeks later, Alberto received a letter from his son:

Had you said to me 20 years ago what you did at the Picasso the other day—the put-downs about the play, the inane, pathetic jealousy, the relentless negativity—they'd still be scraping pieces of you off the walls.… You don't deserve love, respect, or sons, for that matter.… You were always a brooding, self-absorbed man/child, but with old age you've become patently malevolent. You're a toxic piece of shit … I'm sorry your life was utter failure, and I know you tried your best to make me feel like a failure as well. Alas, it didn't work, owing largely to the fact that I'm superior to you in every conceivable way.

Alberto was stunned by the rage expressed in his son's letter. Looking back, he says he doesn't understand what made Peter so angry.

The son of Henry Braunstein, a wealthy Italian businessman, Alberto spent his childhood in Cairo and Milan, and went to boarding schools in Switzerland and England. By 1964, when Peter was born, the fortune had dissipated, however. Alberto and his wife, Angele Cohen—whose family had fled Baghdad in 1951, when Iraq expelled its Jewish citizens—were living in Queens. Alberto worked double shifts in customer relations for Pan American and British West Indian Airways, doing his best, he says, to ensure that his son would lack for nothing.

Braunstein with his father, Alberto, in 1981. Brigitte Stelzer/Polaris Images.

Except for a three-year stint in Miami, Peter grew up in Queens, in a two-bedroom apartment in Kew Gardens. It was a home marked by faded, quasi-bohemian European elegance; books lined the walls, and the kilns Alberto used for his enamel artwork sat in the living room. Peter spoke French with his parents and spent his summers with his father's relatives in France and Italy.

Allan Starkie says he wept when he saw news photos of the BB gun his half-brother had been carrying when he was arrested in Memphis. "He never had any toys as a kid," Starkie says. "His parents never bought him any. They never treated him like a child. They treated him like a little intellectual from the moment he could talk." (Alberto insists that "my sisters would shower Peter with toys.") Peter, Starkie adds, "was an odd kid," a brainy only child with precociously formal manners, adored and doted on by his mother. He lived in a world of his own, and so did his parents—the result of a bitter rift in the family.

Not until he was older would Peter learn that his cousin Allan Starkie was also his half-brother—Alberto's son from his first marriage, to Albertina Cohen, the sister of Peter's mother. As Peter would hear it, his parents had begun their relationship after Alberto's divorce from Albertina. According to Starkie, however, Alberto and Angele began their affair while he was still married to her sister. The relationship so horrified the Cohen family that Alberto and Angele were cut off. "They were segregated," says Starkie, "and in their own minds this was recorded as a triumph, that they were better than the rest of us. That is how it was portrayed to Peter: that the family is rejecting us because we intimidate them. And that's how Peter was raised, with this mixed sense of superiority and enormous self-doubt." Alberto denies that he was sleeping with one sister while married to the other.

Alberto and Angele separated in 1984, when Peter was 20. The year before, he had his first run-in with the police. In what Alberto would later call "a prank," Peter and a friend were arrested at the Helmsley Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, on suspicion of trying to rob a woman. Braunstein was offered a deal by the district attorney: if he testified against his friend, he would be able to avoid jail time. Alberto urged him to plead guilty, to take responsibility for his actions. But Angele furiously rejected Alberto's advice, urging Peter to turn in his friend and save himself. In his letter to Alberto in 2003, Peter said he'd lost all respect for his father when he started "crying about my arrest like a whining little bitch," instead of standing up for him, the way his mother had.

Even before that first arrest, says Alberto, Peter had a "very short fuse" and would sometimes collapse under the slightest pressure. When he was at the Sorbonne, after graduating from the Kew-Forest School, in 1981, Peter got so upset at having to tell a girlfriend that he didn't want to marry her—after she'd gone out and bought a wedding dress—that he suffered a breakdown and was found sleeping in the streets. Worried, his parents insisted he see a psychiatrist, but Peter was so smart, Alberto has said, that he just played mind games with the shrink.

As they got older, Starkie says, he found Peter increasingly "dislikable" and "arrogant." Still, he was not surprised by the contents of Peter's letter to Alberto. It would have been almost impossible, Starkie says, to have any self-confidence after being raised by their father. "Alberto," says Starkie, "is a father who loves putting you down, and Peter grew up with that." Starkie recalls an incident from when he was about seven that he says was typical. He had won an art prize, and as a reward his father bought him a set of oil paints and asked the boy to paint his portrait. Nervous, Starkie made a mess of it. "Well," he recalls Alberto saying to him, "evidently they gave the prize to the wrong boy." Then Alberto smiled and lit a cigarette. "He thought he was being witty," says Starkie, "in that witty, shitty way of his." Alberto says he has no recollection of this incident.

