Playwright-turned-accused "Phony Firefighter" Rapist Left Online Traces
By Steve Huff
The crime seemed planned and timed for Halloween. The attacker was organized, as if every move was scripted. There were special effects — small fires set in the hallway outside the woman's apartment — costume, and dialogue. The rapist recorded many of his acts, and when he was done with his 34-year-old victim, he left with one of the props. The sexual predator clad in a fake New York City Fire Department costume took a trophy — a high-heeled pair of the victim's shoes.
The man knew too much about the woman, as well. When she would wake from periods of unconsciousness, induced by her attacker shoving a chloroform-soaked cloth in her face, he taunted her. He knew she'd been laid off from her job. He made her try on various pairs of shoes, apparently having knowledge of some kind of similar traumatic event in the woman's past.
To say the attack by the fake firefighter on a 34-year-old woman was bizarre might be an understatement.
The announcement November 4, 2005 that New York Police were seeking a former writer for The Village Voice and Women's Wear Daily (WWD), a gifted cultural historian named Peter Braunstein, age 41, pushed the story from the realm of the merely bizarre into that of the truly surreal.
In 2004, Braunstein had turned from journalism — his specialty was meditating on pop culture, particularly that of the '60's and '70's, many of his articles delving into the history and culture surrounding mainstream pornography — to dramaturgy.
His obsession, something he seemed to view as his magnum opus, was a play he wrote, titled, "Andy and Edie," about the tormented relationship between famed pop artist Andy Warhol and doomed socialite Edie Sedgwick.
On a website Braunstein created to promote his off-broadway show, he discoursed about his subject in a manner one would expect from a former PhD candidate at NYU:
The play is at once a twisted love story that ends tragically, a tale of debauchery, drug use, and sadomasochistic obsession, and a treatise on the creation of modern celebrity pioneered by this dynamic pair. Andy and Edie thought they were just playing charades, but they were really playing for keeps. The play is ultimately a rumination on the contrasting nature of both 'living' and posthumous fame, making the case that certain people can enter our lives — even for the briefest of moments — and end up haunting us forever after.
If Braunstein's erudition was apparent in his explanation of the play, other pages linked to the main webpage devoted to promoting "Andy and Edie" seemed to show slowly-spreading cracks in whatever mask of sanity he was trying to maintain. One page was supposed to be "Edie's Diary" — someone, presumably Braunstein, writing as Sedgwick. There were only two 'entries' in the diary. Near the end of the entry dated March 26, 2004, the thin line between Peter Braunstein's imagination and perhaps his insanity seemed to blur:
I heard a group of artists have come together to do a play about Andy and moi. At first I thought: "Oh no, let me rest, I haven't had enough time, and I cannot, will not go back to that place. Not just yet." But then I stuck my head into the rehearsal room for a brief moment, soaked up the memory flash and realized that I would have to make peace with the past. Bury the hatchet. For good. I learn, still, that, yes, in life, you cannot control anything. You don't make the higher scheme. It makes you. And you don't find your destiny by chasing it in circles all over the planets. You don't find it at all. But it will gently tip you on the shoulder one day, just when you were ready to cave in, and it'll say: "Hello, I was waiting for you to meet me halfway. How lucky we should finally conspire in each other's favor." So I looked around and saw some people who looked familiar: one keeps visiting me in his dreams. He doesn't know that I can see him, but I do. And I believe that he, sometimes, when the moment is right, can see me...
On the webpage he titled, "About the Playwright," Peter Braunstein tied his words into those of his imagined Edie Sedgwick:
Andy says to Edie: "You've been my good-luck charm. Ever since you entered my life I've had nothing but good luck." The same is true for Edie and me, maybe even more so. At no time in my life have I felt more fortunate, and it's all due to a beautiful girl who died 30 years ago, a girl who never had enough fame in her own life but still saw fit to transmit a small piece of it to me after death. That's a major theme of the play: how "there is no death," how the dead still haunt, influence, and change the living, how the 'second 15 minutes of fame lasts forever'. This moment in my life, this 15 minutes, has that ineffable feel of forever-ness. I dream about Edie almost every night, we sing Roy Orbison songs together, and sometimes I wake up in chills. Because in those dreams I can see her future, but she can't.
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