www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/12/seymour-200912
Her divorce has generated nearly as many headlines as the epic Christie Brinkley-Peter Cook split of 2008. When a "fairy-tale" marriage goes bad, the ending can be extremely grim. Amid the storm of allegations surrounding the divorce of supermodel Stephanie Seymour and tycoon Peter Brant--substance abuse! Stephanie Seymour, the 41-year-old former supermodel and veteran of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, Victoria's Secret catalogs, and, not least, two Playboy pictorials, would seem to be making that claim on these pages. "He's strong, intelligent, sensitive, and very masculine," she purred while discussing her then fianc with People magazine in 1994, on the occasion of her election as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. Brant cannot claim that level of renown, but his rsum is not shabby. In People's words, he is "the polo-playing owner of Interview, Antiques, and Art in America," while a recent court filing reminds us that he is also "a newsprint entrepreneur, an art collector, film producer, and owner/breeder of thoroughbred horses." Well, yes, Mr and Mrs Brant truly did have a fairy-tale marriage, or at least a fairy-tale divorce, because if you've recently read any fairy tales you know that they are unpleasant little narratives full of rage, jealousy, misbehavior, and vengeance. And if you've recently read any tabloids or Connecticut Superior Court documents, you know that the Brant split has devolved into "a real-life War of the Roses," as the New York Post put it (chops licked), with the bitter couple continuing to share their Greenwich estate while generating a reliable stream of lurid headlines, gossip, and even ancillary court cases: a Brant security guard charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly shoving Seymour after she allegedly grabbed some papers from him and tucked them down her shirtfront; a civil suit filed, in turn, by the same guard against Seymour, claiming that he was injured after she allegedly proceeded to slam a door on his arm following the previously alleged shove; a public-disturbance charge issued against Seymour after she allegedly blocked the family driveway with her SUV, then yanked the keys out of another security guard's car and threw them in some nearby bushes. Hindsight suggests there were hints of eruptions to come even before the courtship. She had been sued in 1993 by former boyfriend Axl Rose for, he claimed, having thrown a chair at him and punched him in the groin at a Christmas party. Both he and she were at low emotional ebbs when they met in 1993. He swept her away to Paris and by all accounts they fell deeply in love. And then--well, after a decade and a half of presumed bliss--it got ugly. Legal documents in divorce proceedings probably never make for happy reading, but the filings in Stephanie S Brant v Peter M Brant read like a series of increasingly nasty, or sad, brushback pitches. Last April, for instance, a month after she filed for divorce and requested custody, Seymour claimed that her husband had "harassed and intimidated" the children in an effort to turn them against her and that he had instructed the family's domestic staff and officials at their five-year-old daughter's school to keep her away from the children. Another filing accused him of spiriting a small museum's worth of artworks from "the marital residence" without Seymour's consent, a haul that allegedly included nearly 50 Warhols--Brant had a long association with the artist--as well as works by Koons and Prince, not to mention some drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat that had hung in Seymour's bathroom and a pair of Cindy Sherman photos allegedly pilfered from her dressing room. No mention was made of the Cattelan bust, which may have lost its trophy-like luster in the eyes of at least one of its owners.
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