In his book, Starkie wrote of his own suicide attempt. He also described spending time in a German jail in 1995, after being arrested in connection with the bankruptcy of Oceonics, a construction company he ran for Sarah Ferguson's lover John Bryan. (Starkie was released without charges.) But despite the apparent parallels between the brothers' lives, they were never close. "You pathetic, cowardly pseudo-intellectual," Starkie wrote in a letter to Peter that he posted on the Internet in November 2005, while Peter was on the run. "How dare you disgrace the family with your absurd cries for attention?"

Starkie's letter, whose viciousness he later said was meant to lure Peter out of hiding, accused Peter of trying to "compete with my success." It's a tendency both brothers seem to have inherited from their father, who competed with his sons over everything, Starkie says, even women. Extravagantly charming and gallant, Alberto was, by his own admission, "a womanizer." Married and divorced four times, he spoke freely, and sometimes very intimately, about women to his sons. This was resented by both boys but especially by Peter, who, at the slightest sign of trouble in the marriages of his female relatives, would become furious and urge them to leave their husbands. "You don't understand," Peter once told his father. "I take sex very seriously." "That's good, Peter, but what does that mean?," Alberto responded.

Peter's 2003 letter, Starkie believes, was proof of how deeply this conflict had affected him. "I'm much more intelligent than you, much better educated, handsomer, taller, and," Peter wrote to Alberto, "much more successful in making women happy than you ever were." For Peter, "pleasing a woman" had become "a measure of validation," says Starkie. "Look at the poignancy of that letter. Why did he care so much what his father thought, especially a father like Alberto?"

"I love both my sons," says Alberto. "I am so proud of both of them." But he was so insulted by that letter—particularly Peter's comment that he couldn't wait "to ceremoniously urinate" on Alberto's grave—that he made no attempt to contact his son for more than two years. As a result, he knew nothing about Peter's life. "If I had," he says with great regret now, "then perhaps all this could have been avoided."

In truth, Alberto had no idea how desperate Peter had become by the time of their lunch at Picasso. He was broke, and had been turned down for several journalism jobs. Feeling suicidal, he'd gone to a psychiatrist, who'd prescribed the antidepressant Paxil. In July 2003, Peter learned that Jayson Blair, the disgraced New York Times journalist—who had been fired for plagiarizing and fabricating portions of his stories—had received story assignments from Esquire and Jane magazines. Once again, someone less deserving than Braunstein had been rewarded, and he found himself enraged by the hypocrisy and shallowness of the media. When someone on a Mediabistro.com message board challenged his effort to organize a telephone protest campaign against the magazines, he lashed out at his critic: "Have you been laid? EVER?"

That month, Braunstein faced another, far more devastating rejection, when Larkworthy told him she wanted to end their relationship. For the first time, Braunstein became violent with her. According to the police, he taped Larkworthy's hands to a chair and, waving a knife at her, told her that he would "destroy [her] professionally and otherwise." Friends say she was frightened but didn't know how to get him out of her home. So he stayed, working on his play and using his friends in the press to get it plugged in Playbill and New York magazine and on "Page Six." To the outside world, he seemed to be doing well.

Braunstein's Fairchild Publications work ID, posted with a notice stating that he should not be permitted to enter the company's offices. Robert Miller/Polaris Images.

But, on November 22, Larkworthy again tried to break up with him. This time, a friend says, Braunstein "went nuts." He picked up a kitchen knife and started cutting himself. The police were called, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, only to be released after a few hours. "They found him very sane," his father says. Indeed, Larkworthy was the one who seemed to be out of her mind in an item that appeared on "Page Six" on January 8, 2004, more than a month after she cut Braunstein off. Braunstein had told the gossip column that Larkworthy, "wearing a blue Victoria's Secret teddy and high heels," had attacked him in a fit of jealousy and scratched him, then called the police and accused him of mutilating himself.

Larkworthy was humiliated, says a friend, but there was nothing that could be done. Challenging "Page Six" "would just draw more attention to it." Even though he was growing seriously disturbed, Braunstein still had influence with the New York press, and he knew how to use it to inflict damage.

"What he did to Jane on 'Page Six' was revolting," says one W editor, and everyone who knew Braunstein seemed to agree. After the item was published, almost all his friends in the media cut him off. With nowhere else to go, Braunstein had already moved back to his mother's apartment in Queens. From there, he launched a harassment campaign against Larkworthy that would last 18 months. He called her at the office hundreds of times, threatening her or playing a recording of a woman having an orgasm. He wrote letters to her bosses at Fairchild, saying she was unstable and dangerous. He sent similar letters to executives in the beauty industry. He even posted nude photographs of Larkworthy on the Internet, with her phone number, and sent the photographs to her employer.

