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- [x] 11:53 :wine_glass: [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]], [[!!Wine|Wine]]: Order a couple of boxes of [[Nadine Saxer - Blanc de Noir]] 📅 2023-01-31 ✅ 2023-01-04
- [x] 11:53 :wine_glass: [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]], [[!!Wine|Wine]]: Order a couple of boxes of [[Nadine Saxer - Blanc de Noir]] 📅 2023-01-31 ✅ 2023-01-04
- [x] 11:57 🐛 [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Eradicate flies & such in the kitchen 📅 2023-01-15 ✅ 2023-01-04
- [x] 11:57 🐛 [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Eradicate flies & such in the kitchen 📅 2023-01-15 ✅ 2023-01-04
- [x] 12:24 :hospital: [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Find a charity shop in [[@@Zürich|ZH]] to give away clothes 📅 2023-01-10 ✅ 2023-01-04
- [x] 12:24 :hospital: [[2023-01-03|Memo]], [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Find a charity shop in [[@@Zürich|ZH]] to give away clothes 📅 2023-01-10 ✅ 2023-01-04
# Gisele Bündchen on Tom Brady, FTX Blind Side, and Being a “Witch of Love”
**If Gisele Bündchen** is a witch, she’s a good witch.
The supermodel is conjuring her mystical, much-TikTokked-about powers at 7:30 on a recent Friday morning in her “bedroom”—a minimalist casita in the shadow of her towering main house, perched high among the dense palm treetops of Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula—where she is cupping a wounded bird.
Bündchen has just discovered the unmoving robin nestled on a white couch on her terrace, a serendipitous landing place with a panoramic vista of the beach below. Looking bereft, she scoops the bird up with the ease of a Disney princess, taking care with its mangled claw.
“Are you*okay*?” Bündchen coos to the bird, her throaty voice softening to a whisper. She is stroking its tiny head with an elegant unpolished index finger—performing “a little Reiki,” as she says, referring to the holistic practice of transferring healing energy through touch. She does the same to her kids, Benjamin Rein, 13, and Vivian Lake, 10, all the time.
“He has a little poo-poo,” Bündchen notes in her distinctive accent. The robin has soiled one of Bündchen’s pristine cushions, but she is unbothered, consumed by its fate. (She later spot-cleans the bird’s poo-poo herself.) She calls her home’s caretaker, Victor, hoping he’ll rush it to a local animal sanctuary, and drips water into its beak from an incense holder turned makeshift bird feeder. “I’m afraid that he’s going to die if he stays like this,” she says.
Just then, the bird flinches. “Maybe he’s going to fly,” Bündchen whispers.
Bodysuit by **Versace.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
Bündchen explains that she regularly communes with birds, squirrels, and butterflies. She is surrounded by what she calls Costa Rica’s “symphony of nature”: chirping insects, squawking parrots, and the lionlike roars of locally renowned howler monkeys, brought closer by a fully retractable fourth wall of her hideaway. She begins to describe the splendor: “I found this hummingbird by the ocean one day when I was walking with the dogs—”
Suddenly, the robin claps its wings and banks from Bündchen’s hands, soaring out over the hilltop. We are astounded. Either its rumpled foot miraculously healed or Bündchen really is a witch—“a witch of love,” she offers.
“It’s an omen!” she declares, her eyes wide. We analyze the bird’s swift recovery, melodramatically searching for meaning, right down to its droppings. “He needed to release!” Bündchen laughs. But a broken bird flying free, at this particular moment in Bündchen’s life, can’t help but be its own metaphor.
“I don’t want to be limited,” Bündchen told me in one of our many intimate conversations over two days at her compound. “I want to spread my wings and fly.”
Bodysuit by **Alaïa.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
**Let’s get it** over with: Off duty, 42-year-old Bündchen is giving mythic goddess. The godmother of the beach wave’s hair flows in its natural state. Her makeup-free skin is a preternatural Nars Laguna bronze. She wears a chestnut brown bandeau bikini top and high-waisted jean cutoffs—she dons only crop tops or bikinis while I’m there, because shirts and surnames are superfluous when you’re Gisele. Her stature might be intimidating if she didn’t also possess a boundless golden retriever–like energy.
