Latest news with #TinaBrown
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Daily Mail
Top magazine editor reveals her chilling encounter with Epstein
Veteran editor Tina Brown has said she was left shaken after Jeffrey Epstein brazenly showed up inside her office without an appointment 15 years ago. Recalling her encounter with Epstein, Tina said the disgraced financier had 'cold, snake-like eyes' and warned her to halt the Daily Beast's reporting on his abuse. Tina, who launched the Daily Beast alongside media mogul Barry Diller, said the chilling face-off came in 2010, just days after the outlet ran a major investigation into Epstein's sordid history and suspicious plea deal. She told the Daily Beast Podcast: 'He said, "Just stop". And he looked at me with this kind of snake eyes, cold, and it was menacing. It was really menacing. And he pointed his finger and he said, "Just stop". 'It was a very chilling experience. I mean, it was scary, actually.' The article, headlined 'Jeffrey Epstein, Billionaire Pedophile, Goes Free,' broke new ground by revealing how victims had told investigators they were as young as 12 when Epstein trafficked them - years before prosecutors brought federal charges. Before the uninvited visit, Tina said she'd already fielded calls from both Epstein and his attorney, trying to quash the story. She refused. But when she returned from lunch one day, she found him sitting in her office - having bypassed her security. She said: 'I was stunned. I stood at the door, aghast.' 'He was a master-class con man, so maybe he was just able always to kind of get what he wanted,' she added. Tina told him the reporting wouldn't stop – and that's when he dropped the threat. 'He said, "There will be consequences if you don't stop,"' she said. 'And he just got up, and he left my room.' Tina, who had crossed paths with Epstein during New York's glitzy social heyday in the '80s and '90s, said the disgraced financier's behavior during their brief office encounter made one thing clear: intimidation was his goal. At the time of the article, Epstein had already been convicted in Florida for soliciting a minor – but had served just 13 months in a county facility under a highly controversial deal that allowed him to spend most of his days outside the jail. It would take nearly another decade before he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, with the medical examiner ruling it a suicide. His death sparked widespread suspicion, political finger-pointing, and an ongoing storm of conspiracy theories. This comes just after the Justice Department announced it would not release further records related to the case, and denied the existence of a so-called 'client list' implicating powerful allies.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Very Dangerous Moment' for Trump Now That MAGA Sees He's Taking Them for ‘Fools'
President Donald Trump has forgotten amid the Jeffrey Epstein maelstrom that his base owns him and not the other way around, according to legendary journalist Tina Brown. The long-time media powerbroker and Daily Beast founding editor told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump's response to MAGA's fury has only served to alienate him from some of his most ardent supporters. 'It was like he's forgetting who owns him, right?' said Brown, who first met Trump and Epstein when they were all at the center of the New York social scene in the 1980s and 1990s. 'And he's mad as hell now because they're supposed to be owned by him.' On Tuesday, the president ripped into his own supporters for continuing to demand answers about Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The Department of Justice and the FBI formally denied there was an Epstein 'client list' earlier this month and insisted that he died by suicide, not murder. 'My PAST supporters have bought into this 'bulls--t,' hook, line, and sinker. They haven't learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years,' Trump wrote. Brown, who founded the Daily Beast with media titan Barry Diller in 2008, called the post 'ill-advised' because it shows the president has confused the dynamics of his relationship with his supporters. 'I mean, as we know, famously he said, 'I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and my base would still love me,'' she told Daily Beast Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty. 'He finds this insurrection deeply aggravating because they're supposed to just get in line and worship him.' His base seems to finally be coming around to the fact that he thinks they're stupid, she added, and they're not buying it when he tries to pin the Epstein scandal on Democrats. Brown noted that Candace Owens had written: ''It's almost as if Trump thinks his base is stupid.' And I'm thinking, you think? You think? He's always thought they were stupid. That's the whole point. That's been his superpower. 