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.
A British fintech which counts Standard Life among its key clients is close to finalising one of the industry’s biggest funding rounds so far this year.
Sky News understands that Hyperlayer, which is run by the former Morgan Stanley executive Rob Rooney, is lining up a major equity injection led by CDAM, a UK-based investment firm, and several new institutional investors.
City sources said this weekend that the new capital from CDAM and other backers could total at least £30m.
The funding round is expected to take place at a post-money valuation of about £160m.
Hyperlayer, which operates a consumer-facing digital wallet called Hyperjar, intends to use the new funding as growth capital to finance the development of new partnerships with global banks and asset managers.
The company provides smart account technology on existing client infrastructure, and is said to work with a number of the world’s 10 largest banks – although it has not publicly disclosed their identities.
Its work with Standard Life involves the future launch of a consumer money app aimed at people approaching or in early retirement.
Hyperlayer’s consumer-facing platform sees customers organise their money in what the company calls “digital jam jars”, enabling them to earn rewards which give them access to partner brands such as Asda, Morrisons and Starbucks.
IKEA and the John Lewis Partnership are among the other merchant partners with which Hyperlayer is working to develop distinctive loyalty-based initiatives for its financial institution clients.
Founded in 2006 by Adam Chamberlain and Scott Davies, CDAM has $1.5bn in assets under management and is an experienced investor in financial services technology.
Mr Davies has had a seat on Hyperlayer’s board for several years.
Mr Rooney, who was a prominent Wall Street executive for years, ultimately serving as Morgan Stanley’s technology operations, joined the company as CEO in 2023.
The new capital injection led by CDAM is understood to be subject to approval by Hyperlayer’s shareholders.
Thoroughbred racing suffered its most ignominious, industry-deflating moment 50 years ago today with the breakdown of Ruffian, an undefeated filly running against Foolish Pleasure in a highly promoted match race at Belmont Park. Her tragic end on July 6, 1975, was a catastrophe for the sport, and observers say racing has never truly recovered.
Two years earlier, during the rise of second-wave feminism, the nation had been mesmerized by a “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King’s win became a rallying cry for women everywhere. The New York Racing Association, eager to boost daily racing crowds in the mid-1970s, proposed a competition similar to that of King and Riggs. They created a match race between Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure and Ruffian, the undefeated filly who had dominated all 10 of her starts, leading gate to wire.
“In any sport, human or equine, it’s really impossible to say who was the greatest,” said outgoing Jockey Club chairman Stuart Janney III, whose parents, Stuart and Barbara, owned Ruffian. “But I’m always comfortable thinking of Ruffian as being among the four to five greatest horses of all time.”
Ruffian, nearly jet black in color and massive, was the equine version of a Greek goddess. At the age of 2, her girth — the measurement of the strap that secures the saddle — was just over 75 inches. Comparatively, racing legend Secretariat, a male, had a 76-inch girth when he was fully developed at the age of 4.
Her name also added to the aura. “‘Ruffian’ was a little bit of a stretch because it tended to be what you’d name a colt, but it turned out to be an appropriate name,” Janney said.
On May 22, 1974, Ruffian equaled a Belmont Park track record, set by a male, in her debut at age 2, winning by 15 lengths. She set a stakes record later that summer at Saratoga in the Spinaway, the most prestigious race of the year for 2-year-old fillies. The next spring, she blew through races at longer distances, including the three races that made up the so-called Filly Triple Crown.
Some in the media speculated that she had run out of female competition.
Foolish Pleasure had meanwhile ripped through an undefeated 2-year-old season with championship year-end honors. However, after starting his sophomore campaign with a win, he finished third in the Florida Derby. He also had recovered from injuries to his front feet to win the Wood Memorial and then the Kentucky Derby.
Second-place finishes in the Preakness and Belmont Stakes left most observers with the idea that Foolish Pleasure was the best 3-year-old male in the business.
Following the Belmont Stakes, New York officials wanted to test the best filly against the best colt.
The original thought was to include the Preakness winner, Master Derby, in the Great Match Race, but the team of Foolish Pleasure’s owner, trainer and rider didn’t want a three-horse race. Since New York racing had guaranteed $50,000 to the last-place horse, they paid Master Derby’s connections $50,000 not to race. Thus, the stage was set for an equine morality play.
“[Ruffian’s] abilities gave her the advantage in the match race,” Janney said. “If she could do what she did in full fields [by getting the early lead], then it was probably going to be even more effective in a match.”
Several ballyhooed match races in sports history had captured the world’s attention without incident — Seabiscuit vs. Triple Crown winner War Admiral in 1938, Alsab vs. Triple Crown winner Whirlaway in 1942, and Nashua vs. Swaps in 1955. None of those races, though, had the gender divide “it” factor.
The Great Match Race attracted 50,000 live attendees and more than 18 million TV viewers on CBS, comparable to the Grammy Awards and a pair of NFL “Sunday Night Football” games in 2024.
Prominent New York sportswriter Dick Young wrote at the time that, for women, “Ruffian was a way of getting even.”
“I can remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, and the lady that took the toll in one of those booths was wearing a button that said, ‘I’m for her,’ meaning Ruffian,” Janney said.
As the day approached, Ruffian’s rider, Jacinto Vasquez, who also was the regular rider of Foolish Pleasure including at the Kentucky Derby, had to choose whom to ride for the match race.
“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure, and I knew what he could do,” Vasquez told ESPN. “But I didn’t think he could beat the filly. He didn’t have the speed or stamina.”