As most sentient beings know, Bündchen is [emerging from a long and productive union to once-again former NFL quarterback Tom Brady](https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2009/5/and-god-created-gisele)—god or pariah, you pick. The supercouple finalized their divorce last October after a slow burn of headlines that intermixed the fate of their marriage with that of his career: There was Brady’s long-anticipated retirement in February 2022, of which Bündchen had seemed in favor; his*un*\-retirement 40 days later; his 11-day absence from Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camp to address “personal” things; the hiring of attorneys; and, after a garish but brief divorce watch, the dropping of the other shoe: nearly identical statements vowing to be amicable co-parents and professing gratitude for their time together. By the time Brady re-retired in February, the pair had consciously uncoupled.
Their glittering union seemed prom-perfect: swanning through the Met Gala 11 times (once, famously, in coordinating Versace); embracing amid the hoopla of Brady’s Super Bowl wins; kissing at sunset in this very house, where they held their second wedding in 2009, following a Catholic ceremony in Santa Monica, after which Brady grilled steaks for dinner. And so theirs was a split of Jolie-Pittian, and Pitt-Anistonian, proportions. The feeding frenzy was part parasocial projection, part gender discourse: If “Gisele and Tom” can’t make it, what about the rest of us? Can two alphas at the apex of their careers coexist in a marriage? Must the female partner in a cishet partnership—no matter how successful she is—always assume the lion’s share of childcare? Or maybe it was schadenfreude.
Around two and a half months have passed since the announcement by the time she picks me up at my hotel in Costa Rica on an ATV in a taupe sports bra, matching short-shorts, and Rainbow flip-flops. A blue-and-white linen scarf is looped around her head and face not for privacy—she is treated as a local by the locals, if not the tourists—but to combat the clouds of dust kicked up on unpaved roads. She offers me a matching scarf, and we rev uphill.
Only two and a half months, after 13 years, and Bündchen’s emotions are still palpably raw. “It’s like a death and a rebirth,” she tells me. She is sitting cross-legged in the living room of the main house, an open-air temple in the sky that could be the lobby at Amanyara. The gated compound—complete with a pickleball court, a yoga palapa, and a chicken habitat, where the family gets its eggs and recycles its scraps—overlooks a sleek pool and, beyond that, endless ocean.
Losing a partner to divorce is often likened to a death. Bündchen is mourning “the death of my dream,” she says. “It’s tough because you imagine your life was going to be a certain way, and you did everything you could, you know?” At this, her voice breaks. She apologizes, pressing her fingertips into her eyes, which rim pink and watery. After several yogic inhale-exhales, Bündchen resumes. “I believed in fairy tales when I was a kid. I think it’s beautiful to believe in that. I mean, I’m so grateful I did.”
“You give everything you got to achieve your dream,” she adds. “You give a hundred percent of yourself, and it’s heartbreaking when it doesn’t end up the way you hoped for, and worked for, but you can only do your part.”
Bündchen’s marital contributions have been well documented: For most of her partnership with Brady, the woman who was long the highest-paid model in the world scaled back her career in favor of his. She stopped walking the runway in 2015, and a few years later, moved from her longtime home of Boston to Florida. “When we moved to Tampa, I actually had never been there before,” Bündchen tells me. “I just arrived and that was my life.”
The initial decision to focus her considerable energy on wifedom and motherhood was entirely Bündchen’s. “When I met Tom, I was 26 years old, and I wanted a family. I felt so ready,” she says. She’d been working relentlessly, up to 350 days a year, since she was discovered at a São Paolo mall at age 13. In December 2006—a year after she broke up with Leonardo DiCaprio—Bündchen and Brady were set up on a “blind date” by their mutual friend Ed Razek, the former CMO of Victoria’s Secret’s parent company and much-criticized mastermind of its Angels. The minute Bündchen laid eyes on Brady at West Village wine bar Turks & Frogs, “I knew right away,” [she told this magazine in 2009](https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2009/5/and-god-created-gisele).
