Forced out at Este Lauder for a ‘racist’ meme, John Demsey is backwith high-profile support

Published

2 years ago

September 12, 2023

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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

World

This man survived Hiroshima bombing – and has a stark warning for us all

Published

2 hours ago

August 6, 2025

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This man survived Hiroshima bombing - and has a stark warning for us all

Toshiyuki Mimaki is exhausted when we meet him.

The 83-year-old sinks into his chair, closes his eyes, and asks us to keep it brief.

But then he starts talking, and his age seems to melt away with the power of his stories.

He is a survivor of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb, a lifelong advocate for nuclear disarmament and, as of last year, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But now, on the 80th anniversary of the bombing, he comes with more than just memories – he has a message, and it is stark.

“Right now is the most dangerous era,” he says.

“Russia might use it [a nuclear weapon], North Korea might use it, China might use it.

“And President Trump – he’s just a huge mess.

“We’ve been appealing and appealing, for a world without war or nuclear weapons – but they’re not listening.”

‘I didn’t hear a sound’

Mr Mimaki was three years old when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in war, and it’s remembered as one of the most horrific events in the history of conflict.

It’s estimated to have killed over 70,000 people on the spot, one in every five residents, unleashing a ground heat of around 4,000C, melting everything in its path and flattening two thirds of the city.

Horrifying stories trickled out slowly, of blackened corpses and skin hanging off the victims like rags.

“What I remember is that day I was playing outside and there was a flash,” Mr Mimaki recalls.

“We were 17km away from the hypocentre. I didn’t hear a bang, I didn’t hear a sound, but I thought it was lightening.

“Then it was afternoon and people started coming out in droves. Some with their hair all in mess, clothes ragged, some wearing shoes, some not wearing shoes, and asking for water.”

‘The city was no longer there’

For four days, his father did not return home from work in the city centre. He describes with emotion the journey taken by his mother, with him and his younger bother in tow, to try to find him.

There was only so far in they could travel, the destruction was simply too great.

“My father came home on the fourth day,” he says.

“He was in the basement [at his place of work]. He was changing into his work clothes. That’s how he survived.

“When he came up to ground level, the city of Hiroshima was no longer there.”

‘People are still suffering’

Three days later, the US would drop another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, bringing about an unconditional Japanese surrender and the end of the Second World War.

By the end of 1945, the death toll from both cities would have risen to an estimated 210,000 and to this day it is not known exactly how many lost their lives in the following years to cancers and other side effects.

“It’s still happening, even now. People are still suffering from radiation, they are in the hospital,” Mr Mimaki says.

“It’s very easy to get cancer, I might even get cancer, that’s what I’m worried about now.”

Tragically, many caught up in the bomb lived with the stigma for most of their lives. Misunderstandings about the impact of radiation meant they were often shunned and rejected for jobs or as a partner in marriage.

Many therefore tried to hide their status as Hibakusha (a person affected by the atomic bombs) and now, in older age, are finding it hard to claim the financial support they are entitled to.

And then there is the enormous psychological scars, the PTSD and the lifelong mental health problems. Many Hibakusha chose to never talk about what they saw that day and live with the guilt that they survived.

For Mr Mimaki, it’s there when he recounts a story of how he and another young girl about his age became sick with what he now believes was radiation poisoning.

“She died, and I survived,” he says with a heavy sigh and strain in his eyes.

He has subsequently dedicated his life to advocacy, and is co-chair of a group of atomic bomb survivors called Nihon Hidankyo. Its members were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024.

‘Why do humans like war so much?’

But he doesn’t dwell much on any pride he might feel. He knows it’s not long until the bomb fades from living memory, and he deeply fears what that might mean in a world that looks more turbulent now than it has in decades.

Indeed, despite advocacy like his, there are still around 12,000 nuclear warheads in the world in the hands of nine countries.

“In the future, you never know when they might use it. Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, Israel-Iran – there is always a war going on somewhere,” he says.

“Why do these animals called humans like war so much?

