It’s a long way from Emily Bronte to Lauren Weisberger, and even further, perhaps, to Peter Braunstein, the former media columnist for Women’s Wear Daily. Or is it?

Something strange happened in court during the Braunstein “fire fiend” trial. That was the moment Anna Wintour’s name came up as someone Braunstein had fantasised about killing. It began to dawn on everyone that they were about to witness the first use in a high-profile criminal case of The Devil Wears Prada defense.

In a written evaluation, defense psychologist Barbara Kirwin stated that for Braunstein, the sexually charged, celebrity-driven pressure cooker of the fashion world was toxic, “the proverbial recipe for disaster.”

The “fashion made him do it” defense ultimately failed—the jury resoundingly convicted Braunstein last week of kidnapping and sex abuse, and he faces 25 years to life in prison.

Braunstein, now 43, was fired from Women’s Wear Daily in 2002 for being obnoxious. He was a seemingly willful misfit, according to former colleagues, someone with bad clothes, bad hair and tone-deaf social etiquette.

On Halloween 2005, after being fired, Braunstein impersonated a firefighter and tricked his way into the apartment of a co-worker he barely knew, where he sexually molested and terrorised her for 13 hours.

The movie The Devil Wears Prada, based on the best-selling novel by Weisberger, a former assistant to Wintour, came out in 2006, while Braunstein awaited trial. “When I saw the movie, I said that’s the Peter Braunstein story,” Robert Gottlieb, Braunstein’s defense lawyer, recalled. “You think people are inferior to you, and then you go into the fashion industry, where you could be inferior,” Gottlieb said.

In his diary, Braunstein obsessively vented his rage at, among other targets, Kerry Diamond, then the beauty director of Harper’s Bazaar.

“I called Kerry Diamond who sang my praises up till then, so I thought she’d see a friend in need,” he wrote in 2005 while running from police. “She berated me for leaving too long a message on her cellphone. ‘That costs money, you know?’ ”

He went on: “If there was ever a contingent of hubris-drenched compensated sociopaths crying out for retribution, it’s this crowd. And every time I think about their callous indifference along every step of my downturn, it just strengthens my resolve to see this through until I’m a bleeding corpse splayed out on the sidewalk filled with police-issue lead.”

But he saved his fiercest wrath for Wintour. “There were many high-profile editors, and God knows they had big egos, but you could still get them on the phone,” Braunstein wrote, “But Wintour? She just never talked to peons like us.”

“You get to call me a psycho,” he wrote, “and in return, I get to tell you that I willfully renounced the inane regimen of petty satisfactions and grievances that you all live every day.”

Who in the fashion world wouldn’t recognise the sense of self-importance? If the Prada fits, wear it.
Anemona Hartocollis NYT