"The most toxic woman I ever attempted to love" is how Braunstein described Larkworthy in the spring of 2004 on the Web site he'd created for his upcoming play. Referring to Larkworthy as "BioHazard," he said that his two years with her had been "a Hellride of Emotional Suffocation," like "trying to woo a desert." In what appears now to have been a warning, he wrote that he was determined "to make more noise than any non-existent being" in her life "had ever made." But his suffering, he wrote, had enabled him to write his play: "It's the nasty truth of how art is created: through a crucible of pain, suffocating neglect, paranoia and malice." To write about Edie Sedgwick, he "had to become Edie," and Larkworthy had helped him do that. He dreamed about Edie every night, he said, and that was the power of celebrity. For the famous there is no death, because "the second fifteen minutes of fame lasts forever."

Braunstein's play opened in June 2004 at Shetler Studios, a performance space in Midtown Manhattan. Braunstein was a total wreck by then—ranting in late-night phone calls to his actresses, smashing his head on the sidewalk in a bid for publicity. In the midst of this, he planted an item on "Page Six" about his impending marriage to Edie Sedgwick's niece. It was totally untrue, but "Page Six" printed it anyway. "They printed a lot of stuff while Peter was unwinding, and that fueled him," says a friend.

Just 10 days after opening night, the play closed. The only scene that had been praised by a reviewer was one in which Edie Sedgwick, "drugged out and wearing only panties," is hectored by two men with a video camera to "confess her darkest fears on film." It was almost exactly what Braunstein would allegedly do to his victim 16 months later.

Devastated by the failure of his play, Braunstein grew increasingly depressed. He applied for several more jobs in journalism, but again he was turned down. "No one wanted me. I felt like a failure," he would tell Alberto after his arrest. In October 2004, Braunstein was hospitalized, according to his mother, after mixing beer and an overdose of Prozac in an apparent suicide attempt, although medical records would indicate that he had mixed alcohol with the barbiturate Fioricet. By this time, he had also managed to get a prescription for the anti-psychotic Haldol, and he would obtain additional prescriptions, for the anti-anxiety drug Ativan, the sleeping pill Ambien, the antidepressant Lexapro, and the painkiller Vicodin. His mind was slipping. He repeatedly told his mother he wanted to die, and at one point he shoved her so hard that she fell and hit her head on the floor. "I pulled him by the arm, because he was being nasty, but I should have remembered—it was touch and go with him," says Angele Braunstein. "When he loses his temper, it's horrible. I had a hell of a time, but you can't do anything with a man of 40 years old."

On February 3, 2005, Braunstein was arrested and charged by the Manhattan District Attorney with stalking, harassing, and menacing Jane Larkworthy. One month later, it seems, he had begun preparing his attack. In March, he bought what appears to have been chloroform on eBay. In May, he placed a second order.

Just whom he was planning to attack at this point isn't clear. Later, he told his father that it wasn't Jane Larkworthy, as many speculated, "because she had suffered enough." His anger now seems to have been aimed at the entire fashion industry. According to the D.A., Braunstein had harassed three other women in the business, with e-mails and calls, threatening to ruin them professionally. He does not, however, seem to have made any contact with his future victim. Then, in late June, a photograph of the former W editor appeared on the Internet. She was at a benefit, laughing with friends. That may have been what made Braunstein fixate on her, for he saw her as another one who had broken the rules. She had left W in the fall of 2003, and Braunstein had heard the rumor that she'd been accused of stealing dozens of pairs of designer shoes lent to the magazine for fashion shoots. The victim's lawyer says she "resigned from W on good terms," adding that "the rumors about her employment history" are "irrelevant and unfounded." What Braunstein believed, however, was that, like him, she had been cast out of Fairchild. But, unlike him, she had not suffered. She had landed another high-powered, well-paying job. And she was happy.

In July 2005, Braunstein pleaded guilty to reduced charges, of menacing Larkworthy. By then he had begun writing his "personal manifesto aka the making of a menace." Holed up in his mother's apartment, he spent the next weeks at the computer, working on the 10-page diatribe, which ended with the sentence, "We've taken a wrong turn as a race and have nowhere left to go." Increasingly depressed, he filled still more prescriptions that month, according to medical records, for Halcion, Prozac, and Valium. In August, he returned to eBay. Using the screen name "drgroovy," he bought chloroform as well as an F.D.N.Y. firefighter's coat.

