Infamous New York City sex predator Peter Braunstein denied parole
Two decades after committing one of New York City's most twisted sex crimes while disguised as a firefighter, former fashion journalist Peter Braunstein has been denied parole, authorities said.
The New York State Parole Board rejected Braunstein's first bid for parole after he failed to show up to his parole hearing, according to the state Department of Corrections (DOCCS).
"Peter Braunstein waived his scheduled appearance with the Board of Parole on August 19, 2025. He was denied release," DOCCS said in a statement to ABC News on Wednesday.
The 61-year-old Braunstein's next opportunity for parole will be in August 2027, a DOCCS spokesperson said.
Braunstein, who is incarcerated at the Wende Correctional Facility near Buffalo, will continue serving a sentence of 18 years to life. He did not reply to a letter from ABC News requesting comment.
A Manhattan jury convicted Braunstein in 2007 of first-degree sexual abuse, kidnapping, robbery, and other crimes tied to the attack nearly 20 years ago.
A former writer for the fashion magazine Women's Wear Daily, Braunstein dressed as a New York City firefighter on Halloween night 2005, set off smoke bombs outside his victim's apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and pretended to evacuate people in order to coax the victim into opening her door, according to prosecutors.
Once inside the victim's apartment, Braunstein threatened her with a realistic-looking fake handgun and placed a chloroform-soaked rag over her face, rendering her unconscious, prosecutors said. Braunstein, according to prosecutors, stripped off the victim's clothes and tied her to a bed, placing a pair of high-heeled shoes on her that he found in her closet. Over the next 12 hours, he sexually tortured the victim, prosecutors said.
The victim was a former colleague of Braunstein's who had worked closely with his ex-girlfriend at W magazine, a sister publication of Women's Wear Daily. In a series of media interviews Braunstein did from prison after his conviction, he said he targeted her after becoming obsessed with her as a symbol of what he hated about the fashion industry and blamed her for his downfall after he was fired from his magazine job.
Asked in an ABC "20/20" interview following his 2007 conviction why he sexually tormented the victim, Braunstein said, "I guess to humiliate her."
Despite his absence, Braunstein's parole hearing proceeded without him. Before the hearing, the Parole Board received a letter from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, asking the panel to deny parole and alleging that Braunstein is still a "danger to society." Prosecutors claimed that his nearly 20 years of incarceration have done little to reform him.
"He has shown himself to be a determined, angry, and vengeful man. Time and again he has demonstrated that he is a danger to society, and he has clearly and repeatedly stated that should he be released from prison he will continue to be a danger to society," Maxine Rosenthal, senior counsel for the Special Victims Division of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, wrote in the July 25 letter to the Parole Board.
In the letter, Rosenthal, who led the prosecution's case against Braunstein, noted that in a series of media interviews following his conviction, Braunstein never expressed remorse, and in several interviews said, "I regret the choice of victim, but not the crime itself" and that he believed "the crime was justified."
Rosenthal also said in her letter to the Parole Board that even after being convicted and sent to prison, Braunstein violated court orders by continuing a "campaign of harassment and intimidation" of an ex-girlfriend until at least 2014 by sending letters to her from prison or attempting to call her, her employer and her relatives. Just three months before Braunstein committed the sex attack for which he was convicted, he pleaded guilty to menacing the ex-girlfriend, a magazine beauty editor who died in June 2025 from cancer, and was placed on probation.
"In response, letters were sent to the prison superintendent requesting that a negative correspondence order be issued prohibiting the defendant from having any further contact with the former girlfriend," Rosenthal wrote in the letter to the Parole Board.
Braunstein was arrested in December 2005 following a six-week nationwide manhunt. He was captured in Tennessee after a witness recognized him from the show "America's Most Wanted" and alerted police. As officers approached Braunstein, he attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the neck with a knife, according to Memphis police.
