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Harvard vs. Harvard
by
John Sedgwick
November/December 2007
, Page
56
[Daniel Kim] never relented in pressuring me to accede to his deviant sexual fantasies.
[Daniel Kim] never relented in pressuring me to accede to his deviant sexual fantasies.
It's a Wednesday afternoon outside the five-story brownstone at 139 Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan, time for the midweek handoff. A normally serene 31-year-old, Daniel Kim, stands on the sidewalk in from of the elegant townhouse, his 19-month-old daughter, Stevie, in a stroller next to him. Kim and Stevie are ready to head to his apartment in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. But Kim's ex-girlfriend, a pretty, vivacious woman named Jennifer Rubell who is five years Daniel's senior, can't bear to part with their little girl. She's yelling, gesticulating, making a scene. Kim is answering carefully, doing his best to remain calm. Finally, Rubell turns her back on Kim, races up the stairs, jerks open the heavy oak door, and slams it behind her.
That encounter last April was just one of many such scenes in the sometimes public, frequently vicious, and ultimately heartrending custody fight between two turbocharged Harvard grads. Even as their bitter quarrel spilled into the tabloids, the battle for custody of Stevie has made its way up the judicial ladder. Jennifer Rubell v. Daniel Kim has moved from the New York State Civil Supreme Court to the state appellate court and will eventually return to trial. But this is more than a fight between former lovers over custody of a young child; it is a clash of money, society, and changing gender roles, all set against a very modern Harvard backdrop. It’s Love Story, 2007 style: Rather than uniting despite their social and financial differences, these two lovers from differing backgrounds have been torn apart by money, New York Post headlines, and high-priced lawyers.
Of the two, Jennifer Rubell may be more accustomed to such tabloid drama. Now 36, she grew up amid a heady New York mix of glitz, cash, and drugs. Her parents, Don and Mera, were conventional enough: Don was a gynecologist, Mera, a teacher. The couple had collected art since the early 1960s, when they bought a piece for $50 during a European vacation, and from the time Jennifer and her older brother, Jason, were little, the Rubells were constantly going to museums and touring galleries. Other “people with their kids, they talk about sports,” Jason Rubell once told an interviewer. “We talk about art.” It was one reason why the family was so close, Jason explained—“because we share that.” The drama came from Jennifer’s uncle, Steve Rubell, co-founder of infamous New York disco Studio 54, which he and friend Ian Schrager opened in 1977. Guarded by muscleman bouncers and filled with thumping music, swirling lights, exotic women, piles of cocaine, and the most glamorous celebrities, Studio 54 was the height of decadence in late-’70s New York. Rubell, who later went to prison for tax evasion (despite hiring legal bulldog Roy Cohn to defend him) and died of complications from AIDS in 1989, once said that the only institution more profitable than Studio 54 was the Mafia.
Childless himself, Steve Rubell doted on his young niece. According to the biography on Jennifer’s website, JenniferRubell.com, Steve Rubell “treated Jennifer like his own child … inviting her to every major event at Studio 54, starting at the age of seven.” Jennifer grew up surrounded by Steve’s single-name friends—Calvin, Liza, Bianca. After one party, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat left his coke straw in Jennifer’s bathroom. Steve took Jennifer to another bash at the house of fashion designer Halston, whose long, flowing dresses were worn in abundance at Studio 54. “I remember Halston saying to his butler, Bring us napkins and markers,’ Jennifer once told South Beach magazine. (Neither Rubell nor Kim would be interviewed for this story.) “He brought them on a silver tray. Andy Warhol drew Farrah Fawcett’s eye and Ryan O’Neal’s nose. He looked at me and said, ‘Your family, they collect art, right?’ And he drew my whole face.” Jennifer treasured another gift, a plaque made by the painter Jenny Holzer bearing the kind of truism that made Holzer famous: “Protect me from what I want.”
When Steve Rubell died, Don received much of his brother’s fortune, and he and Mera expanded their art buying, collecting thousands of pieces—neoexpressionist, minimalist, pop, and neorealist work by such artists as Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Damien Hirst. The Rubells moved to Miami in the 1990s, and the Rubell Family Collection, as it is known, now resides on public display in a Miami warehouse that formerly housed cocaine and drug money seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
As one might expect, Jennifer Rubell learned how to throw a party. “I’ve been entertaining at home since I was nine years old, and I’ve never stopped,” she said in a recent Internet ad for Blackberry. After graduating from high school, Rubell spent a year in Paris, then worked as a concierge at New York’s then-chic Royalton Hotel, of which Steve Rubell was part owner. After Harvard, Jennifer Rubell would help develop boutique hotels in Florida: the Albion and the Greenview in South Beach and the Beach House in Bal Harbor. She worked hard and displayed a flair for thoughtful touches such as placing bedtime stories she wrote on the pillows of hotel guests and including a gentle apology on the recorded wake-up call. “Our vibe,” she told Fast Company, “is a direct antithesis to the spirit of exclusion that prevailed at Studio 54. But at a deeper level, my uncle had a deep understanding of hospitality, which he passed on to me.”