'You think he wants to hang out with a lot of those people? No, he doesn't.' Trump's efforts to claim that the Epstein fury is some kind of Democratic plot to undermine him is too ludicrous to convince his supporters. 'Even MAGA are not buying that,' Brown said. 'Something must have sort of hit him in the shower or something, 'I can blame this on Democrats.' He's too late… This has not been a dexterous use of lying, which is usually very effective on his side. But it's not working this time.' MAGA supporters are beginning to wonder if Trump—who they felt spoke to them directly instead of showing them contempt like other elites—really is their guy. 'Suddenly, it's like Trump's not speaking to them anymore. He's behaving as if they're fools. 'He's really misjudged this because he's basically telling them—he's treating them like the global elite that they hate so much have always treated them,' she said. 'This is not good. This is not their guy.' The scandal could be the tipping point that finally starts to erode 'Teflon Don's' power, Brown added. 'It's very dangerous moment. I think for Trump... This has always been his power—that they believe that they have this intimate bond of sensibility and value to him,' she said. 'And if they think he's just, you know, kicking them to the curb and calling them 'weaklings' and 'just get on the train because I'm telling you,' I don't think that's going to play well.' Click here to subscribe to Tina Brown's must-read Substack, Fresh Hell. New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Daily Mail
Top magazine editor reveals her chilling encounter with Jeffrey Epstein and act that still shocks her today
Veteran editor Tina Brown has said she was left shaken after Jeffrey Epstein brazenly showed up inside her office without an appointment 15 years ago. Recalling her encounter with Epstein, Brown said the disgraced financier had 'cold, snake-like eyes' and warned her to halt the Daily Beast's reporting on his abuse. Brown, who launched the Daily Beast alongside media mogul Barry Diller, said the chilling face-off came in 2010, just days after the outlet ran a major investigation into Epstein's sordid history and suspicious plea deal. She told the Daily Beast Podcast: 'He said, 'Just stop.' And he looked at me with this kind of snake eyes, cold, and it was menacing. It was really menacing. And he pointed his finger and he said, 'Just stop.' 'It was a very chilling experience,' she said. 'I mean, it was scary, actually.' The article, headlined 'Jeffrey Epstein, Billionaire Pedophile, Goes Free,' broke new ground by revealing how victims had told investigators they were as young as 12 when Epstein trafficked them – years before prosecutors brought federal charges. Before the uninvited visit, Brown said she'd already fielded calls from both Epstein and his attorney, trying to quash the story. She refused. But when she returned from lunch one day, she found him sitting in her office - having bypassed her security. She said: 'I was stunned. I stood at the door, aghast.' The Beast's 2010 investigation revealed girls as young as 12 were flown across the globe on Epstein's jets 'He was a master-class con man, so maybe he was just able always to kind of get what he wanted,' she added. Brown told him the reporting wouldn't stop – and that's when he dropped the threat. 'He said, 'There will be consequences if you don't stop,' she said. 'And he just got up, and he left my room.' At the time of the article, Epstein had already been convicted in Florida for soliciting a minor – but had served just 13 months in a county facility under a highly controversial deal that allowed him to spend most of his days outside the jail. It would take nearly another decade before he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, with the medical examiner ruling it a suicide. His death sparked widespread suspicion, political finger-pointing, and an ongoing storm of conspiracy theories. This comes just after the Justice Department announced it would not release further records related to the case, and denied the existence of a so-called 'client list' implicating powerful allies. The move enraged corners of the MAGA base, who had hoped Donald Trump, a former Epstein acquaintance, would declassify more information. Brown, who had crossed paths with both Trump and Epstein during New York's glitzy social heyday in the '80s and '90s, said the disgraced financier's behavior during their brief office encounter made one thing clear: intimidation was his goal.
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Magazine editors used to be gatekeepers. Do we need them anymore?
