Reading the Sunday paper this morning, this little news clip caught my eye:
“The former fashion writer convicted of sexually tormenting a co-worker while dressed as a firefighter says he’d go on a homicidal rampage if released from an Ohio prison.
“Peter Braunstein told the New York Daily News in a jailhouse interview that he has ‘no desire’ for rehabilitation.”
Back in 2005, Peter Braunstein stalked a woman who worked for the same company as he once did (although he didn’t know her), set off a smoke bomb in the hallway of her New York City apartment, banged on her door dressed as a firefighter, and held her prisoner and molested her for 13 hours. He then fled and police launched a multi-state manhunt. He robbed a psychiatrist in the Cincinnati area, and was eventually caught in Memphis.
Columnist for WWD
The news ignited a media frenzy at the time, although not being in New York, I missed it. What added so much fuel to the fire was that Braunstein had once been a columnist for Women’s Wear Daily, a publication at the epicenter of the fashion world, passing judgment on the editors of the country’s biggest fashion magazines. He was, at one point, considered an intellectual and arbiter of pop culture.
How far he has fallen. Friday’s article in the New York Post was headlined, Fake fireman sicko Braunstein likes prison, warns of ‘rampage’ if released. The article called him a psychopath.
Braunstein was already convicted in the New York crime, and was sentenced to 18 years to life. He’s currently in Cincinnati, where, according to an article entitled N.Y. tabloid villain charged here in the Enquirer, he faces another 28 years for aggravated robbery, robbery and kidnapping.
Profile of a psychopath
Vanity Fair magazine published an in-depth article about Peter Braunstein, The Devil and W.W.D., on April 2, 2007. It described his upbringing, early career, family and self-destruction. Several former friends were quoted trying to explain what happened to Braunstein.
Reading the article, it seemed pretty clear to me that Braunstein was always a psychopath. He got involved with women who financially supported him. He sent vile e-mails to his father (who may have had his own issues). He considered himself superior to the rest of the world. When his last girlfriend left him, he launched a virulent, public smear campaign.
It seems that for many years Braunstein was able to keep a lid on his disorder, until a series of career and relationship failures left him with no more claims to grandiose superiority. At that point, the mask slipped, and he stopped pretending to be a human being.
Cover is blown
It’s something many of us who have been entangled with psychopaths have experienced. The cover is blown, and the evil is released. I suspect that some psychopaths may actually feel exhilarated—finally, they can be who they really are.
Braunstein does not want to get out of jail. “I would have no desire to try to rehabilitate myself and go back to being a guy with a job and meeting girls and having friends. I’m not interested in that whatsoever.”
Those might be the most authentic and honest words this psychopath has ever spoken.
Dear UB,
My X-BF wanted a “respectable wife” to keep his harem of affairs GFs in line so he could say “no, I cna’t leave my wife and marry you”—his respectable wife of 32 years had FINALLY caught him de facto in bed with another woman and kicked him out. Only a few months after that he came after me and I was a lonely widow and I fell for it hook line and sinker, but thank God I caught on before I actually married him! But it hurt so bad to kick my dreams to the curb of another great relationship and he was “fun” at first.
I have a friend who got involved with one that had ED and she loved him and didn’t care, but he wanted all kinds of “kinky”sex, 3 somes etc, anything to try to spark his ability to convince himself he was a stud. She finally kicked him to the curb but it has taken her a long time to start to recover. She was CRUSHED, her dream of a loving, professional and personal relationship with this man was trashed. She had invested so much in the relationship in love and care and he had invested NOTHING, she was like used toilet paper to him. She was professionally and personally humiliated and crushed.
At least professionally their peers are catching on to his psychopathic and disrespectful behavior and he is being shunned from professional organizations now, and she continues to be well respected world wide. It has been a long difficult road for her though. As it has for us all.
I think the looking for exciement is sometimes an addiction with them. The very bright ones seem to be always looking for a fix, a new scheme, a new con, a new thrill, like “life” in general bores them. I’m bright and I like “new” things, but I get my thrills from a new hobby, learning a new skill, reading and learning new things, seeing new places, not inflicting new con games on new people and then discarding those people like trash. I confine my “thrills” to things that are positive and things that are interesting to me, and obviously to them the things that are “interesting” and “positive” for THEM are NEGATIVE for others.
All peoople in my experience spend their time doing what gives them positive feed back. You spend your money and your time doing what you LIKE to do. Seldom do you buy a bass boat to fish if you don’t like to fish. Or golf clubs if you don’t play golf. That makes sense.