It was probably inevitable that, after studying art history at Harvard, graduating in 1993, Rubell would choose entertaining as a career. In addition to working on the hotels, she attended the Culinary Institute of America, wrote magazine columns about entertaining, and, last year, published a book called Real Life Entertaining: Easy Recipes and Unconventional Wisdom. The book is a guide for working women who live “whirlwind” lives and want to throw parties but can’t realistically devote themselves to the art of full-time entertaining. “Forget the full bar, the four-course meal, and all the fussy little details that supposedly make parties divine,” Rubell’s website explains. “Who has the house, the money, or the time to throw that kind of party, anyway?” Rubell did, but she was smart enough to know that her lifestyle was hardly typical.
Tall, slender, with an intelligent, angular face, Daniel Kim comes from a very different culture than does Rubell, but has racked up similarly high achievements. The son of a nuclear engineer and his wife, both Korean immigrants, Kim grew up in a Los Angeles suburb called Agoura Hills. From a young age, he showed a gift for the oboe, and at 16, he became the youngest member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, toured Asia with the International Winds ensemble, and performed with Yo-Yo Ma. A history and literature concentrator at Harvard, Kim played music only sparingly there, but he was impressive. “His musicianship was unparalleled,” says classmate Michael Friedman, a composer. “He really had the goods.”
In college, Kim also wrote a successful piece of legislation, ultimately known as the Kim Bill, for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. House Bill 5170 incorporated an arts curriculum for public high schools into the 1993 Education Reform Bill. As co-director of Phillips Brooks House, he directed the only student-run homeless shelter in the nation; Kim would play in concerts for the shelter residents. When he applied to become a Rhodes Scholar, Kim wrote, “Just because instrumental classical music can’t address social problems doesn’t mean it can’t speak directly to the people who struggle the most with these problems.” After Oxford, he signed on as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, the next logical step on a well-trod path: Harvard, Oxford, private-sector riches.
Rubell had arrived at Harvard worried that her cosmopolitan tastes would not fit with students who thought the height of fashion was a Volvo. Kim, whose parents had worked to achieve a solid upper-middle-class life, was more worried about fulfilling expectations than rejecting them. In that Love Story era of the late '60s, Rubell and Kim would have been on opposite sides of the tracks, a romantic union unlikely. In that era, it was unlikely that you’d even find many people like Rubell and Kim at Harvard. But Harvard has replaced the notion of a social hierarchy with that of a meritocracy, and by the time they finished school, Rubell and Kim were well on their way to assembling résumés that would have been the envy of many graduates twice their age.
They did not meet at Harvard; Kim graduated in 1998, five years after Rubell. Instead, fixed up by friends, the couple met at a Bette Midler concert at Radio City Music Hall in October 2004. Kim was 28, Rubell 33. Friends say that the pair became almost immediately inseparable. “When you saw them, they always read like a happy couple,” says says Michael Friedman.
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Steve Rubell, Halston, and Margaux Hemmingway at the Palladium in New York, January 1977.Rubell was the one who pushed the relationship briskly along, Kim would later say. Just weeks after they met, she took him to a grand reopening of the family museum. There, to Kim’s surprise, she glowingly introduced him to everyone as her boyfriend. “Daniel approached this relationship with Jennifer with openness and optimism,” one friend of the couple explains. “Maybe he should have been wary.”
A month later, Rubell told Kim that she wanted to have a child with him. “I was a bit taken aback,” Kim admitted in court documents. But he was game. By the end of January, some three months after meeting Kim, Rubell was pregnant. In November 2005, just a year after her parents had met, Stevie Kim-Rubell—named after her great-uncle—came into the world.