“We keep saying it, we keep telling them, but it’s not getting through, for 80 years no-one has listened.

“We are Hibakusha, my message is we must never create Hibakusha again.”

World

The chilling document that traces nuclear weapons back to Britain – and the threat we now face

Published

2 hours ago

August 6, 2025

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The chilling document that traces nuclear weapons back to Britain - and the threat we now face

Eighty years ago today, an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

It was the dawn of the atomic age, but the birth of the bomb can be traced beyond the deserts of New Mexico to Britain, five years earlier.

A copy of a hand-typed document, now in the Bodleian library in Oxford, is the first description of an atom bomb small enough to use as a weapon.

The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum was written by two nuclear physicists at the University of Birmingham in 1940.

Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls don’t feature in the film Oppenheimer, but their paper is credited with jump-starting the Manhattan Project that ultimately built the bomb.

Both Jewish scientists who had both fled Nazi Germany, they built on the latest understanding of uranium fission and nuclear chain reactions, to propose a bomb made from enriched uranium that was compact enough to be carried by an aircraft.

The document, so secret at the time only one copy was made, makes for chilling reading.

Not only does it detail how to build a bomb, but foretells the previously unimaginable power of its blast.

“Such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area,” they wrote.

“The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the centre of a big city.”

Radioactive fallout would be inevitable “and even for days after the explosion any person entering the affected area will be killed”.

Both lethal properties of the bombs that would subsequently fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing around 100,000 instantly and more than 100,000 others in the years that followed – most of them civilians.

‘The most terrifying weapons ever created’

Those bombs had the explosive power of around 16 and 20 kilotonnes of TNT respectively – a force great enough to end the Second World War.

But compared to nuclear weapons of today, they were tiny.

“What we would now term as low yield nuclear weapons,” said Alexandra Bell, president of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which campaigns for nuclear disarmament.

“We’re talking about city destroyers…these really are the most terrifying weapons ever created.”

Many of these “high yield” nuclear weapons are thermonuclear designs first tested in the 1950s.

They use the power of nuclear fission that destroyed Hiroshima to harness yet more energy by fusing other atoms together.

Codenamed “Mike”, the first test of a fusion bomb in 1952 yielded at least 500 times more energy than those dropped on Japan.

Impractically devastating, but proof of lethal principle.

Variants of the W76 thermonuclear warhead currently deployed by the US and UK are around 100Kt, six times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

Just one dropped on a city the size of London would result in more than a quarter of a million deaths.

The largest warhead in America’s current arsenal, the B83 has the explosive equivalent of 1.2 megatonnes (1.2 million tonnes of TNT) and would kill well over a million instantly.

But modern intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are designed to carry multiple warheads.

Russia’s Sarmat 2, for example, is thought to be capable of carrying 10 megatonnes of nuclear payload.

They’re designed to strike multiple targets at once, but if all were dropped on a city like London most of its population of nine million would be killed or injured.

If that kind of power is incomprehensible, consider how many nuclear warheads there now are in the world.

Nine countries – the US, Russia, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – have nuclear weapons.

Several others are interested in having them.

The US and Russia have around 4,000 nuclear warheads each – 90% of the global nuclear arsenal and more than enough to destroy civilisation.

According to analysis from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China us thought to have around 600 warheads, but has indicated a desire to catch up.

Beijing is believed to be building up to 100 new warheads a year and the ICBMs to deliver them.

Five more nuclear powers, including the UK, plan to either increase or modernise their existing nuclear stockpiles.

The nuclear arms race that created this situation was one imagined by Frisch and Peierls in their 1940 memorandum.

Given the mass civilian casualties it would inevitably cause, the scientists questioned whether the bomb should ever be used by the Allies.

They wrote, however: “If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this weapon… the most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb.”

What they didn’t believe was that the bomb they proposed, and went on to help build at Los Alamos, would ever be used.

Devastated by its use on Japan, Peierls disavowed the bomb and later campaigned for disarmament.

But that work is now as unfinished as ever.