On September 7, Braunstein was sentenced in the Larkworthy case—to a mere three years of probation and five days of community service—and was ordered by the judge to turn over his computers to the police. Which he did, apparently aware that they contained the entire scenario for the attack he was planning. Twelve days later, he was back on eBay with a new screen name, "gulagmeister." "Same loyal customer," he wrote. "I just don't feel like drgroovy anymore." He bought firefighter pants, still more chloroform, and, on September 29, 8.8 pounds of potassium nitrate. In late October, according to the police, Braunstein renewed his passport. He cleared his belongings out of his mother's apartment. And then, on October 24, he told his probation officer that he would not be able to attend his next appointment—on October 31—because he was having surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The Halloween-night attack was harrowing for the victim. But it was also, in the view of one of her close friends, "more of an intellectual humiliation than a sexual attack. He was tormenting her with mind games." He made her put on the shoes while apparently filming her with the video camera. At some point, he gave her a sleeping pill, took one himself, lay down next to her, and took a nap.

The day after his arrest, Braunstein was in the hospital in Memphis recovering from his self-inflicted knife wounds when the N.Y.P.D. detectives came to interrogate him. He told them if they read his journal it would answer all their questions. He asked about the victim, if she'd gotten a book or movie deal yet. Getting a book deal, he said, "is the symbol of a true victim." He told them he had seen himself on television while on the run and had read about himself on the Internet. He rambled for some time and seemed to get frustrated with the detectives' questions. "There is a bigger picture," he said. He wanted "anyone that turned a cold shoulder to me to fear who would be next," he said. "I have no past or present. New York City turned its back on me."

Extradited to New York, Braunstein was admitted to the prison ward of Bellevue's psychiatric hospital, where he spent the next four months. Placed on 24-hour suicide watch and put on Seroquel, an anti-psychotic medication, Braunstein did little more than sleep for the first weeks. But by late January 2006 he was able to start meeting with the psychologists hired by his lawyer, as the first step to building a psychiatric defense.

In interviews with the psychologist, Braunstein painted a picture of a life that had been tormented from the beginning. According to the psychiatric report the defense submitted into evidence last June, Braunstein—"rocking back and forth uncontrollably," perspiring heavily, and hyperventilating—said that he had "blotted out much of his childhood" but went on to describe it as "dysfunctional and turbulent." He remembered "being bullied by other kids" and thinking that "there was something very wrong" with him and said his depression had grown especially bad during his college years. Dropping out of both George Washington and the University of Maryland, he says he spent this time in "a haze of marijuana and cocaine."

As Braunstein recalled it, his years with Donna Keane and Debra Michals were the most stable of his life, because both women had been strong enough to give him the support—both financial and emotional—he needed. The problems with Larkworthy had started when he began to think, according to the report, that she was "as fragile as he was." Being unemployed had left him feeling like a "person who exists with no social identity," and he said he "began to be consumed by thoughts of suicide." By 2003, as Larkworthy was trying to end their relationship, he said he "hit bottom," believing that all the women he'd relied on for stability "had deserted him."

There is no mention in the defense psychiatric report of Braunstein's harassment of Larkworthy, and his only comment about the Halloween attack is his claim that he was surprised, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room the next day, to see reports of it on the television news, because "he did not think [the victim] would report it to the police." This claim—difficult to believe, considering he had his getaway planned and was seen by the hotel clerk glancing nervously at the TV when he checked in—is cited as proof that Braunstein really believed "his actions were of no consequence, unreal, as if they occurred in a play or novel."

Indeed, it is the conclusion of the psychologist and neuropsychiatrist hired by the defense that Peter Braunstein is, and was at the time of the attack, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Among the other symptoms noted in support of this diagnosis are his extreme anxiety, self-loathing, emotional and social alienation, hostility, aggression, and "sexual preoccupation." Mention is also made of his "paranoid delusions" and "bizarre sensory experiences," although no specific examples are given. According to the defense psychologist, the long list of symptoms combined to create a fragile personality that could not withstand any stress. Putting Braunstein at W.W.D., in "the highly competitive glitzy and sexually charged atmosphere of a celebrity-driven fashion periodical," the report said, "was in fact the proverbial recipe for disaster."

There is no doubt that Peter Braunstein was very troubled. But how troubled? The stalking of Larkworthy alone suggests deep-seated psychological problems. "Stalkers are very disturbed, and it's something that goes way back," often to early childhood, says Dr. Louis Schlesinger, a forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "A lot of stalkers are borderline pathological and sometimes psychotic." And it is said that psychotic breaks—with their delusions and, in some cases, hallucinations—can be brought on by great stress. The stress of being fired, of romantic rejection, of a play's closing, of failure on every front—all of this could have contributed to Braunstein's violent collapse. The pharmacy of drugs in his system may also have scrambled his mind. But was he so ill that he cannot be held responsible for his actions?