Smack in the middle of the couple’s honeymoon phase and one day before the news broke publicly, Brady informed Bündchen that his ex-girlfriend, actor Bridget Moynahan, was pregnant. Some (many?) women might have bolted. Bündchen, indeed, considered bowing out. Looking back, it was “a challenging situation for all of us,” she says. Instead, when Brady and Moynahan’s son, Jack, was born in 2007, Bündchen embraced him as her “bonus child.”
Dress by **Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello;** belt by **Artemas Quibble.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
Jack, now 15, accelerated Bündchen and Brady’s plan for a family. “Jack came into our lives and I felt so blessed and it kind of awakened in me this desire of being a mom,” Bündchen says. “I’ve always dreamed of being a mom, but I think that happened a little faster than I thought, because now I have this beautiful little angel that I get to care for and love.” Benjamin and Vivian were born via water birth at home in Boston (which Brady initially opposed but Bündchen insisted on) in 2009 and 2012, respectively. “My world was them,” Bündchen says. “Do you know how grateful I am that I got that time for myself? I breastfed my kids until they were almost two years old. I was taking them to school every day. I was making them breakfast, lunch… I was*there.*”
But Bündchen was never your typical WAG. Even after going to “the Valley,” her apt name for the mom-dominant phase of her career, her modeling millions—thanks to contracts with Pantene, Dior, Chanel, and others—reportedly surpassed Brady’s NFL salary for most of their marriage. (His new Fox Sports broadcast contract is rumored to be worth up to $375 million.) In pursuit of extracurricular business ventures, Brady and, to a lesser extent, Bündchen shot advertisements for—and invested millions in—Sam Bankman-Fried’s recently collapsed cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, where Bündchen assumed the title of environmental and social initiatives head. “I was blindsided,” Bündchen tells me. “I’m no different than everyone else that trusted the hype.” She says she is legally unable to discuss specifics, but says she had believed FTX to be “a sound and great thing based on what my financial advisers told me.”
“It’s just...terrible,” Bündchen adds. “I’m so sorry for all of us that this happened, and I just pray that justice gets made.”
Despite her earning power, Bündchen reasoned that her job was more flexible than Brady’s. Like so many women and mothers, she surrendered a bit of herself: “I wanted to build the best possible relationship with Tom, Jack and our children,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir*Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life.*“I’m also a peacemaker who likes making everything better, easier, and more harmonious for the people I love.”
For a long time, that was Bündchen’s MO, she tells me now, two freshly plucked baby coconuts speared with metal straws, hers largely untouched, sitting on the table before us. As their children got older, her aspirations bubbled. “Vivi, my baby, is 10, and she’s very independent,” Bündchen says. “I have dreams,” she clarifies. “I have my own dreams.” She wants her children to see her pursue them: “You want to show them that, in life, you have to find real fulfillment, not living something that you’re not.”
Brady continued collecting championship rings, even as he became practically geriatric in pro football. Particularly after Brady leapt to Tampa in 2020, the issue seemed to snowball. “My wife has held down the house for a long time now, and I think there’s things that she wants to accomplish,” Brady shared on his*Let’s Go!* podcast in October 2021. Around the same time, in a YouTube video answering fan questions, including if Brady could play until age 50, he yukked it up with teammate Rob Gronkowski, who added: “Will*Gisele* let Tom play ’til 50?”
When their marriage officially ruptured last year, the media and the public assumed the timeline and its causation: that the marriage ended after Brady U-turned out of retirement. But marriages aren’t built, or broken, overnight, Bündchen says now. “That takes years to happen.”
