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Tagged: Feuds

Feuds

The Boncompagni Beneficiary? HarperCollins, Of Course

130794You have to feel a little bit sorry for Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni, the two sisters embroiled in a nasty spat over the rights to the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. (If you've missed the action thus far, see here, here and here.) Both women have seen their reps damaged as a result, and Tatiana's career as a journalist and novelist will probably be overshadowed by the incident for many years to come. (Fortunately, she married into money. Or so she says.) Yesterday Natasha took down the website that hosted pages from the disputed manuscript. (We have a copy of the judge's ruling here, in case you're interested.) One party, we hear, that is not all that unhappy about the flurry of press that has followed in recent days? HarperCollins, not surprisingly. Hedge Fund Wives is now available for pre-order and the book's sales rank has edged up ever so slightly from 500,000 to 132,377. The messy feud has also boosted Boncompagni's first book, Gilding Lily: It dipped below 10,000 earlier this week before losing some ground today. It's now ranked 19,921.

Following Up

The Boncompagni Feud: HarperCollins Weighs In

130748HarperCollins appears to be standing by Tatiana Boncompagni as she battles her sister, Natasha, over who actually authored the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. At least for the moment! We just heard back from Erin Crum, director of corporate communications at HarperCollins: "We hope that they can work it out amicably, and we will still be publishing the book on May 5th."

Family Feuds

The Boncompagni Sisters Fight On

130653The feud between Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni gets messier, and nastier, by the minute. Just in case you've missed the story thus far, Tatiana Boncompagni is the author of the chick lit novel Gilding Lily and has been working on a new book called Hedge Fund Wives. Natasha is her sister and claims she co-authored Hedge Fund Wives—in fact, she says the story is largely based on her own Wall Street career—but was then cut out of the deal by Tatiana, who she says has "a history of lying." Tatiana is insisting it was solely her work and that her sister simply offered "input," and has filed suit against Natasha for claiming partial credit, and for copying the manuscript from her computer and posting part of the manuscript online in an act of retribution. Natasha, for her part, is upset her sister has denied her role in writing the book, and is countering with various—and potentially very damaging—claims. Following so far? Good. After the jump, more from the Boncompagni scandal and a few scandalous emails, too.More

Family Feuds

Natasha Boncompagni Responds

130631Natasha Boncompagni is responding to the lawsuit filed against her by her sister, Tatiana, who claims she authored the forthcoming HarperCollins novel, Hedge Fund Wives, without any help from her sister. Natasha claims Tatiana's lawsuit was an attempt to "preempt" a lawsuit of her own, and says Tatiana couldn't have written the book by herself since it was based on her "Wall Street career" and "insider's knowledge of the social workings of the hedge fund community." There's more: Natasha also says her sister's "history of lying" is a "well-known fact both within our family and with her current publisher, HarperCollins," and that she only landed her first book deal after she lied about being descended from an Italian princess. Thanksgiving dinner at the Boncompagnis is going to be a blast this year, huh? Natasha's full response after the jump.More

Feuds

Wolff on Brown: 'An Old Magazine Hack'

130210We mentioned Michael Wolff's distaste for Tina Brown last week, but today he goes on the offensive. "I think it's preposterous," he starts off when asks him to comment on Brown's new site, The Daily Beast, which competes (to some degree) with Wolff's own Newser.com. "I don't even think it's a rehash of Talk—I think it's a rehash of [CNBC's] Topic A." It gets better! "She's just an old magazine hack... It's like she's been on ice for ten years and suddenly she's been thawed out again." Now we can all look forward to watching Tina strike back in a few books when the Beast reviews Wolff's new book on Rupert Murdoch. [NYO, previously]

New Media

Michael Wolff Strikes Back

130210Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago. More

Moguls

Harvey's Crumbling Empire

129539This hasn't been a good week for Harvey Weinstein. Last Friday NBC successfully blocked Weinstein from moving Project Runway from NBC-owned Bravo to Lifetime. Over the past few days, he's also been engaged in an increasingly public (and increasingly messy) feud with producer Scott Rudin over the fate of The Reader, a romantic drama directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. Weinstein had wanted to release the film before the end of year so it could be an Oscar contender, and Rudin claims Weinstein stopped at nothing to move up the film's release date, going as far as to harass producer Sydney Pollock on his deathbed and pressure the grieving widow of Anthony Minghella (another of the film's producers) to make it happen. More

Restaurant Feuds

129064

Maccioni v. Tihany | Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni isn't very happy with Adam Tihany, the restaurant design maestro who crafted the look of Maccioni's own eateries but then "betrayed" him by coming up with the new look of arch-enemy Daniel Boulud's Daniel. "Adam Tihany will never do anything for me again," he starts off with Gael Greene. "Adam did five restaurants for me. He was always six months late and two million over budget... I should have 10% cent of everything Adam earns." [Insatiable Critic via Gothamist]

Catfights

Aby Rosen Is Still Wolfe's Public Enemy No. 1

122679A year and a half after Tom Wolfe took to the Times Op-Ed page to mock Aby Rosen's tummy and assail his plan for a shiny Sir Norman Foster-designed skyscraper at 980 Madison, he's picking up the hatchet again. At a hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission last night, Wolfe lit into Rosen and Foster's five-story, 152,000-square-foot second draft for 980 Madison, a pared-down proposal that they'd hoped would silence people like Wolfe who were sinking the project the first time around. No luck! More

Dumb Disputes

Bitter Neighbor Totally Spoils Hamptons Party

Every summer the Hamptons plays host to any number of absurd feuds between extremely moneyed and extremely territorial neighbors. Christopher Clark, heir to the W.G. Clark Construction Co. fortune, inaugurated the bickering season on Saturday when he called the East Hampton Village Police to complain about all the cars illegally parked outside the mansion of his neighbor, Jana Partners hedge-funder and Forbes 400 listee Barry Rosenstein, who was throwing a birthday party for his 9 year-old daughter. After the po-po showed up, party attendees including Allure editor Linda Wells and designer Nicole Miller had to rush to re-park their cars in the Rosensteins' driveway so they wouldn't be ticketed. Adman Jerry Della Femina had a supporting role in this farce, too, because Crane's wife, Samantha, called the cops on him the night of the parking incident because his son was having an overly rowdy party. So the final tally for the evening: two calls to the cops, three sets of livid neighbors, untold numbers of modestly inconvenienced party guests, and zero offenses legitimately worthy of indignation or police intervention.