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Peel away the facade of fabulousness and the life of even the most powerful style star is often far more fragile than it seems.

Take John Demsey, the former Executive Group President at the Este Lauder Companies. A three-decade Lauder stalwart, Demsey helped steer the company from a mid-sized privately-run family concern to a publicly-traded cosmetics giant worth, at its peak, over $100 billion.

Last winter, as his father lay gravely ill and his mother began battling cancer, the rest of Demsey’s world unexpectedly imploded. In early March 2022, Demsey was forced to retire from Lauder after he reposted an Instagram meme that contained the N-word.

Demsey insisted hed misinterpreted the meme, which was initially shared by the rapper Chingy.

Despite removing the post within hours, pressure from both Lauder employees and call-out accounts like Estee Laundry saw Demseys 31-year career at Lauder end in barely a week. Branded a racist and quieted as part of a legal agreement with his former employer Demsey had been canceled.  

It felt like Id been the victim of an identity theft, Demsey, 67, told The Post in an exclusive interview, his first since the Instagram fiasco 18 months earlier. I made a mistake and I corrected it. But the life I had before this happened simply does not exist anymore.

The mementos of that life cover nearly every surface of the six-story East Side townhouse, which Demsey, who’s divorced, bought in 2018 and shares with his 14-year-old daughter, Marie-Hlne, eight dogs, and a pair of cats.

Demsey has spent the majority of his post-Lauder existence here sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, often exercising (hes dropped 35 pounds), but mostly cooped-up and clearly contrite.

I almost feel like Ive been under house arrest, he deadpanned. And when I do go out, people act as if theyve sat shiva for me. 

In the multi-billion dollar world of luxury and beauty, few stars cast a wider shine than Demsey. Tall and imposing, the Stanford-educated exec was equally adept at creating buzz and making money.  

Demsey has always had a deep sense of what consumers want before they want it, said Professor Thomai Serdari, Director of the Fashion and Luxury MBA Program at New York University, of Demseys tenure at Lauder. He is very good at commercializing brands … while providing the glue that makes ventures work.

Demseys presence at Lauder was particularly potent in two areas: far-sighted advertising campaigns and his chairmanship of the MAC AIDS fund, which has raised $500 million for HIV research over the past 25 years. 

In the ad world, Demsey is best known for the decades of VivaGlam and Beauty Icon promotions he oversaw for MAC. Many of their stars were black RuPaul, Rihanna, Diana Ross, Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj. And Demseys intimacy with African-American artistry provided him with a level of racial maneuverability rarely afforded to white execs.

Long before the era of George Floyd, John was one of the most culturally attuned people when it came to inclusivity, longtime former Wall Street Journal fashion reporter Teri Agins told The Post. John was accepted by black people because it always felt like he was in the culture. 

Dressed in a tan suit and Zegna sneakers, Demsey displayed both incredulousness and humility as he recounted the events of the past year. He freely described his actions on social media as stupid and impulsive a casualty of the near-manic Instagramming which overtook him during Covid.

I was posting like 20 or 30 times a day, he said. People really responded to it and it just became this sort of a thing. 

The Chingy meme, Demsey explained, appeared randomly in his feed a Covid-era Big Bird tending to a bed-ridden Snuffleupagus accompanied by the phrase My n***a Snuffy done got the rona at a Chingy concert.

Demsey insists he read n***a as nanna a nod to Snuffleupagus grandmotherly get-up.

Ive never used that word in my life, Demsey said of the racial slur hes accused of promoting.

Even though Chingy himself went on Instagram to defend him, no one else will ever really know what Demsey was thinking when he pushed that share button. 

Branded a Lauder liability and a poster boy for white privilege Demseys demise reflects both the punitiveness of this current cultural climate along with a misguided belief in his own indispensability. 

I was a bit of an impresario, he said. And those businesses and people that I supported were very successful because that’s the way I was.

Indeed, what does matter, say longtime Demsey admirers, is his track record of hiring African Americans.

Take Sean “Puffy” Combs, who Demsey brought to Este Lauder in 2004 back when other beauty groups were reluctant to sign the rapper for a fragrance deal. Barely a year later, Combs’ scent Unforgivable had achieved $1.5 million in sales per week, according to The New York Times. 

John is one of the good guys, said Richard Parsons, the former Time Warner and Citigroup CEO and Chair of the Apollo Theater Foundation on whose board Demsey served for a decade. As far back as the 90s he was a leader in putting people of color in magazines and photo shoots he made a difference. 

Years before DEI mandates became standard, Demsey was providing exposure and paychecks to many African-American singers, stylists, and makeup artists.

For someone whos contributed so much to black culture, to hip-hop culture to have his career end like this is disheartening in every way, said creative director June Ambrose, whose clients have included MAC campaign stars such as Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige.

