If Rubell had impugned Kim’s character, Kim would now return the favor—in spades. As a teenager, Kim alleged, Rubell had become a cocaine addict while a student at the Horace Mann School. While still underage, she’d also slept with David Ross, then the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. At Harvard, she’d had a long-distance affair with a defrocked French priest whom she’d subsequently claimed had molested her. Then there was that contested pregnancy and the two broken engagements. “While she may have become more skillful at masking cruel or rapacious behaviors over the years,” Matthew Lee would say, “I do not believe her pathology has softened … [it] may have only become more ingrained as the stakes [have risen].”

None of this, Kim argued, inspired confidence in Rubell’s parenting skills. “One can only wonder how she will react when Stevie disagrees with her or does something to disappoint. Will [Jennifer] cast her off as easily?” He called his ex-fiancée a “psychologically absent parent” who was obsessed with her career. On her book tour, he charged, she’d barely eaten while pregnant, endangering the fetus, lest she look roly-poly for the TV cameras. She’d even threatened to abort the pregnancy if Kim, whose parents are evangelical Christians, didn’t agree to raise Stevie as Jewish.

By contrast, Kim explained, he had taken on child raising with a passion, researching and selecting the midwife, doing most of the feedings after Rubell stopped breastfeeding, selecting the insurance plan, taking his daughter to a weekly Music Together class, even making complicated arrangements to bank some of Stevie’s stem cells in case of injury or disease. There seemed no middle ground on which the former lovers could meet. And while there were likely many reasons why the relationship had ended, there was really only one reason why the breakup had turned into a war: money.

It had always been an issue. With her family money, art, real estate, hotels, and other investments, Rubell was worth a staggering $150 million. From his days at McKinsey, Kim had saved up $300,000, an impressive sum by most standards, but paltry compared to Rubell’s wealth. Their annual incomes were even more disparate. In 2005, Rubell made $1.8 million; Kim spent $85,000 of his savings. (In 2006, Rubell would earn $2.9 million.)

Kim worried that he didn’t have enough money for her; so did Rubell. When Kim proposed, Rubell recalled, he gave Rubell an “extravagant” pair of earrings, then returned them, telling Rubell he could get them elsewhere for less. He never did find a substitute, “not even a small token,” she lamented. “That was the first sign that Daniel did not really want to marry me.” Yet Kim said that it was Rubell who did not want to marry him. “You limit my lifestyle,” Kim recalled her informing him, adding, “Making a lot of money is the most important thing in life.”

The financial tensions came to a head when, shortly after the engagement, the two attempted to hammer out a prenuptial agreement. They agreed that in the event of a divorce, each would keep the assets he or she had brought into the marriage. Any assets either added during the marriage would be evenly divided. But when Rubell’s lawyer wrote up a draft, the fifty-fifty split was gone. “I was deeply hurt and betrayed,” Kim wrote. Three weeks later, Rubell declared the relationship over and demanded that she be the primary parent for Stevie. Why? “[Because] she and her family have more wealth,” Kim charged. Rubell gave every indication that she feared Kim would try to siphon off some of that wealth. In jettisoning his high-powered and high-paying career to take care of their child, Rubell argued, Kim was relying on her to support all three of them.

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