Headlines cast Bündchen as a sidelined shrew, with the prevailing explanation centering on a supposed ultimatum: If his career continued, their marriage would not. The only problem is that, according to Bündchen, no such thing ever happened. She calls those characterizations “very hurtful” and “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Listen, I have always cheered for him, and I would continue forever,” Bündchen insists, her voice thick with emotion. “If there’s one person I want to be the happiest in the world, it’s him, believe me. I want him to achieve and to conquer. I want all his dreams to come true. That’s what I want, really, from the bottom of my heart.”
With Jack, Benjamin, and Vivian, Bündchen had been omnipresent at Brady’s games. Yet the tabloids “made me somebody who is against football,” she said of the headlines. “Are you kidding me? I learned about it! I used to joke that I was going to be able to be the ref because I’ve watched so many games. And I loved it.” The winking conspiracy about Bündchen’s magical powers escalated when Brady divulged in 2019 that Bündchen built him pregame altars and gifted him special “healing stones.” She confirms that she drew homeopathic floral baths for Brady—“whenever he was going through difficult times, you know, he has a lot of intensity, to help him calm his nerves”—and gave him onyx, “a stone of protection,” and a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha, the remover of obstacles.
Hot pants by **Ferragamo;** hat by **Jacquemus.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
When I ask Bündchen if there were stories written about their split that simply weren’t true, she flatly replies, “Everything.”
“Like, I would give up my dream because of…” Bündchen trails off.
“One more season?” I attempt to fill in.
“Wow, people really made it about that,” she says. “What’s been said is one piece of a much bigger puzzle,” Bündchen tells me later. “It’s not so black and white.” Bündchen also dismisses digital murmurs that politics—namely, the MAGA hat spotted in Brady’s locker in 2015—drove a wedge. “Never,” she tells me.
I don’t believe that she or anyone else can summarize the unraveling of a 13-year marriage to a relative stranger in a couple of hours over fresh coconut water. What Bündchen does indicate is a gradual drift between her and Brady—one that predates the retirement saga of the past year. “Sometimes you grow together; sometimes you grow apart,” she says. “When I was 26 years old and he was 29 years old, we met, we wanted a family, we wanted things together. As time goes by, we realize that we just wanted different things, and now we have a choice to make. That doesn’t mean you don’t love the person. It just means that in order for you to be authentic and truly live the life that you want to live, you have to have somebody who can meet you in the middle, right? It’s a dance. It’s a balance.”
“When you love someone, you don’t put them in a jail and say, ‘You have to live this life.’ You set them free to be who they are, and if you want to fly the same direction, then that’s amazing.”
**The life Bündchen** wants to lead—*la pura vida,*or the simple life—would, ideally, be based full-time in Costa Rica. “My dream was to raise my kids here,” Bündchen tells me. “I didn’t get to be here as much as I’d like, but now I’m bringing them more often.” (Both are partially homeschooled.) Bündchen has a “village” of local friends and neighbors. On Friday nights, they make gluten-free pizzas in her outdoor oven, then circle the firepit holding sticks and sharing stories. A recent night’s topic: courage. Bündchen plays pickleball with Benjamin (“Benny”) and, every other day, rides horses with names like Pinta and Alcancía (“Piggybank”) through the countryside with Vivi. I join them on their afternoon ride to the beach, clumsily plodding through muddy streams, ducking under dangling palm fronds, and chasing the setting sun so Vivi can gallop along the shore. “If I never went to another city again,” Bündchen says, “I’d be perfectly happy.”
Bündchen is building a tiny solar-powered house in the mountains—the casita is practice—where she hopes to grow all of her own food. She’s considering opening a wellness center nearby, not a far cry from the way she’s long introduced loved ones to juicing or silent retreats. “I want to do things that I believe are an extension of me,” Bündchen says. “Being a model is not really an extension of me... It’s being an actress in a silent movie.” At this point in her life, “I don’t want to be a character in anybody else’s movie. And when I do that, it doesn’t feel as comfortable for me anymore.”