In documents submitted to the court, the prosecution has made clear that it believes the answer is "no." It wasn't just Braunstein's flight from the law that demonstrated his "consciousness of guilt," according to the D.A., but what he did while he was on the lam. There was the phone call he allegedly made from Cleveland, four days after the attack, to Larkworthy's assistant at W, warning her that "if you testify [for Larkworthy], you will die." There was his use of aliases to conceal his identity, and his thefts, duly noted in his journal, of backpacks, money, a bicycle, and a cell phone. There was even an incident, the D.A. claims, when Braunstein feigned mental illness while committing a crime. On November 17, Braunstein allegedly robbed a psychiatrist at gunpoint in Cincinnati. In his journal, he wrote that he'd gained entry to the doctor's office by pretending "to be really neurotic, verging on manic-depressive/psychotic."

It remains to be seen whether this "prior bad act," which has earned Braunstein an indictment in Ohio, will, along with the others, be admissible as evidence in his New York trial. With or without it, however, Maxine Rosenthal, the prosecuting attorney—and her psychiatric expert—are expected to mount a full-scale assault on the defense's claim that Braunstein was suffering from a mental illness so severe that it crippled his ability to distinguish right from wrong.

There are those—his half-brother and former colleagues included—who wonder if Peter Braunstein isn't clever enough to fool psychiatrists into believing he is mentally ill. If so, it has at moments been a convincing performance. Several times, guards at Bellevue found him with bruises from smashing his face against the wall and bars of his cell. He spent weeks lying on his bunk, rarely speaking except to tell his father to stop paying Gottlieb because he had no future to defend. He was planning to kill himself, he said, the first chance he got.

With drugs and psychotherapy, Braunstein's condition improved, however, and in May 2006 he was moved to Rikers Island jail. Within days, according to Alberto, Peter was approached by several inmates who threatened to slit his throat and "finish the job" he'd begun when he stabbed himself in Memphis. As a result, Peter was moved to a high-security section of Rikers. Overweight from his medication and sedentary life in jail, Braunstein spends most of his days now reading, although he no longer looks at the newspapers and magazines that once obsessed him.

For the victim, the hardest part of it all has been coming to grips with the randomness of what happened to her. "She kept saying, 'Why me?'" a friend recalls. The first weeks were the worst. She couldn't work, couldn't return to her apartment. A "very tough woman" and "very independent," according to this friend, she had to be persuaded to see a trauma counselor. As for Larkworthy, she would like nothing more than to put this all behind her. She is still an editor at W and got married last fall to a man one friend describes as a "phenomenal guy" and "normal."

The slow reconciliation between Peter Braunstein and his father began while he was at Bellevue, after Peter learned that Alberto had mortgaged his apartment to pay for an attorney. Although Alberto ran out of money last October (Gottlieb is now paid with public funds), the rapprochement continues. According to Alberto, Peter has done nothing to help prepare his defense. In the winter, Alberto says, Peter was ready to accept the prosecutor's exploratory offer of 20 years in prison in return for a guilty plea—but that offer was subsequently withdrawn. Alberto says Peter is "resigned" to whatever the future might bring. Or maybe not. On March 6, the day Braunstein was scheduled to appear in court for the final hearing before his trial, he was found in his cell, bleeding from both ears, and was rushed to a nearby hospital. Braunstein said he had no memory of what happened to him, and jail officials had no record of an attack. As Braunstein was re-admitted to Bellevue, Gottlieb attributed his client's condition to a subdural hematoma, suggesting that this could be the basis for his disturbed behavior. Then, on April 2, Gottlieb revealed that Braunstein's skull was fractured. Meanwhile, a law-enforcement official said that Peter had been intentionally hitting his head on the sink of his cell, possibly in an attempt to delay his trial.

In all their long talks, Alberto says, he still hasn't gotten "a clear answer" from Peter about his motives for the attack. At times, Braunstein has seemed to his father to be "pretty proud of his performance," telling Alberto that he "planned everything very carefully." He has said too that he "never felt so carefree" as he did when he was on the run, because "he was free from his past." Asked if Peter feels any remorse, Alberto says, "Oh, yes, now that he realizes the consequences of his actions and knows that he will be paying the price for the rest of his life." Unless a plea deal is struck at the eleventh hour, it will be up to a jury to determine whether that happens in prison or a psychiatric hospital.

Suzanna Andrews is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.