Non-proliferation treaties helped reduce the expensive and excessive nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US, and prevent more countries from building nuclear bombs.

‘Everything trending in the wrong direction’

But progress ground to a halt with the invasion of Ukraine, as nuclear tensions continued elsewhere.

“After all the extremely hard, tedious work that we did to reduce nuclear risks everything is now trending in the wrong direction,” said Alexandra Bell.

“The US and Russia refuse to talk to each other about strategic stability.

“China is building up its nuclear arsenal in an unprecedented fashion and the structures that were keeping non-proliferation in place stemming the spread of nuclear weapons are crumbling around us.”

‘New risks increasing the threat’

The world may have come closer to nuclear conflict during the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, but the fragmented and febrile state of geopolitics now is more dangerous, she argues.

Conflict regularly flares between nuclear armed India and Pakistan; Donald Trump’s foreign policy has sparked fears that South Korea might pursue the bomb to counter North Korea’s nuclear threat; some states in the Middle East are eyeing a nuclear deterrent to either nuclear-wannabe Iran or nuclear armed Israel.

Add to the mix the military use of AI and stressors like climate change, and the view of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is the situation is more precarious than in 1963.

“It’s more dangerous, but in a different way,” said Alexandra Bell. “The confluence of all these new existential risks are increasing the threat worldwide.”

US

Bill and Hillary Clinton subpoenaed in Jeffrey Epstein probe

Published

2 hours ago

August 6, 2025

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Bill and Hillary Clinton subpoenaed in Jeffrey Epstein probe

The US House Oversight Committee has issued subpoenas for depositions with former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton relating to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

The Republican-controlled committee also subpoenaed the Justice Department for files relating to the paedophile financier, as well as eight former top law enforcement officials.

Donald Trump has denied prior knowledge of Epstein‘s crimes, claiming he ended their relationship a long time ago.

The US president has repeatedly tried to draw a line under the Justice Department’s decision not to release a full accounting of the investigation, but politicians from both major political parties, as well as many in Mr Trump’s political base, have refused to drop their interest in the Epstein files.

Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and since then, conspiracy theories have swirled about what information investigators gathered on him and who else may have been involved in his crimes.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee initiated the subpoenas for the Clintons last month, as well as demanding all communications between former president Joe Biden’s Democrat administration and the Justice Department about Epstein.

The committee previously issued a subpoena for an interview with Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who had been serving a prison sentence in Florida for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She was recently transferred to another facility in Texas.

Mr Clinton was among those acquainted with Epstein before the criminal investigation against him in Florida became public two decades ago. He has never been accused of wrongdoing by any of the women who say Epstein abused them.

Mr Clinton previously said, through a spokesperson, that while he travelled on Epstein’s jet, he never visited his homes and had no knowledge of his crimes.

This is a rare escalation

The subpoenaing of former president Bill Clinton is an escalation, both legally and politically.

Historically, it is rare for congressional oversight to demand deposition from former presidents of the United States.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice, had already been summonsed.

But the House Oversight Committee has now added Bill and Hillary Clinton, several former Attorneys General and former FBI directors to its list.

It signals bipartisan momentum – Democrats voting with Republicans for transparency.

The committee will now hear from several people with known ties to Epstein, his connection with Bill Clinton having been well-documented.

But the subpoenas set up a potential clash between Congress and the Department of Justice.

Donald Trump, the candidate, had vowed to release them. A government led by Mr Trump, the president, chose not to.

If Attorney General Pam Bondi still refuses to release the files, it will fuel claims of a constitutional crisis in the United States.

But another day of Epstein headlines demonstrates the enduring public interest in this case.

The subpoenas give the Justice Department until 19 August to hand over the requested records.

The committee is also asking the former officials to appear for depositions throughout August, September and October, concluding with Hillary Clinton on 9 October and Bill Clinton on 14 October.

Although several former presidents, including Mr Trump, have been issued congressional subpoenas, none has ever appeared before members under compulsion.

Last month, Mr Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release information presented to the grand jury that indicted Maxwell for helping Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.