The financial chaos that has threatened to flood Louise Blouin and her Blouin Media for months now has given way to a new problem — actual floods that induced a mold problem at the company’s new Tribeca offices.
The recent heavy rains apparently caused a flood in the new Art + Auction, Modern Painters and Blouin Artinfo.com offices at 88 Laight St.
Although Blouin — the so-called Red Queen — has been dubbed one of the 200 richest women in Britain, she has had a bad habit of neglecting to pay an army of freelancers and former executives.
While Blouoin Media has suffered some defections recently, the latest exits may have had more to do with the rain and the flood than the financial storms hitting the troubled publisher.
Art + Auction Senior Editor Julie Baumgardner was working late one night when water started dripping from the ceiling, sources told Media Ink.
“The next morning the whole office was flooded, and it sat like that for weeks, as Louise would have to pay to have it cleaned,” said a source. “The staff cleaned it up, but it was there so long mold appeared everywhere, and they had to evacuate. Julie walked out in early May over the issue. She just got up and left.”
Not too long after Baumgardner left, Michael-John Pierce, Blouin’s longtime and long-suffering chief of staff, also quit suddenly.
Pierce, who worked at SAC Capital before joining Blouin Media five years ago, was a gatekeeper who controlled access to Blouin and kept what little order there was inside the company.
Some speculate that he left because he was angry that he did not get tapped as the president when Ben Hartley resigned and David Gursky was hired for the job — returning to the company for a second go-round last year.
Others said the festering mold problem was the last straw.
“Everyone was shocked because [Pierce] had put up with her for years,” said one source. “He just walked out about three weeks ago — nobody knows why.”
Whatever the reason for Pierce’s exit, the erratic freelance payment schedule that had plagued Blouin Media in the past appears to have become more erratic and unpredictable with the chief of staff now gone.
Noted art world blogger Tyler Green, who wrote for Blouin Blogs, posted recently, “Due to circumstances beyond my control and for the first time since I started the site in 2001, Modern Art Notes is on hiatus.”
Green is owed $18,500 by Blouin Media, sources said.
Stuart Rohrer was said to have extracted a settlement agreement in Small Claims Court from Blouin Media for work he did in trying to launch the ill-fated Blouin News more than a year ago. But after agreeing to pay him off, she allegedly skipped out on the first payment.
Rohrer is apparently bitter at the mere mention of her name. “Until Google lets us all “erase” our Internet pasts, I prefer not to have my name ever show up in connection with Louise Blouin,” he told Media Ink.
Most of the freelance writers in the Asia/Pacific bureaus, who work out of their homes, have also stopped contributing because they have not been paid in months, sources said.
Gursky, the president of Global Development, who appears to be the highest-ranking executive at Blouin Media, did not respond to several text messages.
Blouin did not return texts or calls to her last known mobile number. Calls to the phone number listed for the Blouin Media offices were greeted with a constant busy signal.