You spend your money and your time on things that YOU consider a priority. I used to get irritated with parents who brought children to the clinic without insurance, yet I knew these same people who said they “couldn’t afford” health insurance HAD A $30,000 BASS BOAT in their yard. They spent their money on the things that were more important to them. Health care for their children was less of a priority than a bass boat to go fishing with.
Psychopaths set their priorities just like we do, on the things that THEY get positive feed back from. Sex, conning people, risk taking, lying and getting away with it, abuse of all kinds because they want what they want and when they want it, no matter what the consequences to OTHERS ARE.
As a parent, I put more priority on my children’s health care than on my own hobbies. That is because I cared about my children more than owning whatever hobby equipment I would have enjoyed. Maybe these parents weren’t psychopaths but they were in my opinion pretty unwise and narcissistic about their own WANTS before what I consider a NEED, but they obviously did NOT consider a NEED.
And yes, they will tell you stories about other’s bad behaviors so you won’t believe a word that person might say about them, and vice versa, they will tell that other person bad stories about you so that if you tell anything bad about the P the other person will be prepped to not believe you. They are mean, but they are not stupid. They have learned how to play the game and “clean up in front” of problems. My own little P-son darling told my mother awful things about me, and me awful things about her to prep the scene for his final assault.
It was only by the Grace of God that I survived, and for that I am grateful. Learning to spot them and realizing completely what they are capable of is our only defense from future attacks. Healing our own wounds and resolviing the bitterness is the only way we can come out on “top” no matter what they have cost us for these lessons. I actually think the price in the end will be well worth it—it is only STUFF after all and stuff is not what makes me happy or peaceful. Right this minute I am angry and resentful after my contact yesterday with my DIL and my enabling mother, but it will pass, and I will return to peace again and there will be no more contact for any reason, unless it is to protest the parole of the Trojan horse P next year when he comes up again.
Thanks Ox-D,
You’re a better woman than me! I could not tolerate contact with this man ever again.
At least I was able to walk away, move 150 miles to another town and was welcomed by my old friends and family. I never have to see or deal with this guy again (unless I’m called to testify in court one day) except in my nightmares.
God has taken care of me in many ways. My lesson from this is to stick to the standards I have for myself and follow my instincts better. When something doesn’t feel right then it isn’t right for me. Simple as that.
this is off topic, BUT I am so happy that judge Judy knows about sociopaths…
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYN_15xJjJA&feature=related
In addition to the “sameness” of the psychopaths, I’ve noticed that there are some similarities in US as well.
In re-reading through the Bible “stories:” of Joseph, testing his brothers before revealing himself to them to see what kind of men they were, of King David dealing with King Saul stalking him and intending to kill him, of David enabling his own psychopathic son Absalom, of Jezebel, and so many of the other psychopaths described in the Bible, I think of Eve.
I have read where Eve, even a mythological one if not a literal one, became “fully human” when she discovered the differences between GOOD and EVIL. Chimps and other of the great apes have a society, but they are not fully human because they can’t truly recognize the differences between good and evil. They cooperate and reciprocate with each other, but out of fear of revenge rather than a loving and giving motive.
When I was younger and read about Eve I always felt God wasn’t fair to her, because, not knowing good from evil, how could she have even realized that Satan was telling a lie? Satan, the prototype psychopath, had nothing to gain from her down fall except the satisfaction of causing it, of seeing her suffer, of taking away her earthly paradise.
He held out to Eve the mirror of her desires, in fact, he incited her desires by telling her how god-like she would be and how jealous God was being and how God was keeping the “good stuff” for himself.
How many of us have put aside our own knowledge of good and evil to reach our hands out toward the false “prize” that the psychopath held out to us?
Unlike our Mother Eve, we do have the knowledge of good and evil. We are fully functioning human beings with free and informed choices if we choose to exercise them.
Eve was commanded by God to blindly obey, not to understand, just blindly obey. She, without the knowledge of good and evil, succumbed to the temptations of the greed of wanting something more than she had, of becoming god-like in herself. We, on the other hand, aspire to grasp the prizes held out to us by the psychopaths, the deputies of Satan.
In our losses of our internal paradises, and our temporary sojourns in “hell-on-earth” I think we too can gain a certain knowledge of GOOD and EVIL, if we use the opportunity we have been given for garnering this information. I think our own temporary loss of sight of the knowledge of Good and EVil allows us to be conned, just as Mother Eve was conned, by the psychopaths. I think the psychopaths, just as Satan told God when God asked him where he had been and he replied, “going to and fro about the earth”–I think they go to and fro until they chance upon one of us who have in our own minds forgotten or put aside our own knowledge of good and evil, and they take the opportunity to use that to persuade us that they can give us heaven on earth with their love, just as Satan convinced Eve she would be god-like if she only grasped the fruit.