It's 2025 and veteran Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown is on Substack, opining on private jets and Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories. Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recently published a memoir about his magazine world heyday, and did a jolly round of interviews with all the new media talkers: fashion podcasts, food podcasts and sound bytes for Interview. And multiple generations of fashion fanatics are pouring one out — and by 'one,' I mean a splash of nonfat oat milk matcha — for Anna Wintour's (pseudo-)retirement from the day-to-day operations of American Vogue. Soon the 21st-century decline of the fashion media landscape will move from tidbits in media newsletters to the silver screen: 'The Devil Wears Prada 2,' a follow-up to the 2006 hit that helped make Wintour a household name, has just begun filming. It follows Wintour's stand-in, Miranda Priestly, navigating the digital revolution. And on the podcast front, a look at what made the company so extraordinary in its prime is the subject of 'The Nasty,' featuring remembrances from Condé Nast's power players on the elevator gossip and the famed Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria at 4 Times Square. Meanwhile, Mr. Big and Carrie — also known as former Condé publisher Ron Galotti and writer Candace Bushnell — are still trading barbs in the press, in recent pieces in New York Magazine and the Times. Welcome back to the '90s! The latest cultural artifact to capture this longing for an earlier, more sparkly zeitgeist is 'Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America,' by New York Times media reporter Michael M. Grynbaum. Tracing the Newhouse family business that owns Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker throughout the 20th century and into this one, the book's buzziest reporting focuses on the careers of Brown, Carter and Wintour. Their 1980s go-getter tenures saw them begin as outsiders who, through their unusual points of view and the largesse of Si Newhouse, created a powerhouse of influence and style — 'one company in Manhattan told the world what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think,' Grynbaum writes — that is the subject of continued fascination on social media and in pop culture writ large. 'When you look at Condé Nast, it's almost the history of social aspiration. And this goes back all the way to the founding: Vogue comes out of the 400 and the Gilded Age,' said Grynbaum in a recent interview, referring to the list of society insiders established by Caroline Astor in the late 19th century. 'If you look at the Condé Nast of the mid-century, you see the WASPy, eastern establishment of the sack suits and threadbare sweaters, and it has this kind of understated aesthetic. By the time you get to the '80s, you have the rise of Wall Street and Gordon Gekko, and this newfound willingness to flaunt.' As Grynbaum noted, Brown's first issue of Vanity Fair appeared the same week that 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' appeared on TV. 'It represented a new establishment,' Grynbaum said, 'and idea of what it meant to be successful in America at that time.' You can see why younger generations are fixated. Grynbaum's book has all the goods to induce mania in anyone with aspirations to work in media, mostly a rare combination of shocking budgets and provocative taste: anecdotes about expense accounts, interest-free mortgages on West Village townhouses and photoshoots with eye-popping budgets for items like $30,000 to rent a live elephant. Carter would dispatch his assistant to travel destinations a day in advance to set up an exact reproduction of his New York desk, complete with pencils (and no paper clips — he had a distaste for them that was noted in the staff manual). One editor was told that her chosen hotel wasn't splashy enough — upgrade! 'It was considered unprofessional to go into the office in flat shoes. Maybe a pair of Chanel ballet flats, but a pair of brogues, absolutely not,' Vogue writer Plum Sykes tells Grynbaum. Writers and editors FedExed their luggage so they didn't have to deal with it on the plane. (In business class, or the Concorde, of course.) The accounts of this time of pure luxury are rollicking even as you become desensitized to them. Picture this: Carter had just landed in Venice in 2006 for a Condé retreat with the business's top editors and executives, when he realized he'd misplaced his top-secret mock-up issue of Portfolio, the company's not-yet-launched business magazine that had been given to him confidentially. He called his assistant Jon Kelly (now a founder of digital media start-up of Puck), who had just landed on a red-eye from New York, and told him that he'd probably left it on a gondola. Kelly, armed with his usual 10,000 euros in petty cash for such trips, spent the next several hours bribing gondoliers until he turned up the issue. It's an equally impressive tale of unimaginable resources and assumptions of powerful editors, plus the bygone maniacal pluck of their lowly assistants. It recalls a scene from 'The Devil Wears Prada' in which Anne Hathaway, as Miranda's struggling assistant, Andy, manages to find a copy of the not-yet-released Harry Potter book for the editor's daughters. And it would make a much more glamorous (and likely entertaining) film than the 'Prada' sequel. Who wants to watch Miranda Priestly square off with traffic reports? But the most provocative, eyebrow-raising reveal from the book is this: We still live in the world Condé Nast and its intimidating editors created. We just don't know how to make sense of it, because we lack the requisite curatorial eyes. TikTok is filled with home tours that recall the real estate porn of Architectural Digest; even though they're probably out of reach, we're still obsessed with decoding the behaviors and wardrobes of the ultra-elite. 'Our contemporary Instagram culture — airbrushed, brand-name-laden, and full of FOMO, where pretty people do pretty things in pretty places without you — is a DIY replication of the universe that the celebrity editors of Condé Nast carefully created month after month, year after year,' Grynbaum writes. He argues that, although it may be Brown's tenure at Vanity Fair that is most often celebrated, her time at the New Yorker was more audacious and revolutionary: 'It is striking to realize the degree to which her tenure, so controversial in its day, laid the template for our modern notion of upper-middlebrow journalism,' he writes. 