Miami will be the modern family’s “main location” going forward. Bündchen has found a waterfront home in Surfside (she’s meditating through endless construction), where the kids can be close to Brady’s $17 million mansion in the exclusive village of Indian Creek, where neighbors include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner (she has yet to run into either). “Miami works for me because it’s literally a direct flight to Brazil,” Bündchen says, where her parents and five sisters, including her twin, Patricia, still live. “I’m going to go more to Brazil.” Bündchen often speaks Portuguese to Benny and Vivi, striving to keep them close to their heritage.
Fifteen years of co-parenting Jack with Moynahan is helping inform how Bündchen navigates custody with Brady and sibling time for all three kids. “I say to Bridget—you know, I have a great relationship with her...” Bündchen pauses, then declares, “Everything in life comes with work. You have to go through the roller coaster. You have moments where you get to the sticky points and you’ve gotta overcome it.”
Did Bündchen always have a great relationship with Moynahan? I ask, somewhat rhetorically. “No!” Bündchen blurts. The two women didn’t meet for more than a year after Jack was born, but they eventually reached the point where Bündchen, Brady, and Moynahan mingled at the park in New York, where Moynahan is based, and the women hugged in the streets of Boston. “Love conquers all,” Bündchen says of her experience with Jack and his mom. “My life became so much richer because I got to learn so much from *that.*” The primary lesson: “Nothing is worth fighting \[over\].”
With Moynahan, “my goal was always, how can I be the most helpful? How can I make it the easiest I possibly can?” Bündchen reflects. “I put myself in her shoes and I was like, ‘How can I support her?’ Because in the end of the day, we are team players in ‘How are we going to do this so \[Jack\] can have the best life?’ ”
And so she strives to maintain an amicable relationship with her ex, even when tabloid leaks shake her poise. “We’re not playing against each other,” Bündchen insists. “We*are* a team,” she says, “and that’s beautiful. I look back and I have no regrets. I loved every bit of it.”
Bündchen and her son and daughter were, in fact, still cheering for Brady right up until what turned out to be his last game ever (if his second retirement sticks) in the wild card round of the NFC playoffs a few days before we met. The Dallas Cowboys trounced the Bucs in one of the worst postseason performances of Brady’s career, but Bündchen declined to add to the pile-on. “It was tough, but you know what? Let’s just be honest. It’s a team sport and you can’t play alone,” she says. “I think he did great under the circumstances that he had. I mean, he had no offensive line.”
Jacket by **Alexandre Vauthier;** swimsuit by **Norma Kamali;** shoes by **Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
The whole brood is thriving, and Jack remains her bonus child. “I love him so much,” Bündchen says of Jack, who is “quarterbacking”—very much a verb in this household—with aspirations of going to his father’s alma mater, the University of Michigan. Benny, who is alternately lounging with friends and studying for a math test, prefers drawing on his iPad and non-ball sports like surfing and skiing (the athletic pressure of being Brady’s son led to bullying in Boston after one particular baseball game). Vivi is a tie-dye-clad aspiring horse jumper whose likeness to Bündchen is so uncanny that she can unlock her mother’s Face ID.
Together, Bündchen, Benny, and Vivi have thrown themselves into jujitsu—“Jack loves it too, but he doesn’t do it as much because he’s not with us as much”—practicing the martial art under the tutelage of Miami-based Brazilian brothers Pedro, Gui, and Joaquim Valente. The family is so devoted, there’s a room dedicated to it, and teachers travel with them in four- or five-day stints.
“They’re all like senseis,” Bündchen says of the “amazing” trio’s mind-body-spirit ethos. With Jack and Benny now in their teens, Bündchen questioned, “how can I help them to have a person that has that level of integrity and can teach them values?” For seven years in Boston, Bündchen—a Bruce Lee devotee nicknamed “Giselee” by Brady—had practiced kung fu, with sword and stick fighting, even doing so into her ninth month of pregnancy.