The new parents were deliriously happy with their daughter. “She is all Daniel talks about,” a friend says. “What she did at the park, his plans for her in the evening, who they met in the playground.” Rubell was equally infatuated. For the girl’s first birthday, Rubell would compose a series of cards that read like a children’s book. “Hi Stevie. /It’s me, Mama/wishing you a very happy 1st birthday/I’d like to tell you about everything you did this year/You began by being born/(a very impressive way to begin) … ”
Soon before Stevie’s first birthday, the couple, now sharing the Lexington Avenue townhouse Rubell owned, had decided to make their union permanent. At about the same time, pictures of the lovebirds appeared in the first issue of this magazine. The images showed Kim playfully nuzzling Rubell’s neck at Bond St. in the East Village as Rubell expounded on ways to improve the tempura sea bass. In the photos, Rubell is talking, laughing, working the room, while Kim seems focused on Rubell in an almost worshipful manner.
Rubell had a questionable history with engagements; she had broken off two of them, to magazine journalist David Samuels and music producer Andrew Feltenstein, the son of a wealthy L.A. restauranteur, in her post-college years. “That’s what she’d do,” says a friend. “Get involved, then pull back.” Nor was her dating history encouraging, according to Matthew Lee, a chef and cookbook author who dated Rubell at Harvard. That relationship didn’t last long, and after they broke up, Rubell “insinuated” that Lee had gotten her pregnant, Lee asserted in a court document. He paid for an abortion and “grieved with her”—only to discover that, given the timing of the pregnancy, he couldn’t have been the father. “I am aware that Jennifer has since boasted about this deceit to at least one other individual and taken pleasure in it,” Lee claimed. Why she might have acted so manipulatively, he could not explain.
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Bron to be a domestic diva? "I've been entertaining at home since I was nine years old," Rubell once said.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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Kim, Rubell and Stevie at a book party for celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan, April 20, 2006.His friends were horrified at the portrait emerging in the New York media. “Daniel, lazy?” one friend asks, reeling off Kim’s credentials. “He’s the furthest thing from lazy that you can get.” Adds another: “You read the papers, and if you don’t know him, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, look at that asshole.’ But it’s so clearly not him. Daniel is one of the most positive and supportive people I’ve ever met. He’s a really beautiful person.”
Kim, who had his own lawyers at the six-person New York firm of Ira E. Garr, which specializes in matrimonial litigation, fired back. “It defies comprehension how any psychologically sound person could create a motion so completely full of bold-faced lies,” Kim replied in his own affidavit, “especially when each and every allegation can be so easily discredited.” He proceeded to try to do just that: He didn’t “steal” Stevie’s passport; he had held it since her birth. He was American; the notion of him fleeing to Korea merely because he was of Korean ancestry was offensive. And so what if he had a surveillance camera in his room? The camera had filmed Jennifer and her mother poking around the room, then trying to disable the camera; he had reason not to trust his ex. Nor was he a freeloader: He had receipts showing thousands of dollars worth of his contributions to the household. As to the drug question, “I fully admit to having smoked marijuana in social situations over the past couple of years—including, on occasion,” with Rubell. But “my occasional use pales in comparison with [Rubell’s] prior addiction and party-girl antics.” In any case, he’d cleaned up his act: A lab analysis of his hair showed no drugs in his system.
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Daniel Kim and Jennifer Rubell in happier times. Out on the town in Manhattan, summer 2006.His occasional pot smoking, Kim charged, "pales in comparison with [Rubell's] prior addiction and party-girl antics."
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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Daniel Kim and Jennifer Rubell in happier times. Out on the town in Manhattan, summer 2006.Supreme Court Judge Harold Beeler delivered his ruling on March 28 of this year: Kim would receive equal custody of Stevie. It was back to the midweek handoff, and it was after this decision that an infuriated Rubell slammed the door on Kim when he came to pick up their daughter. Meantime, Stevie had begun to manifest signs of stress, repeatedly shrugging her right shoulder in a nervous tic.
Rubell’s lawyers attacked the fifty-fifty schedule as too much back and forth for Stevie, citing psychiatrists who attested to the necessity of a single, dominant home—Rubell’s. In June, the five-member appellate court reversed the lower court’s decision and, in a preliminary ruling, reinstalled Rubell as the primary parent. (At press time, the full ruling had not been rendered.) For now, at least, Kim’s visitation rights have been reduced to a few hours a week and a weekend overnight.
Kim apparently plans to press on, returning the case to the jurisdiction of Judge Beeler for a new trial. Rubell will surely fight him tooth and nail. “When you’ve got two high-powered people like Jennifer and Daniel,” says friend Michael Friedman, “there’s a lot of energy there.” Which means, for some time to come, no more dramatic screenplays from Kim and a lot less entertaining from Rubell. Except, perhaps, real-life entertaining.
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