The lessons learned by us, as victims, that there IS GOOD and there IS EVIL, will never be forgotten. Learning by hard experience may be the most painful way to learn, but the lessons are never forgotten. My own arrogance, my own feeling of being “in control” of my own destiny, when I was anything BUT “in control”–my own desires to ignore the EVIL I deep down truly knew was there, my own naivete that I was powerful enough to play with fire and not get burned, all these contributed to my own down fall and having to RELEARN the “knowledge of good and evil” from painful personal experience, just as our Mother Eve did.
Along with the Knowledge of Good and EVil, God gave us FREE WILL, we can choose our paths and go toward the “righteous road” as Wini says, or we can chose to go toward the “Dark Side” like Darth Vadar…I chose the righteous road, and I pray that God will help me keep my feet on the path and I will never forget my lesson, my painfully learned lesson in the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Now we know why women’s high-fashion is so disgusting and why our teenagers have clothes marketed to them that ‘out tramp’ the streetwalkers. At least one known psycho was in charge of manipulating that fashion marketing system. Fortunately few real women wear the outlandish creations presented and marketed by people like this sad freak.
How revealing! (pun intended)
I don’t believe for a second that he likes being in prison. I think it is all macho bluffing. He would like to know that others fear him or at least react to him and what better way than to make a statement that sounds scary to a normal person.
I think it shows that he has the intense need to feel powerful and in control. Pretending that he is where he wants to be allows him to maintain that delusion in his own mind.
Maybe he is fooling others by saying this, but I think he is mostly trying to fool himself.
Still, a lot of weirdos and psychopaths do very well in prison. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, model prisoners all. Maybe because the reins are finally taken out of their hands. However, I think they still use the prison, as well as any other misfortunes they might have, to get pity and support from people.
My ex-bf used his kidney disease to get more tolerance and support from women. The first thing he did when I broke up with him was go home, throw out all his meds and make a big scene so that his daughter would freak out and call me, which she did. In fact she freaked out so bad one of the other women called me.
There is another manifestation of pathological evil, where the victims are innocents who will never have a voice, even when fully grown up. It is truly up to others to speak up for them.
Here is a verdict in which justice, to the extent that the law allows, was served. http://rtfitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/jury-finds-jason-meduna-3-strikes-rancher-guilty-on-most-counts/
The hero that first went in and started rescuing the hundreds of starving horses horses wrote the following. He nailed the ego of the pathological:
Of all the scenes from hell through which I have walked, those from the Three Strikes Ranch were undoubtedly the worst. I haven’t said much about it, for the specific reason that Meduna’s fans and supporters were wanting anything they could find to hang me. To them I was the villain, the intruder, the ultimate bad guy and had it not been for me, their idol would never have fallen.
I received three calls in the middle of the night, all letting me know the jury’s decision. There was a joy, a celebration of good over evil, a strong sense of justice and a stamp of validity for all we have been through and our decisions to make it right for those horses, no matter what.
In the end, 220 horses, donkeys and mules walked out of that place, some giving birth within minutes of leaving. Left behind were an unknown number of once beautiful animals, now nothing more than bones and tufts of hair. Two of those, Voodoo and Itchy, are still at the ranch, both now fat and healthy once again.
Jason Meduna lost. His stupidity, his arrogance. his threats and those of his friends have been proven, in court, to be worthless. To all of them, this was about EGO and SELF. It was never about a single horse. It was never about life.
To us, the vets, Jim, Hillary Wood, the Husses, to those who worked so hard at HSUS and to those rescues that took in the horses to rehab them and find them new homes, today celebrates life. Our combined measure of the value of life were measured by a court of law and found to meet the same criteria as those who wrote the laws, and one bad guy is found guilty 145 times over.
And for that, I give thanks.
Those poor animals! At least the jury made the right decision.
JAH, thanks for the good news. There is actually another terrible story behind this one.
You can find it at
http://rtfitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/262-million-acres-and-salazar-cant-find-a-place-for-wild-horses/
This article, printed Friday, is about a speech by Ken Salazar, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. The federal Bureau of Land Management is rounding up the wild horses, and placing them in these privately owned containment ranches. And the head of the Department of the Interior, which oversees this program is cattle rancher, and program is quite clearly to remove the horses to make more room for cattle.
If this infuriates you (as it does me), I found a site where you can join a petition to stop or radically alter this program. Here’s the location:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/166841148