THE last thing that Kate Moss needed as she attempted to rebuild her modelling career after a visit to a drug rehabilitation clinic was a brush with a psychotic New York stalker.

Yet Moss found herself unwittingly caught up last week in a police hunt for a fugitive sex attacker who once declared himself “addicted” to the troubled British supermodel.

New York police are hunting Peter Braunstein, a Manhattan journalist suspected of a bizarre Hallowe’en attack on a former colleague almost two weeks ago. Braunstein, 41, is reported to have dressed as a fireman and set off smoke bombs to gain entrance to the flat of his 34-year-old victim. She was bound with tape, stripped and assaulted for 13 hours.

Moss, 31, had just returned to New York from her first modelling assignment since she emerged from the £2,000-a-night Meadows clinic in Arizona, where she had been seeking treatment for the cocaine addiction that was threatening to ruin her career.

She awoke on Thursday morning to find that the man dubbed the “fire fiend” by New York’s tabloid newspapers had once claimed he and Moss were “meant to be together”.

Braunstein, a former writer for the Village Voice weekly and Women’s Wear Daily, an influential fashion news sheet, published an article called Stalking Kate in BlackBook, a progressive magazine that describes itself as “clandestine and avant garde”.

The 2003 article has aroused concerns that Braunstein may have been trying to “impress” Moss by getting his name in the papers — perhaps acting out the kind of delusion that propelled John Hinckley to shoot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in the belief that it would make Jodie Foster, the Hollywood actress, fall in love with him.

In his BlackBook article, Braunstein said he had become obsessed with Moss in 1992 when she became an instant international icon for her waif- ish look in a series of Calvin Klein advertisements for a perfume called Obsession.

Three years later he wrote: “I tried to kick Kate cold turkey.” But Klein had launched a new campaign and once again Moss’s face was everywhere. Braunstein even persuaded his girlfriend of the time to let him keep a picture of Moss next to his bed. “There will never be a ‘next Kate’ for a simple reason: Kate is always ‘the next Kate’,” he wrote. “That makes her every woman, real or imagined, I’ve ever fallen hopelessly in love with.”

Representatives of Moss declined to comment last week, but relatives and former friends of Braunstein claimed his mental health had deteriorated since the article was published.

After the break-up of a two-year relationship with an editor at another fashion magazine, Braunstein started a blog that he filled with rants about his former girlfriend. He dubbed her “Biohazard — because she’s the most toxic woman I ever attempted to love”.

The former girlfriend eventually reported Braunstein to police and he was charged earlier this year with 37 misdemeanour counts, including stalking and menacing. He was sentenced to three years’ probation that began in September.

According to the New York Post it was also the former girlfriend who gave Braunstein’s name to police when she heard about the Hallowe’en attack. She knew the victim, but police are uncertain why she was chosen as a target.

Police sources said both Moss and the former girlfriend, who now lives in Massachusetts, had been told Braunstein remained at large and could be dangerous.

Police have established the journalist obtained a passport a few days before the attack, but there is no evidence he has left the country.

Shortly after the victim was left blindfolded and bound in her flat in the Chelsea district of Manhattan 12 days ago, Braunstein checked into a nearby motel where he was filmed by security cameras.

He then disappeared and has ignored pleas from his father and other family members to turn himself in. “I want him to come in to the police to defend himself,” said Alberto Braunstein, a Manhattan gallery owner. He added that he had not heard from his son for more than two years.

For Moss the case can scarcely have been welcome as she tries to repair the damage to her image caused by the publication of photographs showing her snorting cocaine.

Among the firms that had distanced themselves from her was H&M, which last week turned to Stella McCartney to provide a publicity buzz with a low-budget collection that sold out in a transatlantic frenzy.

Moss was also dumped by Chanel and by H Stern, the jewellery company, but memories appear to be short in the fashion industry and there are signs that designers are already prepared to forgive and forget.

Moss was last week reported to have made £100,000 from her first post-rehab assignment, for Roberto Cavalli.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end