A fashion-industry titan and top donor to President Bill Clinton met a woman on Match.com, lavishly wined and dined her before she agreed to have unprotected sex — and infected her with herpes, she claims in a new lawsuit.
Arnold Simon, the former CEO of Calvin Klein jeans and Aris Industries, took the unidentified woman to the chic Surrey Hotel bar Feb. 4 for their first date, and spent most of the night bragging about his expensive duds, she claims.
Arnold Simon in 1996 (Charles Wenzelberg)
The woman, who filed the suit as a Jane Doe, told The Post, “He wrote an e-mail that he was very handsome and tall and a well-built man. He refers to himself as looking like Humphrey Bogart.”
The date went well, as Simon regaled her with anecdotes about his relationship to the ex-president, she says.
“He told me that he had just gotten back from a lunch with Clinton; he is a close personal friend with Bill Clinton,” she said, and records, in fact, show he shelled out at least $1 million to Clinton’s foundation.
Simon, she said, claimed he had lunch with the former president earlier that day at Candles 79 on the Upper East Side.
“Clinton likes to eat organic because he has a heart condition,” she said he told her.
After drinks, they had dinner at The Mark hotel, and then his driver took them to The Carlyle to listen to jazz, she said.
The next day, he sent her a dozen long-stemmed roses. Smitten, she agreed to a second date on Feb. 10.
“He picked me up in an Audi A9,” she said. “He had a driver. He said, ‘I’ll bring my Bentley the next time.’ He takes me to Scalinatella. Everyone knew him there. They put us at a nice table.”
Afterward, the couple went back to the woman’s Upper East Side pad to watch the Grammys.
Back at Simon’s apartment, the two became intimate. But before bedding the fashion mogul, the unnamed woman asked Simon whether or not he had any STDs. Simon insisted he was clean, and claimed he had undergone regular tests, according to the lawsuit.
“We had sex unprotected,” the woman admitted, claiming that she was disease-free at the time of the encounter.
About two weeks later, she found out she had herpes, she said.
The alleged victim conceded that she should not have had unprotected sex.
“I absolutely should have used a condom. I let my guard down.”
Simon, a New Jersey resident, couldn’t be reached for a response.
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court by lawyers Matthew Blit and Sally Mourad, seeks unspecified monetary damages.