Bündchen and the kids found community at the Valente brothers’ academy. “They’re awesome people,” she says. “They have created this safe space.” Pedro, the eldest, is “the philosopher,” while Gui is “composed and calm.” Then there’s the youngest, Joaquim, who teaches Bündchen and her children. He has been photographed grabbing dinner with them at nearby Koji’s, jogging—and splitting a set of AirPods—with Bündchen, and riding horses with her and a group of kids. In an Instagram Reel she shared last year that has since been viewed more than 9 million times, Bündchen, in a white gi, is seen body-slamming, headlocking, and generally owning a Valente brother in the name of jujitsu.
Bündchen blithely elides the rumors that she and Joaquim are dating: “I think, at this point, unfortunately, because I’m divorced, I’m sure that they’re going to try to attach me to anything,” she says of tabloid reports, before going on to emphatically praise Joaquim, along with his brothers. “I’m so grateful to know all of them, because not only have they helped me and helped my kids, but they have become great friends, and Joaquim especially,” she says. “He’s our teacher and, most importantly, he’s a person that I admire and that I trust. It’s so good to have that kind of energy, to have my kids around that type of energy.”
Weeks after I’ve left Costa Rica, the*Daily Mail*pivots to a new “exclusive” narrative: linking Bündchen to real estate developer Jeffrey Soffer, a friend of Brady and Indian Creek resident (and the ex-husband of Elle Macpherson). When I reach Bündchen by phone as the story ricochets around the internet, she is devastated. She’d spent the previous day in the mountains without cell reception, then returned to what she called the “absurd” report. “I have zero relationship with him in any way,” Bündchen says of Soffer, adding that she has not so much as laid eyes on him in over six months. “He’s Tom’s friend, not my friend.” I tell Bündchen that I’d questioned myself whether she’d date someone so close to Brady. “I wouldn’t be with his friend. I wouldn’t be with this *guy,*” she says. I can almost hear her grimace. “I mean,*puh-leeze.*” She especially resented the implication that she’d strategically date Soffer, a 55-year-old billionaire: “They were saying I’m with this guy, he’s old, because he’s got money—it’s ridiculous.”
Bündchen and one of her sisters (who’d first flagged the offending story) suspect the rumor was planted. “Who benefits from this?” Bündchen wonders. “Why would somebody plant something like this? There’s only one reason. They want to make me look like something I’m not.”
What really breaks up Bündchen—bringing her again to the brink of tears—is not only her suspicion that “people have been creating false stories about me from the beginning of the divorce,” but “the hate” behind that alleged campaign. “Seeing lies being created all the time about yourself is not easy.” She vacillates between publicly saying more, and deciding to “take the high road” for the sake of their children. “I’m a simple girl who wants to be in nature—leave me alone. I just want to go do my job and raise my children in peace.”
And that is what she has otherwise been doing in her private refuge. In their wall-less living room, Bündchen and Vivi indulge my request for a mini self-defense lesson. If an attacker were to approach me head-on, “you lift your foot up and you kick with your heel,” Vivi advises with utmost gravity—aiming, ideally, at the perp’s knee.
“Bang!” Bündchen demonstrates in slow motion.
“A girl took this big guy by kicking him three times,” Vivi adds. “Joaquim told me.”
The mother-daughter duo quickly gets fired up. “What are you going to do, Vivi, if I come and grab you?” Bündchen shouts, role-playing a brute grabbing the girl from behind. “You would go like*this,*” Vivi says as she lunges forward and grabs her mother by the ankles—they are a tangle of lithe limbs, with the same long-toed feet—miming how she’d knock her mother off-balance and throw her backward to the floor. I’m left with total confidence that Vivi could destabilize a grown man.
Bündchen informs me that you can break a nose with the heel of your palm, but the goal is to never have to. “What does Joaquim say?” Bündchen asks Vivi before answering her own question: “Don’t go in conflict.”
I tell Bündchen that jujitsu seems like a very empowering thing for women to learn.
“You have no idea.”
