Jane and I Worked With a Sex Criminal Who Terrorized 2 of Our Colleagues in the Creepiest Ways

Where is Peter Braunstein now? Does he still hate fashion editors?

It’s midnight on Halloween! And what does that make you think of? If you’re a true crime freak, like me, it’s probably only one thing: Peter Braunstein, the guy who dressed up like a firefighter on Halloween 2005, forced his way into a fashion editor’s apartment and terrorized her for almost 13 hours before running from the cops for 6 weeks.

Did you know Jane and I worked on the same floor as Braunstein back in the day? Jane magazine was under the umbrella of Fairchild Publications before it was folded into Conde Nast, and our offices were at 7 West 34th Street (directly across the street from the Empire State Building). Jane shared a floor with fashiony W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, where Peter was a writer. He stood out in the elevator: He had shiny dark curls and carried a fancy leather briefcase. That’s how I remember him — kind of put-together yet kind of eccentric-looking, in a vaguely academic kind of way. Like a beat-poet professor with a perm.

Peter’s Fairchild ID. Some of Peter’s bylined WWD stories are still online, including one about Selma Blair called “A Brunette’s Blues.” 

I didn’t think about him much at the time, until he sent me a kind note about a story I wrote about black-market Adderall use at Vassar and other college campuses. He said he appreciated the reporting I’d done and that more stories should push boundaries like that did. I don’t remember what I wrote back to him, but he seemed sharp and passionate, like he legit cared about journalism. 

Another woman who once worked with us at Jane magazine — someone intelligent and beautiful and funny and successful — dated Peter for more than a year, including after he was fired from Fairchild for being a jerk to a publicist. When our ex-coworker broke up with him, things went off the rails. (Actually, “off the rails” is a severe understatement, but this woman has been through enough, so let’s skip those details.) 

I am pretty sure Peter hit on Jane Pratt at one point through email. [He visited me in my office unannounced too many times, from what I recall, under the guise of some potential work thing? And I had forgotten all about the emails until now. -Jane]. But in 2004 he wrote an off-off-Broadway play about Edie Sedgwick, which honestly sounded kind of lit.

Here’s a more recent pic of 7 West 34th Street, where we shared the fourth floor (or was it ninth?) with Peter. Jane magazine was always weirder than the other Fairchild publications, so we stayed in our own chaotic little corner. Say hi to JP.

By October 2005, Peter apparently became fixated on another woman at Fairchild — a fashion editor who had endless access to designer shoes, luxury bags and more. To him, she represented everything wrong with the fashion industry: phony, privileged, unattainable.

Then on Halloween night 2005, Peter did something terrifyingly brilliant and so incredibly evil. He dressed up in a NY firefighter’s uniform, set off a smoke bomb inside the lobby of the fashion editor’s apartment building, and knocked on her door, saying he was the fire department. When the fashion editor let him in, he pulled a gun on her, knocked her out with chloroform, stripped her clothes off, tied her up with a parachute cord and sexually assaulted her — just not exactly in the way he’d planned.