Peter Braunstein sat bug-eyed and slack-lipped today as his beautiful fashion editor ex was forced to read aloud in court her intimate love letters to him and describe kinky sex play in which she dressed for him as a nurse.
“I have been waiting all my life for you,” W magazine beauty director Jane Larkworthy read aloud, her voice steely, as the typically zombie-like Braunstein watched with apparent alertness.
“I can’t wait to lock eyes with yours and feel your loving touch, and all that that means,” the witness continued.
“It gives me such joy to be in love with you, Peter.”
Defense lawyers in the ongoing kidnap-sex-assault trial hoped to use Larkworthy’s letters to prove that the pair enjoyed a storybook romance back in 2002, before something in Braunstein snapped, and he began spiraling into the depths of mental illness.
Braunstein grew so deeply psychotic, they claim, that he had no idea it was wrong to commit the attack at the center of the case – his admitted Halloween, 2005 chloroforming, kidnapping and molestation of a former Fairchild Publications co-worker of both himself and Larkworthy.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber quickly stopped the attractive blonde’s disturbing, forced recitation.
But not before it became just the last in a sordid history of humiliations the successful editrix has suffered at the pervert’s hands.
Throughout an afternoon of testimony – she’s due back for more cross-examination today – Larkworthy had to describe her initial, gooey love of her failed fellow fashion writer.
She told jurors how he made her wear high heels, even around her Chelsea apartment, and harrowing arguments in which she appeased his violent temper by groveling, “I promise I’ll be a better girlfriend!”
“How?” He’d demand.
“I will,” she’d swear.
The next morning after that fight – he’d flipped out after one of her friends neglected to ask about his new play – she reluctantly had sex with him. I thought it would calm him down, she admitted to jurors.
Worst of the humiliations, though, was having to tell jurors about her sex life with Braunstein as the fiend himself stared at her on the witness stand.
“Did you ever role play with him,” assistant district attorney Maxine Rosenthal prompted gently.
“Yes,” the woman answered. “Because he was into it, and introduced it to me and I derived some kind of enjoyment from it,” she told jurors.
Prosecutors are trying to prove that Larkworthy was not his mental undoing, as the defense argues, but his warm up, instead.
They hope to use Larkworthy’s descriptions of Braunstein’s love of bondage, his preference high heels, and his perverse fantasies of controlling drugged, helpless women to show his intent in committing similar sex stunts during his assault of his Halloween victim.
The details were chilling.
“My arms would be bound with a scarf,” Larkworthy testified. Sometimes, “He would be a patient in a mental institution, and I would be a nurse.
“I got a nurses’s uniform for it,” she told jurors.
Sometimes, Braunstein would pretend to be in his hospital bed, and “I would enter his room and tease him sexually and act like I was in control of the situation.”
Suddenly, the tables would turn. Braunstein would reveal to Larkworthy’s startled “nurse” that he had not taken his medication. “That would lead to sex,” she testified.
Sometimes he’d pretend to force his medications upon his “nurse,” and she’d pretend to be drugged, she told jurors.
Three years later, Braunstein would admittedly dress as a firefighter and use smokebombs to trick his victim into opening the door to her Chelsea apartment. There, he rendered her unconscious with chloroform, bound her to her bed, strip her, put her stiletto Manalo Blahnicks on her feet and molested her over the course of 13 hours.
Braunstein took his first erotic pictures of Larkworthy by surprise, as she stood undressed looking through her closet, she told jurors.
She protested. “Promise me if we ever break up you’ll never publish these on the Web,” she told him. “Baby,” Braunstein answered, “in every relationship they take pictures of each other.”
Thinking she was just being too uptight – her girlfriends confessed to letting their men take their pictures – Larkworthy let Braunstein snap away.
Braunstein, at least at first, was a wonderful companion.
“He was incredibly charming,” Larkworthy testified of the early days of their office romance. The two sat at desks just 20 feet apart in the main newsroom of Fairchild Publications.
“He was incredibly intelligent. And flirtatious. And very intriguing. And very funny.”
“I would pose provocatively, like a centerfold would,” she said of their intimate photo sessions. “Other times, I would just be lying there, and he would come over and take a picture of me.”
Braunstein had the negatives – and Larkworthy’s love letters – in his backpack when he was arrested in December, 2005 on the University of Memphis campus, after a six week, interstate manhunt.
First, though, the pictures would indeed end up on the Web – with Braunstein putting them there for revenge once the relationship began to crash.
Jurors yesterday saw the emails Braunstein sent her friends, her colleagues, and even her boss, Fairchild CEO Mary Berner.
“Paris Hilton is no longer alone!” Braunstein would email them, using an alias and directing the reader to a link to “saucy” pictures of Larkworthy on privatepornpictures.com.
He also posted a realistic web page for her on adultfriendfinder.com, featuring her nude pictures, her name, work phone number, and her purported interest in a discrete relationship.
Afterward, her phone would ring, she told jurors, and she’d hear, “Jane? It’s Joe. Joe from adultfriendfinder.com.”
The nude photographs were the last straw,” she testified.
Larkworthy also described how Braunstein once grabbed her hair and glared at him when she threatened to kick him out of her apartment – where she was supporting his foundering freelance career.
“Peter, what are you doing?” she shrieked as he threw her into a chair and used masking tape to secure her wrists to the arms.
He began caressing a carving knife. “Now you see what it’s like to be totally out of control of the situation,” he told her. “This is what it’s like for me every day.”
Larkworthy told jurors, “He was punishing me.” It was easy for her, she said, to break free of the tape.
Not so for his Halloween victim – by then, he’d graduated to plastic flex cuffs and nylon parachute cord, knotting the cord so tightly his victim testified last week, that she had use her teeth to loosen the knots and escape.
“I did not look at him,” she told jurors of calling the cops on Braunstein, and their leading him away to Bellevue, after another fight in which he threatened to cut himself with a steak knife and blame it on her.
By Halloween 2005, he’d graduated from steak knifes to the long, black handled, double edged Ranger knife he left within his victim’s view, on her nightstand.
In earlier testimony yesterday, defense lawyer Robert Gottlieb read aloud from additional passages from Braunstein’s writings, recovered from his backpack after his arrest.
In them, he celebrates himself as a “criminal anarchist” and claims he was planning his “next outrage.” Testimony continues Thursday.