THE STYLE ISSUE the Mexican Actress Who

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For Immediate Release: March 14, 2016 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 THE STYLE ISSUE

The Mexican Actress Who Dazzled El Chapo

In the March 21, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Go-Between” (p. 66), Robert Draper tells the exclusive, behind-the-scenes story of how the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo ended up accompanying Sean Penn to the jungle to meet El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel— and how she says Penn betrayed her trust in writing his now famous article for Rolling Stone. In January, 2012, del Castillo tweeted her support for Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo; in 2014, Castillo says, he made contact by e-mail, through an associate. In Sep- tember, 2014, del Castillo took a private plane from Miami to an airstrip near Mexico City, where she was met by two of El Chapo’s lawyers. Over lunch, the attorneys told del Castillo that, while El Chapo had received numerous oﬀers from Hollywood producers, he trusted del Cas- tillo and wanted to give her the rights to his life story. “I was, like, ‘You are kidding me,’ ” del Castillo tells Draper. “ ‘O.K., hold on. First of all, is he interested in a movie, a book, a documentary, a series?’ They said, ‘Anything you want. He’s giving you the rights.’ ” She mentioned her new project to almost no one. One exception was an Argentine producer named Fernando Sulichin, who brought in another Argentine, José Ibáñez, who had produced the Oliver Stone documentary “South of the Border” with Sulichin. She conveyed their collective interest to El Chapo’s attorneys. On January 9, 2015, Guzmán signed over his story rights to del Castillo, for a project to be co-produced by Sulichin and Ibáñez. “That one of the world’s most cunning criminals would entrust his life story to an actress he had never met would seem fantastical even in a movie,” Draper writes. But, del Castillo says, “maybe he thought I could understand his world, in a way.”

On July 12th of last year, in news that del Castillo says shocked her, El Chapo escaped from prison. Believing that their project stood a better chance if a major American film star was involved, del Castillo and her partners reached out to Sulichin’s friend Sean Penn. In September, they all flew by private plane from California to Mexico to meet El Chapo. What del Castillo didn’t know, she says, was that in the lead-up to the trip Penn had contacted Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, who assigned Penn to write a story about the trip. Penn was carrying a letter of assignment from Wenner, which said that he, Sulichin, and Ibáñez would be the story’s authors. They were escorted to meet El Chapo by his son Alfredo Guzmán. Over tacos and tequila with El Chapo, Penn announced that he was writing the story; Penn tells Draper, “From our first meeting, I discussed with [del Castillo] my intention to interview Joaquín Guzmán for an article in connection with the meeting that she facilitated. We discussed it again during the flight and the trip to Mexico with our partners.” Del Castillo says that Penn’s claim that he told her about his idea for an article at their first meeting is “total and complete bullshit.” Del Castillo coöperated with Penn, serving as a translator during their hours-long interview. A few days after their meeting, Mexican troops began conducting raids in the area, and the drug lord was eventually captured.

Draper writes, “After the arrest of El Chapo and the publication of Penn’s story, it soon became ev- ident that the Mexican government was singling out del Castillo as a target of investigation.” Though El Chapo may well have exchanged texts with a number of people while in hiding, only the conversa- tions with del Castillo were leaked to the Mexican media. Of the implication that El Chapo’s connection to her ultimately led to his capture, Castillo says, “I wanted to die.” Draper writes, “Her movie project with a notorious criminal has not turned out as planned, but del Castillo maintains that the endeavor is a worthy one,” and she retains the rights to the film project.

Clinton, Sanders, and the Future of the Democratic Party

In “The Great Divide” (p. 38), Ryan Lizza speaks to Bernie Sanders, Clinton insiders, and those on the front lines of both campaigns, and examines the deep tensions that the Vermont sen- ator’s candidacy have exposed within the Democratic Party. “While the Republican Party es- tablishment has been blindsided by the populism behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a similar sentiment has existed on the Democratic side,” Lizza writes. “Clinton’s campaign was slow to grasp the scale of that movement and to acknowledge the momentum of the Sand- ers campaign.” Lizza notes that, lately, Hillary has sounded less like a Clinton Democrat and more like a Sanders Democrat. “Since the campaign began, she has modernized her positions on trade, the economy, and criminal-justice reform,” he writes. Sanders doesn’t buy the trans- MAIRA KALMAN formation. “It doesn’t matter what her policies are,” he tells Lizza. “What matters is whether or not, if she is elected President—and we’re in this to win—if she’s going to stand up and ﬁght. And I think there are many people who will tell you, look, that will not be the case.” Sanders adds, “The question is not what she says. The question is what her record has been and what she will do if she is elected President.” As the race continues and the delegate count goes in Clinton’s favor, however, Sanders has sounded increasingly frustrated that she has co-opted some of his message. “When I spoke to Sanders last week, he refused to speculate about any Convention scenarios that didn’t include him as the nom- inee,” Lizza writes. Lizza asks Sanders if he feels that he made a mistake in not pressing the issue of Hillary’s e-mails. “I understand that the po- litical commentators stay up nights hoping and praying that I could become a Donald Trump, because they love Donald Trump,” Sanders says, referring to Trump’s dark warning that Clinton will be indicted and unable to continue her campaign. Sanders acknowledges the seriousness of the investigations, but says, “We have a legal process by which it is occurring and it will take place.” While Sanders has a tough road ahead of him, he has a large campaign war chest and maintains that he will stay in the race until the end. Two reasons for him to do so, Lizza writes, are to exact concessions from Clinton and to inﬂuence the Party’s platform. Real change, Sanders says, happens by reaching out and mobilizing millions of people. “There is no indication that Hillary Clinton has ever done that, or ever wants to do that,” he says. “You don’t go and give speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street and be the same person that is going to rally the American people. That just does not exist.”