'Tina's approach was giving elite Americans permission to think seriously about subjects that the old version of the magazine had rarely deemed worth of deep consideration: tabloid scandals, hit sitcoms, right-wing demagogues, porn stars.' Today, Grynbaum said, 'I think we get bombarded by different sources of information all day long on our phones. And as much as it's been great to see the rise of new voices in the culture that may have not had a forum in the past, now we live in a state of chaos. I think we're yearning for curators, social curators.' What magazines like Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ did in their prime was help readers make sense of the world — which, now, with social media and the reliance on video content, is even messier. It's not for nothing that the role of the editor in chief, not the designer or photographer or critic, is the one that most young women aspire to have in fashion. For decades — maybe even centuries, if you want to look at the fashion magazines that emerged in the 18th century to track the whims and shopping sprees of Marie Antoinette — the power of choice, of pointing to one skirt, or restaurant, or reporter, play or artist over another, has been a potent domain. Condé's elitist reputation is one it has long struggled to shake — those stories make for some of the funnier and more disturbing reporting in the book, such as a writer's recollection of losing out on a job for eating asparagus the wrong way — and was first the source of its power, then a contributor to its fall. Wintour in particular has tried to broaden the outlook and perspective of Vogue, with uneven results. Yet the new media that has emerged largely replicates the Condé way. Grynbaum pointed out that many of the most popular Substacks — such as the various shopping newsletters and Emily Sundberg's Feed Me, a highly influential roundup of gossip and stories from across tech, media, style and business — are about an unusual person's singular perspective. There is still a desire for figures who can point us, and our attention spans, to what is worth watching, buying, talking about or pondering. Ultimately, what do we long for when we long for the golden age of Condé Nast? It is the dream of having money — and taste.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Empire of the Elite by Michael M Grynbaum – inside the glittering world of Condé Nast
Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father's media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé's roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company's extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace 'low' culture. Condé brought pop stars, television personalities and tabloid intrigue into the highbrow fold, reconstituting cultural capital to fit the sensibilities of an emerging yuppie class with little interest in ballet or opera. Several moments stand out, in retrospect: GQ's 1984 profile of Donald Trump, which paved the way for The Art of the Deal; Madonna's 1989 debut on the cover of Vogue; and the New Yorker's coverage of the OJ Simpson trial in 1994. Tina Brown, appointed editor of the New Yorker in 1992 after a decade at Vanity Fair, said she wanted 'to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy'. Purists bemoaned what they saw as a slide into vulgar sensationalism, but Grynbaum maintains Brown 'wasn't so much dumbing down the New Yorker as expanding the universe to which it applied its smarts'. That expansiveness was key to Condé's mission, and it succeeded so comprehensively that today we take it for granted. Anna Wintour's Vogue would 'elevate the idea of street-style fashion, and presage the industry of stylists and celebrity brand ambassadors that have come to dominate lifestyle media', and GQ's preppy, 'proto-Patrick Bateman materialism' popularised 'the metrosexuality, dandyism and male self-care that have since saturated the culture'. The glory started to fade in the 21st century. The company's acquisitive ethos looked out of touch after the 2008 crash ('Condé's metier was privilege, and privilege had become a dirty word'), and its underwhelming record on race came under scrutiny with the advent of Black Lives Matter. Social media democratised the means of cultural curation, undercutting the authority of established taste-makers. The book ends on a wistful note as Grynbaum contemplates the decline of print media, and the end of an era of plenty. A similar sentiment is expressed in the poignant title of a recent memoir by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good. Like Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries (2017) before it, Carter's memoir offers a vivid, first-hand glimpse of the Condé social whirl. Both books have been praised for their anecdotal brio, and criticised for their namedropping smugness. It's a trade-off. Conversely, Empire of the Elite is a sober affair – an unflustered, chronological account of half a century's comings-and-goings – but has the merit of relative objectivity. The author, a correspondent by trade, keeps his focus on events and his opinions largely to himself; he neither grates nor delights. Gossip junkies and vicarious bon vivants will have more fun with Carter, but Empire of the Elite is a lucid introduction to this rarefied milieu and the people who inhabited it. It sounds like an exhausting world to navigate, 'a land of unspoken codes … The proper knotting of an ascot; the angle of a tie bar; how you dressed, how you spoke, where you went, who you knew – these considerations mattered deeply.' Grynbaum quotes one journalist who believes she missed out on an editorship because, during the interview lunch, she gauchely ate asparagus with cutlery rather than by hand. Tellingly, several of the key players in the Condé story were outsiders: Newhouse, who was Jewish, felt excluded from the Waspy top echelons of US society; Alex Liberman, the veteran editorial director who took Newhouse under his wing and schooled him in urbanity, had been a refugee from Soviet Russia; Carter was a pilot's son from Toronto. These arrivistes understood status anxiety, and astutely monetised it, offering readers an empowering sense of in-group membership for the modest price of a magazine subscription. And, because the United States is a nation built on clambering ambition, it worked. Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped the World by Michael M Grynbaum is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