A white man who earned nearly $10 million in 2021, Demsey is certainly privileged. But just because youre privileged, Ambrose continued, doesnt mean youre racist.

Demsey concedes hes disappointed by the friends who failed to publicly support him after he left Lauder. Harder still was the loss of the Lauders themselves, whom he had considered an extended family.

“I loved the family, particularly [chairman emeritus] Leonard Lauder because I felt that their values were so contrary to what other companies were about,” Demsey said.

Agins, for one, never imagined the company would actually let Demsey go. Sure, John’s actions were sloppy, but I figured he would be suspended and then Lauder would move past it, she told The Post.  

Yet as the very public face of a very public company, Demsey stood little chance of surviving the scandal.

You cannot earn enough accolades to divorce yourself from racial sensitivity, says Ernest Owens, author of the book “The Case for Cancel Culture.” This is about impact not intent.

Still, Owens concedes that Demsey was impacted by the corporate house cleaning that followed the murder of George Floyd. Had this happened before summer 2020, [Demsey] might have had a very different outcome, he said.

Yet while Demsey was hardly the only style leader charged with racial insensitivity Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, for instance, issued a mea culpa for “publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant” during her career   he was one of the few to actually wind up unemployed. 

But with Este Lauder stock down nearly 50% since his departure, Demsey may have actually been more indispensable than the Lauders realized.

Indeed, two years after he brought Sean Combs to Lauder, Demsey also convinced the company to launch fragrance and beauty lines for Tom Ford. Last November, Lauder snapped up Ford’s fashion label for a cool $2.8 billion the company’s first foray into the apparel arena since it was established nearly 75 years ago. 

Demseys home is a dizzying assemblage of art, furniture, an especially photography. There are nearly 600 photos in total from historic prints by Henri Cartier-Bresson to outtakes from Demsey’s many MAC campaigns. 

Its from here that Demsey is readying his next acts. He has no other choice, he said.

I dont want to be known as the canceled guy  for my legacy to be defined by just three hours on social media. 

Still bound by his reported Lauder non-compete, Demsey has taken on a senior advisory role with L Catterton, the private equity group tied to LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, where he’ll help identify and grow new business opportunities. Although the headlines accompanying Demsey’s appointment made note of the Lauder saga, NYU’s Serdari believes the business world has moved past it.

“People make mistakes,” she said, “but that shouldn’t take away from his expertise and intellectual ability.”

There’s also “Behind the Blue Door,” a hefty coffee-table book detailing the museum-like treasures throughout his home, which he co-authored with “CBS Sunday Morning” contributor Alina Cho and is inspired by the vintage blue door fronting his townhouse. The book will be released on October 17th.

Demsey is also returning to the social swirl he once dominated. In June he hosted a birthday party for stylist and costume designer Ambrose at his home where folks like actor Zachary Quinto and Bergdorf Goodman exec Linda Fargo appeared to have moved on from the meme.

And, so has Demsey whose father ultimately passed away in June 2022, while he moved his mother from Ohio to New York in order to look after her. Im not done not at all, he said. Ive got a lot more in me, a lot more to say. The world is still a very exciting place. 

dkaufman@nypost.com

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Science

Ghostly Neutrinos May Hold the Answer to Why Matter Exists in Our Universe

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In a breakthrough study, scientists merged data from Japan’s T2K and the U.S. NOvA neutrino experiments to explore why matter exists in the universe. The findings improve measurements of neutrino behavior and may help reveal whether these particles break symmetry with antimatter, offering vital clues to how the universe survived after the Big Bang.

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World

Thousands targeted in ‘killing fields’ around Sudanese city in paramilitary group’s hands

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November 3, 2025

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Thousands targeted in 'killing fields' around Sudanese city in paramilitary group's hands

Thousands who fled a key frontline city in Sudan’s war as it fell to paramilitaries were targeted in killing fields around it by the group, after the military’s top brass secured their own safe passage.

Warning: Some readers may find content in this article distressing.

More than 60,000 people are still missing and humanitarians fear that Al Fashir’s remaining 200,000 residents are being held hostage by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters.

In our investigation with Sudan War Monitor and Lighthouse Reports, we can reveal the harrowing fate of civilians and soldiers who fled the city in the hours after senior commanders and officers left the infantry division.

Some 70,000 people have escaped Al Fashir since it was captured on 26 October, according to the DTM matrix of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), but fewer than 10,000 people are accounted for in the nearest safe displacement zones.

In an effort to track down the missing, we analysed dozens of videos and followed crowds of civilians on their way out.

In this first video, we see a group, and two men – the first with a yellow hoodie and black jacket walking beside a dirt berm along with women and children.

An image from the first video
Image:
An image from the first video

In a later video, we see a crowd of captives that includes the two men – in the same yellow hoodie and red turban.

