Passion runs high during New York Fashion Week, and this year the tension exploded in a slap heard around the world.
The spat was reportedly caused by several front-row seats – the seats for people who want to be seen at the high-end event – were removed by fire marshals.
“About 30 minutes before Zac Posen’s scheduled start, fire marshals decided to pull 60 seats from the designer’s mostly front-row Avery Fisher Hall venue. It caused quite some confusion and a headache for Posen’s public relations firm, HL Group. That, and the 40-minute delay said to have been caused by Naomi Campbell’s late arrival, must have been too much for at least one French publishing executive and her team, namely Marie-José Susskind-Jalou, president of Jalou publishing house, and her daughters, Jennifer Eymere and Vanessa Bellugeon of Jalouse and L’Officiel magazines, respectively.”
Reportedly, Susskind-Jalou did not have a seat, which infuriated her daughter, Jennifer Eymere.
Lynn Tesoro, PR guru for the HL Group, was in charge of promoting the Posen collection. They were not pleased with the removal of seats either, but Tesoro certainly did not expect a physical confrontation. Eymere, her mother, and her sister all began screaming at Tesoro over the disturbance of seating arrangements.
Eymere claims she warned Tesoro of the slap before it happened. “I said ‘Don’t speak to my mom like this … Be careful. I am going to slap you.’ And she kept doing it and it just happened,” Eymere told WWD. She admits that she did slap Tesoro, saying, “‘It was a small slap. It was not strong. I didn’t hurt her. It was just to humiliate her. She humiliated my mom and I humiliated her in front of her crew. Voila. I just said at the end, ‘Now you know you don’t f–k with French people.’”
A witness to the event sid of the slap: “It was a ‘Whoa’ kind of moment. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being a knockout punch and one being a pat on the cheek, it was a five. The sound could be heard.”
Tesoro filed suit immediately with on Wednesday with the Manhattan Supreme Court, claiming “assault, battery, emotional distress, slander and/or libel.”
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