Braulio Baeza, who had ridden Foolish Pleasure to victory in the previous year’s premier 2-year-old race, Hopeful Stakes, was chosen to ride Foolish Pleasure.
“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure and ridden against Ruffian,” Baeza said, with language assistance from his wife, Janice Blake. “I thought Foolish Pleasure was better than Ruffian. She just needed [early race] pressure because no one had ever pressured her.”
The 1⅛ mile race began at the start of the Belmont Park backstretch in the chute. In an ESPN documentary from 2000, Jack Whitaker, who hosted the race telecast for CBS, noted that the atmosphere turned eerie with dark thunderclouds approaching before the race.
Ruffian hit the side of the gate when the doors opened but straightened herself out quickly and assumed the lead. “The whole world, including me, thought that Ruffian was going to run off the screen and add to her legacy,” said longtime New York trainer Gary Contessa, who was a teenager when Ruffian ruled the racing world.
However, about ⅛ of a mile into the race, the force of Ruffian’s mighty strides snapped two bones in her front right leg.
“When she broke her leg, it sounded like a broken stick,” Vasquez said. “She broke her leg between her foot and her ankle. When I pulled up, the bone was shattered above the ankle. She couldn’t use that leg at all.”
It took Ruffian a few moments to realize what had happened to her, so she continued to run. Vasquez eventually hopped off and kept his shoulder leaning against her for support.
“You see it, but you don’t want to believe it,” Janney said.
Baeza had no choice but to have Foolish Pleasure finish the race in what became a macabre paid workout. The TV cameras followed him, but the eyes of everyone at the track were on the filly, who looked frightened as she was taken back to the barn area.
“When Ruffian broke down, time stood still that day,” Contessa said. Yet time was of the essence in an attempt to save her life.
Janney said that Dr. Frank Stinchfield — who was the doctor for the New York Yankees then and was “ahead of his time in fixing people’s bones” — called racing officials to see whether there was anything he could do to help with Ruffian.
New York veterinarian Dr. Manny Gilman managed to sedate Ruffian, performed surgery on her leg and, with Stinchfield’s help, secured her leg in an inflatable cast. When Ruffian woke up in the middle of the night, though, she started fighting and shattered her bones irreparably. Her team had no choice but to euthanize her at approximately 2:20 a.m. on July 7.
“She was going full bore trying to get in front of [Foolish Pleasure] out of the gate,” Baeza said. “She gave everything there. She gave her life.”
Contessa described the time after as a “stilled hush over the world.”
“When we got the word that she had rebroken her leg, the whole world was crying,” Contessa said. “I can’t reproduce the feeling that I had the day after.”
The Janneys soon flew to Maine for the summer, and they received a round of applause when the pilot announced their presence. At the cottage, they were met by thousands of well-wishing letters.
“We all sat there, after dinner every night, and we wrote every one of them back,” Janney said. “It was pretty overwhelming, and that didn’t stop for a long time. I still get letters.”
Equine fatalities have been part of the business since its inception, like the Triple Crown races and Breeders’ Cup. Some have generated headlines by coming in clusters, such as Santa Anita in 2019 and Churchill Downs in 2023. However, breakdowns are not the only factor, and likely not the most influential one, in the gradual decline of horse racing’s popularity in this country.
But the impact from the day of Ruffian’s death, and that moment, has been ongoing for horse racing.
“There are people who witnessed the breakdown and never came back,” Contessa said.
Said Janney: “At about that time, racing started to disappear from the national consciousness. The average person knows about the Kentucky Derby, and that’s about it.”
Equine racing today is a safer sport now than it was 50 years ago. The Equine Injury Database, launched by the Jockey Club in 2008, says the fatality rate nationally in 2024 was just over half of what it was at its launch.
“We finally have protocols that probably should have been in effect far sooner than this,” Contessa said. “But the protocols have made this a safer game.”
Said Vasquez: “There are a lot of nice horses today, but to have a horse like Ruffian, it’s unbelievable. Nobody could compare to Ruffian.”
The UK has re-established diplomatic ties with Syria, David Lammy has said, as he made the first visit to the country by a British minister for 14 years.
The foreign secretary visited Damascus and met with interim president Ahmed al Sharaa, also the leader of the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and foreign minister Asaad al Shaibani.
In a statement, Mr Lammy said a “stable Syria is in the UK’s interests” and added: “I’ve seen first-hand the remarkable progress Syrians have made in rebuilding their lives and their country.
“After over a decade of conflict, there is renewed hope for the Syrian people.
“The UK is re-establishing diplomatic relations because it is in our interests to support the new government to deliver their commitment to build a stable, more secure and prosperous future for all Syrians.”
Image: Foreign Secretary David Lammy with Syria’s interim president Ahmed al Sharaa in Damascus. Pic: X / @DavidLammy
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has also announced a £94.5m support package for urgent humanitarian aid and to support the country’s long-term recovery, after a number of British sanctions against the country were lifted in April.
While HTS is still classified as a proscribed terror group, Sir Keir Starmer said last year that it could be removed from the list.
The Syrian president’s office also said on Saturday that the president and Mr Lammy discussed co-operation, as well as the latest developments in the Middle East.
Since Assad fled Syria in December, a transitional government headed by Mr al Sharaa was announced in March and a number of western countries have restored ties.
In May, US President Donald Trump said the United States would lift long-standing sanctions on Syria and normalise relations during a speech at the US-Saudi investment conference.
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From May: Trump says US will end sanctions for Syria
He said he wanted to give the country “a chance at peace” and added: “There is a new government that will hopefully succeed.
“I say good luck, Syria. Show us something special.”