Bodysuit by **Alexander McQueen.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
**At 5:30 the** next morning, Bündchen—and Alfie and Onyx, two of her six rescue dogs—are walking toward me on the beach below her house. There’s an ethereal pinkish glow on the horizon, and the completely empty shore stretches before us like a sheet of mirrored glass. It looks a little like the movie version of the afterlife. “We are either living in heaven or hell,” Bündchen says, shaking her head knowingly. “That’s very much a choice.”
This is Bündchen’s daily ritual, where she comes to fill her proverbial cup before the children wake. She’s been up since 4:30, when she rises to her “Zen” flutelike phone alarm, meditates, then plays a 21-minute Devi prayer while moving through some yogic asanas. “I actually like to greet the sun and I like to say goodbye to the sun every day,” she says.
There are so many things she wants to do in her next act. “I’ll give you a funny one,” Bündchen tells me. “One of my dreams is I want to play a superhero.”
I’d prepared to ask Bündchen if she wanted to act in this 2.0 phase, citing her memorable cameo in*The Devil Wears Prada.*“I mean, imagine…I showed up for, like, two hours and who am I in the scene with?” she says. “Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and, um…Anne Hathaway!”
But no, Bündchen clarifies, she doesn’t want to*act*\-act. “I just want to play a superhero,” she laughs her hoarse laugh—perhaps She-Ra, Princess of Power, the almighty sword-wielding, unicorn-riding superheroine seared into the hearts of ’80s kids everywhere. She felt inspired when she took her son and daughter to see*Wonder Woman.*“Can I prove to myself that we, as women, can be that strong? Why not?” she says. “In fashion, people used to joke with me that I was Sporty Spice because I was always the one hanging from things, doing jumping pictures.” There’s an ulterior motive too: “I really want my daughter to think I’m cool, to be honest.”
Her children are still largely oblivious to her legacy. In her native Brazil, when “everyone stops me in the street, they’re like, ‘Mom, why are they doing that?’ ” She doesn’t bother showing them old magazine covers. In the latest development, Bündchen stars—topless and in jeans—in the new campaign for Louis Vuitton’s capsule collection with contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama, shot by her frequent collaborator Steven Meisel. Her costars are a mélange of the new and old guards, among them Christy Turlington, Liya Kebede, Devon Aoki, Bella Hadid, and Karlie Kloss. Bündchen says she doesn’t really know the It girl catwalkers of today—your Kendalls and Haileys. “I was living in Boston for 13 years,” she points out.
Bodysuit by **Alaïa;** cap by **Courrèges.**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
Recharging Bündchen’s modeling means more “really big fashion moments” to come, her longtime agent Anne Nelson teases. “The world is her oyster.” She says Bündchen has considered an activewear line that reflects her minimalist aesthetic. And Nelson has fielded “a million requests for her to walk shows in Paris.” “They still ask, just in case she changed her mind.” (According to Bündchen, “I never say never, because the only thing in life I am certain of is change.”)
Bündchen’s status has endured, even across the time she purposely slowed down. Recently, a seamstress informed the model that her measurements were identical to a mannequin’s. Compared to eras past, “there’s much more age inclusivity,” Nelson says, pointing to Kristen McMenamy, 58, Naomi Campbell, 52, and Kate Moss, 49, all still working. “People look at these iconic models as being the ultimate muses,” Nelson adds. “Age doesn’t even count.”
Bündchen has spent most of her life in fashion, but her early memories of the industry now seem twinged with trauma. The daughter of Vânia, a bank teller, and Valdir, who worked in real estate and later became a sociologist, Bündchen was raised in a hardworking middle-class family in the southern Brazilian town of Horizontina. If Bündchen wanted a doll, she had to wait until her birthday to get it. “All the girls were going over to grandma’s house, walking with bare feet on the dirt road and hanging out with the chickens,” Nelson tells me—the same sort of childhood the supermodel is now trying to re-create for her children in Costa Rica.
In typical sibling scuffles, Bündchen was scrappy: “She had the power to end the fight,” her twin sister, Patricia, told me via email. Still, “it was difficult for Gise to grow up so thin and tall in a small city,” Patricia says. “She felt out of place. But when the opportunity to be a model came, it felt just right.”
