Playboy Club closes…again
I see that the Playboy Club has gone belly up. I covered that story…23 years ago!
Flashback: Trump Trips in ’91
Today’s Wall Street Journal took me back to a story I barely recall writing in 1991.
Rogues’ Gallery Redux
Today’s New York Times reflects the current fashion for questioning the composition of the boards of cultural institutions. Ten years ago, Rogues’ Gallery did the same, using the sometimes sordid stories of the founders and boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a window on the ways cultural philanthropy is used by the wealthy […]
My Night With Jeffrey Epstein’s Rabbateur
Twenty five years ago in Paris, I interviewed Jean-Luc Brunel, the model agent now alleged to have procured underage girls for the late Jeffrey Epstein, for a book on the modeling business subtitled The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. That night I got an acrid taste of just how ugly it could be. Highlights of […]
L’Affair Epstein: The French Connection
Tonight’s edition of 66 Minutes, the French equivalent of our 60 Minutes, includes a segment on Jeffrey Epstein and one of his key enablers, the French model agent and Miami modelizer Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel was first exposed on 60 Minutes in 1988, and (apparently) first responded in a lengthy interview he gave for my 1995 […]
On David Koch (b. 1940, d.2019)
In 2014, as acting editor of Avenue, sitting in that chair for just a few months, I faced a challenge. The October cover had been promised to David Koch, the right wing zealot and social figure, on condition the story be focused purely on his philanthropy, which was a legitimate subject–and ignore his more controversial […]
Meet Jeffrey Epstein’s Enabler
French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel has become a focus of journalistic inquiry in the days since pedo Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide. Yesterday, Brunel made the front page of the Washington Post in a story that cites Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. According to RTL, the French radio network, I’m “one of the few people […]
Toxic Trustees: Named and Shamed
New York Magazine’s Whitney Mallett and Katy Schneider have created a guide to the latest gallery of rogues to join the boards of the city’s leading cultural philanthropies. Rogues’ Gallery gets a shout-out–alongside Metropolitan Museum board members like Henry Kissinger and David Koch.
Margiela Unmasked
According to Wikipedia, only one known photo of the Belgian-born Paris-based designer Martin Margiela exists, taken in 1997 by Marcio Madeira but never officially verified. Here’s a second, taken by me (so I can vouch for its veracity) in Fall 1989 at the second Margiela show I covered in what I understood to be a […]
It’s the Unreal Thing
Owlwood, one of the most famous properties in Holmby Hills, has recently been price chopped to $115 million from an original asking price of of $170 million. First occupied by the estranged wife of the founder of the ritzy real estate development, it was later owned in turn by a partner of Conrad Hilton, movie […]