A video of men sitting on the ground under RSF armed guard shows the women walking through freely, showing they had been separated.

An image from the second video
Image:
An image from the second video

In another video, we see the man in a red turban in a queue of men who start to run as RSF fighters chase and beat them.

An image from the third video
Image:
An image from the third video

A source on the ground told us that this single group had around 2,000 captives and only 200 of them arrived at the nearest displacement shelter in Tawila, around 45 miles from Al Fashir.

We geolocated one of the videos of the group walking approximately 5km (three miles) from the nearby town of Geurnei.

We geolocated one of the videos of the group walking three miles from the nearby town of Geurnei. Pic: Copernicus
Image:
We geolocated one of the videos of the group walking three miles from the nearby town of Geurnei. Pic: Copernicus

There, hundreds were rounded up in school buildings.

‘They would execute people in front of us’

The families of doctors held there told Sky News the RSF asked them to pay ransoms to secure their release.

A man who survived captivity in Geurnei with his wife told us he was held with around 300-400 families after being robbed and harassed on his way out of Al Fashir.

“We got to the school and they caught up with us. They starting targeting people – elderly and young – and took them to be detained,” said Abdelhamid.

“They would select people and execute them in front of us and then say – ‘bury your brother’ – and we would cover them with soil. I saw them kill 18 people with my own eyes and then people had to bury them with their bare hands.”

Satellite images from 30 October show mounds of dirt that appear to be new graves added to an existing cemetery, near school buildings in Geurnei.

Read more:
UAE is ‘main backer’ behind Sudan war – intelligence officer
Tens of thousands killed in two days in Sudan city, analysts believe

Others were executed in the fields outside of Al Fashir.

In a video shared on social media, a vehicle is shown pursuing civilians in the countryside.

The driver films as two fighters, one in an RSF patch, stop an unarmed man.

One asks what the man is carrying, and shoots him at point-blank range.

The car continues forward, accelerating towards and narrowly avoiding two unarmed men.

He asks one man if he is carrying anything and says he is “acting as if you are Arab”.

After the driver says “kill them all”, the camera turns back to the man, who appears to have been shot.

The driver then urges those with him to hurry to catch up with those ahead.

This brutality comes after the RSF encircled, starved and shelled Al Fashir for 18 months in their battle with the military for the last regional capital in Darfur under state control.

Several high-level sources told us that top state commanders, officers and political leaders made arrangements for their own safe passage in over 100 vehicles, including some armoured cars, before the 6th infantry division was captured by the RSF in the morning hours of 26 October.

The battle for Al Fashir – and Sudan

Earlier this year, Al Fashir was being suffocated to death by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they pushed to claim full control of the Darfur region as a base for their parallel government, after the military recaptured the capital Khartoum and other key sites in central Sudan.

On Monday, famine conditions were confirmed in Al Fashir and Kadugli, another besieged city in Sudan’s south, by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

Inside Al Fashir, thousands were bombarded by almost daily shelling from surrounding RSF troops.

The RSF physically reinforced their siege with a berm – a raised earth mound. First spotted by Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, the berm is visible from space.

The Sudan war started in April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between the Sudanese army and the RSF broke out in Khartoum.

The US special envoy to Sudan estimates that 150,000 have been killed, but the exact figure is unknown. Close to 12 million people have been displaced.

After 18 months of surviving forced starvation and shelling, the regional capital and symbolic battleground of Al Fashir fell to the RSF at the end of October.

What does the head of the SAF say?

The commander in chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Abdel Fattah Al Burhan has said the withdrawal was to spare the city from further destruction, indiscriminate shelling and drone attacks.

In response to our findings, he told Sky News: “The decision to withdraw was unanimous among the armed forces, regular forces, and the joint security committee.

“The withdrawal began with an attack by drones on forces blocking one of the crossings, destroying their positions.

“Later, the forces fought until they broke through the barrier and moved to a location outside the city.

“During the withdrawal, the forces lost more than 300 martyrs, and most of their vehicles were destroyed. They remain besieged.

“They did not leave soldiers behind. Those who remained were tasked with securing the withdrawal, and they performed their duty as required.”

But instead of a co-ordinated withdrawal, a soldier left behind describes an abandoned command.

‘They completely abandoned us’

“The division commander had left the garrison. They completely abandoned us and we were suddenly surrounded 26 to 1 in the morning hours. Suddenly, everything collapsed on us in the defence. We asked what was going on and were told everyone fled,” he said.

“Shortly after, bombs started falling on us. Brigadier General Adam, the artillery commander, refused to withdraw, saying that the division commander had already withdrawn without informing him of the order. The brigadier general, six colonels, and a naval colonel were also captured.”

Testimony from a civilian who fled that morning paints a picture of chaos.

