The sex trial of a deranged New York journalist has heard sensational evidence that he wanted to kill Anna Wintour, the iconic British fashion editor who inspired The Devil Wears Prada.

Ms Wintour, the icy editor of American Vogue, apparently provoked Peter Braunstein because she refused to answer his telephone calls.

“She just never talked to peons like us. It was beneath her. And all the while I’m thinking, ‘Who is this skank?’,” Mr Braunstein, a former media correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, wrote in a “personal manifesto” found on a computer disc in his backpack when he was arrested after six weeks on the run.

“She plays up this aristocratic, ‘Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake’ routine, but, excuse me, can I get some proof that she holds a title of nobility that goes back to the 13th century? No. All she does is edit a magazine. That’s it. So what’s with the royalty routine?” he wrote.

“I mean, for Christ’s sake, the woman slept with Bob Marley, one of the most soulful people ever to walk the face of the earth. If that didn’t spiritualise her, nothing would.” He said that Ms Wintour would not need her favoured furs in Hell, just tropical wear. “Wintour will be escorted by eunuchs to a place in Hell run entirely by large rats,” he wrote.

Mr Braunstein, 43, is accused of dressing up as a fireman and sexually assaulting a former coworker after faking a fire by letting off two homemade smoke bombs outside her flat in the Chelsea section of Manhattan on Hallowe’en in 2005.

Defence lawyers admit that he chloroformed the 36-year-old woman, tied her to the bed and molested her for hours but say that he has a brain abnormality that means that he is not responsible for his actions.

Portions of Mr Braunstein’s ravings were read in court on Monday without the jury present as lawyers argued over what could be admitted into evidence. The manifesto praised killers such as Gianni Versace’s assassin, Andrew Cunanan; David Berkowitz, known as “Son of Sam”; the perpetrators of the Columbine school massacre; and even the fictional Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. It quoted the rapper Notorious B.I.G. saying: “You’ re nobody ’til you kill a whole bunch of other people.” The judge ruled that only the sections relating to Ms Wintour could be presented to the jury because they showed his rage at the fashion industry.

Mr Braunstein does not say in the manifesto how he intended to kill Ms Wintour, only that shooting her would be too impersonal. “So I’ll tell you why I’m going to kill Anna Wintour – because I just feel like it,” he said.

A forensic psychologist, testifying for the defence, described Mr Braunstein as a “textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia” who wanted revenge “against the fashion industry that was superficial, against post-9/11 hypocrisy, against firefighters as phoney heroes, against a world that treats talented, sensitive people this way”. Barbara Kirwin told the court that Mr Braunstein became unstable after he was fired by Women’s Wear Daily in October 2002 and was dumped a year later by his girlfriend, Jane Larkworthy, the beauty editor of its sister magazine W.

Ms Larkworthy, 44, set the fashion world atwitter with testimony earlier in the trial about their sexual role-playing. She said that she had bought a nurse’s uniform to please him. Mr Braunstein would pretend to be a patient in a mental institution and announce to the “nurse” that he had not taken his medication. “That would lead to sex,” she testified.

Sometimes, she said, Mr Braunstein would tie her to the bed or pretend to chloroform her, as he did with his 36-year-old victim. Ms Larkworthy said that she indulged in the role-playing “because he was into it . . . and I derived some kind of enjoyment from it”.

Ms Larkworthy indicated that Voguehad played a role in Mr Braunstein’s dismissal. He was accused of being rude to a Vogue publicist. When his boss told him to apologise or be fired, he “stormed out”.

The trial continues.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?