China’s Rich Have Their Own Homegrown Couturier

In “The Empire’s New Clothes” (p. 54), Judith Thurman travels to China and explores the work of Guo Pei, who has been called the country’s first “homegrown master couturier”—and who recently gained widespread Western attention for the first time, when Rihanna wore a sprawling, sunflower-yellow, fox-trimmed cape of her design to last year’s Met Gala. Guo, a gracious woman of forty-nine, tells Thurman that she had never heard of Rihanna when she called. She continues: “And I don’t like lending big things to celebrities.” Guo creates couture that is handmade to order. She is the “court dressmaker” to China’s rich, Thurman writes, noting that the house specialty is wedding and evening wear of delirious opulence, with five- or six-digit price tags. Her patrons are “the consorts of oligarchs, women entrepreneurs, and, reportedly, the wives and daughters of Party officials,” Thurman writes. Guo and her husband and partner, Cao Bao Jie, known as Jack, have a shrewd business plan. “You can’t trust Chinese people to pony up,” Jack says, “and we can’t afford to spend months on a dress if they don’t.” So patrons of the house pay an annual fee, from which their orders are deducted. The club has four tiers of membership, with subscribers in the top tier spending roughly eight hundred thousand dollars. There are about four thousand subscribers. Guo tells Thurman, “I aim to create heirlooms that a woman can pass down.” Some critics say that her notion of identity isn’t contemporary, and that her designs—which feature traditional talismans—rein- force a Western stereotype about China. But, Thurman notes, Guo has succeeded in the global economy’s biggest market on her own terms. “I am confident about my work, and I don’t care what people think about it,” she says.

How Jeremy Scott Remade Moschino for the Instagram Era

In “Barbie Boy” (p. 46), Lizzie Widdicombe profiles the fashion designer Jeremy Scott, who specializes in youthful, exuberant kitsch—both at his eponymous fashion line and as the director of the Italian fashion house Moschino. Scott, who is forty, creates runway spectacles: the dresses in his last collection, whose theme was “Bonfire of the Vanities,” appeared to be literally on fire. Like Warhol and other Pop artists of the twentieth century, he is drawn to American mass-consumer culture. His designs often reference kids’ stuff: toys, cartoons. He’s made a SpongeBob SquarePants mink coat for Moschino; the latest Jeremy Scott collection featured tributes to “The Ren & Stimpy Show.” “I think it has to do with the fact that all those things are pop icons,” he tells Widdicombe. “I’m not, like, a Michael Jackson-type person who’s obsessed with childhood.” But, as Humberto Leon, of the store Opening Ceremony, says, “He’s a champion of the kids, and kids are a champion of him.” His work for Moschino, which he took over two years ago, has translated into profits for Aeffe, the design house’s parent com- pany: in the past year, sales are up twenty per cent. Ken Downing, the fashion director at Neiman Marcus, tells Widdicombe, “The ability to take a brand that had such deep roots in an eighties sensibility and bring back the humor, the extravagance of production, and take the tongue-in-cheek chic of the brand and reinvent it for a new customer has been nothing short of brilliant.” Scott is a divisive figure among fashion cognoscenti. But even those who dismiss Scott’s work agree that he is the perfect successor to Franco Moschino, who was sometimes called the court jester of Italian fashion. Pablo Olea, Scott’s P.R. director, tells Widdicombe, “Jeremy didn’t really set out to be contro- versial, and I do feel like he sometimes gets his feelings hurt by, like, a bad review.” Scott says, “You know, I don’t really like to dissect my work,” and compares himself to Barbie: “I think we’re both very misunderstood for doing something that’s very natural.”

Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson looks back at the 1924 contested Democratic convention and considers why many Republicans are openly hoping for a contested convention this year (p. 31); in the Financial Page, James Surowiecki examines how Donald Trump’s plan for the country’s budget, which has “no basis in reality,” stems from a long history of Republican candidates promising an impossible-to-achieve mix of tax cuts, increases in defense spending, and balanced budgets (p. 36); in Shouts & Murmurs, Ian Frazier imagines the plot of a gripping novel in which a thermonuclear warhead goes missing (p. 45); Peter Schjeldahl visits a David Hammons retrospective, at the Mnuchin Gallery, in New York City (p. 86); Dan Chiasson reads Robyn Schiff ’s third volume of poetry, “A Woman of Property” (p. 89); Jill Lepore reads Michael P. Lynch’s new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data” (p. 91); James Wood reads Mis- cha Berlinski’s new novel, “Peacekeeping” (p. 96); Hilton Als attends David Harrower’s play “Blackbird,” at the Belasco Theatre, in New York City (p. 100); Emily Nussbaum watches the ABC sitcom “The Middle” (p. 102); and new fiction by Annie Proulx (p. 76).

The March 21, 2016, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, March 14th.