He said: “There was no co-ordination over withdrawal, and it seemed to be a surprise to the remaining fighters on the frontline. Some were leaving the city and others were fighting battles with the RSF.”

As the RSF entered Al Fashir, he told us civilians were massacred.

“The streets were covered in bodies. I saw it for myself. The RSF came into the city and butchered everyone they found. They did not discern between a child, a civilian or the elderly – they executed everyone, a full genocide.”

High-resolution satellite imagery captured by Vantor shows burnt vehicles grouped together south of the berm the RSF built to besiege Al Fashir.

A video we located at the site shows dozens of bodies, in fatigues and civilian clothing, lying lifeless on the ground by burning cars.

Mounting concern over 200,000 people

Fears are mounting over the fate of around 200,000 people left in Al Fashir.

A top RSF commander with knowledge of the operations in the city told us that at least 7,000 people have been killed in Al Fashir in the first five days of capture.

He said RSF fighters systemically targeted civilians from non-Arab tribes and killed groups of 300 to 400 people in some areas. Civilian sources close to the RSF corroborated his death toll, which we cannot independently verify on the ground.

Al Fashir is in a complete telecommunications blackout.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) in Sudan has shared in a post on X that their “Humanitarian partners in Sudan are being blocked from reaching A Fashir, North Darfur.

“Civilians are trapped inside, their condition unknown. Aid workers are ready to deliver life-saving support. Access needs to be granted now, in line with international humanitarian law.”

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The RSF has circulated videos on its social media channels showing trucks delivering aid to Al Fashir’s emaciated civilians.

This comes after months of volunteers and aid workers being killed by RSF fighters while trying to bring in relief during their 18-month siege of enforced starvation and relentless shelling.

What does the RSF say?

The spokesperson for the RSF’s political administration TASIS, Dr Alaa Nugud, told Sky News that the RSF there is a big fake media campaign prepared for the “Al Fashir liberation” and denounced the death toll of at least 7,000, shared by one of their top commanders, as “totally rubbish”.

In response to our report, he said: “Never happened that TASIS forces or any of its constituents killed civilians based on ethnic background, on the other hand this is what was done by SAF and the Muslim brotherhood National Congress Party doctrine during their 39 years of rule.

“SAF’s military intelligence was igniting these ethnic clashes throughout years they used religion to flame war in south Sudan and used racism and ethnicity to ignite war in Darfur.”

He added that “RSF and TASIS forces evacuated more than 800,000 civilians outside Al Fashir”.

“Could they not provide or grant safe passage to civilians? The reality is that the insurance of the continuation of the war and spoiling of all peace platforms… the continuation of this war is the main cause of all atrocities.

“The atrocities are consequences of this war, not the cause of the war. So to stop all these atrocities we have to stop the war and this is not there in SAF agenda.”

The RSF is accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity across Sudan since the war started in April 2023.

The Biden administration accused the RSF of committing genocide in Darfur in 2024, two decades after the group was first accused of genocide in the region as the Janjaweed.

Our previous reporting on Sky News has supported allegations that the UAE militarily supports the RSF, though the country officially denies it.

Additional reporting by Mohamed Zakarea, Sam Doak, Annoa Abekah-Mensah, Aziz Al Nour, Julia Steers, Jack Sapoch, and Klaas van Dijken.

This story was a joint Sky News data and forensics investigation with Sudan War Monitor and Lighthouse Reports.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Technology

Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

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November 3, 2025

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Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

Representation of Ethereum, with its native cryptocurrency ether.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Ether fell as much as 9% on Monday, slipping below its critical $3,600 support level, shortly after a multimillion dollar hack affected a protocol on the token’s native network. 

The cryptocurrency, which is issued on Ethereum, was last down 6.6% at around $3,600, CoinMetrics data shows. That’s roughly 25% off its high of $4,885 hit on August 22. 

The coin’s tumble came after Ethereum-based decentralized finance protocol Balancer on Monday lost possibly more than $100 million in a hack. The exploit marks the latest in a series of bearish events that have put digital assets investors on tenterhooks over the past few weeks.

In mid-October, U.S. President Donald Trump announced “massive” tariffs on China over its restriction of rare earth exports, kicking off investors’ flight from crypto to risk-off assets such as gold. And although the president later walked back that threat, his comments sparked a sell-off that triggered cascading liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions. 

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell cautioned investors about expecting future rate cuts, adding to existing bearish market sentiment.     

“These events have put investors on uneasy footing as we roll into November,” Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told CNBC. “Macro volatility notwithstanding, this October’s drawdown appears to have been a healthy, albeit sharp, de-leveraging event that flushed speculative excess from the market.”

Some stocks linked to digital assets are also coming under pressure. Coinbase shares were down nearly 4%, while Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy edged down more than 1%.   

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