Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

You 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.

The feud between Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni rages on. As you may recall, Tatiana is the author of the chick lit novel Gilding Lily and the forthcoming book Hedge Fund Wives; Natasha, her sister, claims she co-authored Hedge Fund Wives and says the book is based on her career on Wall Street. Earlier this week, Tatiana filed suit against Natasha, claiming her sister had stolen a copy of the manuscript and posted it online. Natasha countered her sister's claim with the assertion that Tatiana had tried to pay her to go away and had lied to her publisher, HarperCollins, on numerous occasions, most notably about being the daughter of an Italian princess. (She also said her sister had installed a "keylogging" device on her computer so she could spy on her.) Yesterday a judge issued a temporary restraining order forcing Natasha to take down the site that had previously hosted several sections of the novel. But Tatiana's already-battered reputation is about to take another blow. It turns out that she's not even named "Boncompagni" and her vacuum heir husband had a very similar legal run-in of his own not so long ago.More