Kim, however, was confident that such behavior was in the past and that he was “the one,” as he put it. He asked Don and Mera Rubell for their daughter’s hand in marriage, and when they gave their blessing, the wedding was set for November 12, 2006—barely a month away—at the Harvard Club in New York. Because of the hasty schedule, invitations were dispatched by e-mail, the guest list limited to a few dozen family members and friends. But hardly a week passed before another e-mail message was zipping through cyberspace, this one with bad news: The wedding was kaput. The message assured its recipients that, despite the marital glitch, the relationship was solid.

It wasn’t. Within days, Rubell and Kim had called it quits. The split seemed almost amicable at first. Though Rubell was apparently the one who initiated the breakup, “I don’t think it was a thing where Jennifer was like, ‘I want out of this,’ ” a friend of the couple explains. Instead, it seemed a reluctant parting. Somewhere between Stevie’s birth and the time of the second e-mail, something had gone wrong that the couple could not resolve. As quickly as they had come together—quicker, even—they had fallen apart.

Kim moved upstairs into the room he used as an office on the fourth floor of the brownstone. There, he could hang out with Stevie and work on a new screenplay. He and Rubell agreed to divide their time with their daughter, splitting the week from Sunday to Wednesday afternoon at three. They would alternate Thanksgivings and split Christmases. It was all very modern, very civilized: Kim signed his e-mails to his ex-lover "xo" or "best wishes." Rubell would write, "thanks."

But the veneer of civility wore off fast. Just after Christmas 2006, Rubell arranged to take Stevie to Aspen for two weeks to be with her family. She was to pick Stevie up at the Los Angeles Airport, where Kim would deliver her after three days with his own family, now living in Tarzana, another L.A. suburb. In chatty lowercase letters, Kim wrote from L.A. on December 27 (the day of the LAX handoff), “hi jennifer, hope you’ve been well. stevie’s more amazing than ever; you won’t believe it … the transition to aspen should be easy … “

After Rubell came back from Colorado, however, she did not reciprocate the friendliness. Rather than return to Lexington Avenue, she took Stevie to her parents’ pied-à-terre on East 74th, leaving Kim the Lexington address if he wanted it. (Kim would eventually move into a three-bedroom apartment in Park Slope.) Rubell also fired the velvet-gloved law firm, Blank Rome, she had been using. Just as her uncle had turned to the no-holds-barred Roy Cohn, Rubell now turned to Robert Stephan Cohen, the napalm-throwing lawyer who had detached Donald Trump from Ivana, Billy Joel from Christie Brinkley, and Tommy Mottola from Mariah Carey, and whom Town & Country once called “your worst nightmare” in a story on the country’s top divorce lawyers.

Within a week of hiring Cohen, Rubell had adopted a scorched-earth legal posture. In a searing affidavit, Rubell called Kim an “emotionally abusive” control freak who had derided her as a “hag” and a “bitch.” He was a “freeloader” and a “pothead,” and Rubell wanted hair samples from Kim to prove it. She charged that Kim had badgered her to let him film and photograph her during sex and in “compromising sexual positions.” Kim “never relented in pressuring me to accede to his deviant sexual fantasies,” Rubell said. He’d hidden a surveillance camera in his bedroom, and put secret documents in a locked box labeled “You have been warned.” Deeming him a flight risk because of his family ties to Korea, she demanded that he relinquish Stevie’s passport, which, she said, he’d stolen from her. Rubell insisted on being named the primary parent, conceding Kim just three hours three times a week with his daughter.

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