A former Barneys executive has sued a scion of the fallen luxury empire over his bestselling memoir, claiming the book falsely blamed him for the iconic retailer’s downfall — and that the author and his brother were the real culprits.
Ex-Barneys president Charles Bunstine alleges that Gene Pressman’s “They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Store” is a smear to his reputation — with the book falsely claiming that Bunstine “had neither the feeling, nor the experience to satisfy the responsibilities required of his role at Barneys.”
In reality, it was the Pressman brothers’ “inexperience” in growing the business they inherited from their father — the legendary merchant Fred Pressman — that ultimately doomed the chain, with an overly aggressive growth strategy that sparked “significant cost overruns,” according to Bunstine’s suit.
Calling the tome nothing but a “score-settling account,” Bunstine is demanding $2.4 million and an apology from 74-year-old Pressman and his publisher Penguin Random House, according to the suit filed earlier this month in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Pressman did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Penguin and Pressman declined to comment to The Post. Bob Pressman did not respond to requests for comment.
In a September email reviewed by The Post, Penguin told Bunstine that it would “refrain from ordering reprints of the book while we work through your claims.”
“They All Came to Barneys,” which debuted in September on the New York Times bestseller list at No. 6, implies that Bunstine “was responsible for or at minimum significantly contributed to the Barneys bankruptcy in January 1996,” according to the complaint.
The book dismisses Bunstine as a “bean counter” whose “attempts to institute order” at Barneys alienated both vendors and employees, causing a stampede of talent to leave the company before its January 1996 bankruptcy, according to the suit.
“The problem was, Charles just wasn’t ‘Barneys,” Pressman writes, according to the suit.
“He hadn’t been raised in it the way we had – dyed in the wool, as it were. Charles was ‘efficiency.’ He was an accountant type, and he was going to run Barneys like a business. But Barneys – though it was responsible for millions in sales and plenty of careers – wasn’t anything as staid as that. Barneys was Barneys.”
“He even got involved with our vendors, negotiating without the finesse or understanding that had always characterized those relationships,” the memoir states.
Yet in the buildup to Barneys’ bankruptcy filing in January 1996 – a move Bunstine said he strongly opposed, even as he became the “public face” of the implosion – the Pressman brothers withheld key financial information from him, including why it wasn’t paying vendors, the ex-president alleged.
Barneys needed cash and the Pressmans turned to Japanese lender Isetan, making personal guarantees for the loans that even Gene was hesitant to go along with, the suit claims.
”’I am never signing this,’ I seethed at Bob,” Gene Pressman wrote in the memoir “This is total bulls–t. Business is one thing, but I’m not going to jeopardize my family.”
“‘Don’t worry,’ [Bob] told me. All of our assets—our shares in Barneys, the real estate—were protected in trusts and had been for years. We could sign personal guarantees, but the Japanese would never be able to break into the coffers.”
Isetan doled out $600 million in loans for the aggressive expansion, including a store in Tokyo.
Bunstine recounts a heated meeting in Tokyo, where Isetan president Kazumasa Koshiba “walked behind his executives to an empty chair that he did not take. He stood directly across from [the Pressmans], raised his hand to point his finger at them and said, ‘We trusted you.’ His tone was one of anger. He then left as did all his executives,” according to the lawsuit.
Barneys was at its “peak of success” during his tenure, Bunstine claims. But Pressman’s book allegedly “works to settle his score against the individual his father gave responsibility to.”
Bunstine was hired by Pressman’s father Fred – who famously transformed his own father Barney Pressman’s men’s suit business into a luxury empire in the 1960s – as a senior executive in 1992.
Fred Pressman made Bunstine president in 1995, becoming the first person outside the family to reach the upper echelon of the company. Gene Pressman and his brother Bob — who was in charge of finances at the time — were co-presidents. Their mother and two sisters were involved in the business as well.
Bunstine claims his promotion was a slap in the face to Gene Pressman, who allegedly mischaracterized the reason Bunstine became president – writing that it was because his dad was diagnosed with cancer.
Pressman implied that Bunstine was tapped by someone “facing the end of his life after a diagnosis … rather than what the chairman, CEO and owner wanted to do to further the success of his business,” according to the complaint.
The plaintiff also takes exception with how Pressman framed the timing of the events, stating that the cancer diagnosis came after the promotion – not the other way around, as the book states.
It all comes down to sour grapes, alleges Bunstine, who currently heads luxury bridal designer Anna Maier.
“Fred made me president and took all Gene’s direct reporting away from him and gave it to me,” the suit states.
In recent years the Pressman brothers became estranged.
Last year, Bob Pressman accused his late mother and siblings of orchestrating an elaborate tax fraud scheme that cheated New York state out of $20 million. Gene Pressman was served with the suit at a signing in Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan last year, as The Post exclusively reported.
Barneys filed for bankruptcy for a second time in 2020. All of its stores closed and the brand is now owned by licensing firm, Authentic.