Instead of high school, 14-year-old Bündchen—already five foot nine—went to Tokyo for catalog work. With five other daughters at home, Vânia couldn’t join her. “She was unbelievably fearless,” Patricia says of her sister, “leaving home at 14, by herself, not speaking English.” Now, as the mom of a 13-year-old, Bündchen feels that she was catapulted into premature adulthood. “I was playing with Barbies at 13 and at 14, I’m in Japan, emancipated,” Bündchen rues. Logistically, she survived (she’d helped her family cook and clean since age seven) but felt “alone in the world.”
In her teens, she was living in notorious “models’ apartments” in New York, surrounded by cocaine and heroin use. “I saw things that were like, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she says. “I always say my guardian angels are very powerful.” As is enshrined in fashion lore, Bündchen’s breakthrough came in 1998, when she was 18, [strutting down Alexander McQueen’s spring-summer runway](https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2004/10/beautiful-dreamer), in the faux falling rain, ostensibly topless in a painted-on white crop top. Her body—*The*Body—single-handedly ended the waifish heroin-chic ideal and ushered in a comparatively more curvaceous era, but she has also said that the watershed show was one of the most traumatizing moments of her life. McQueen had intended her to walk completely topless (sans paint) and, scarcely speaking English, Bündchen was unable to advocate for herself.
She alludes to the underbelly of the industry: “The things I’ve seen and the situations I’ve escaped from just because I have faith…” she trails off. Bündchen recalls dehumanizing treatment at the hands of fashion’s inflated egos (although she doesn’t name names); unspeakable things said to her face; being treated “like you are an object…like you have no feelings,” she remembers. “You have to survive that—” her voice wavers, and her eyes again blink back tears. “It’s just emotional. I feel everything so deeply, and when I remember it, I feel like I’m living it again.” When I ask her what she’s remembering that makes her cry, she simply says: “How tough it was.” She might have quit, but “I didn’t want to go back home empty-handed,” Bündchen says. “My parents trusted me. I wanted to show them that I could do it. I didn’t want to fail.”
When she began to suffer panic attacks in her early 20s, she turned to yoga, meditation, and traveling more often to Costa Rica. “My natural instinct was, ‘I’m not going to be a victim of this. I’m not going to sit here and be like, ‘Why are they treating me like this? Why are they leaving me standing here naked for, like, eight hours without offering me water or food? Why are they being so mean?’ ” Bündchen says. “I could have been sitting there thinking, Am I even worthy of anything?”
According to her twin, Bündchen held fast to her family values and the simplicity of her upbringing. “She was never dazzled,” Patricia says.
Instead, Bündchen dug in her stilettos. “I could have chosen to do drugs. I could have chosen to party. I could have chosen to allow…the vampires that are out there to suck life out of me and use me,” she says, “but I came out of it. I wasn’t broken.”
The sun is rising on the beach, which means it’s time for Bündchen’s daily gazing. She closes her eyes, tilts her chin up to the sky, and inhales deeply, letting its warmth beam down on her famous face.
**“Question: Are you** having problems going to the bathroom, or no?”
Bündchen is, surreally to me, inquiring as to the state of my digestive system because it determines what ingredients she’ll add to the round of morning smoothies she’s making for the house—another daily post-beach-walk, post-sun-salutation ritual. “Bananas are more binding and papaya is more releasing,” she explains, ping-ponging between a Vitamix and a Champion juicer in her kitchen before gesturing to the howling outside. “You hear the monkeys?”
Fruits and vegetables harvested from her hillside garden legitimately excite Bündchen. She plans to share her earthy recipes in a forthcoming cookbook. “My goal is to make it really simple,” she says. The bounty, much of it spilling across her countertop, includes “little bananas,” “skinny bananas,” and cuadrados, a short, fat, local banana; two types of kale (soft and crispy); yucca (“We make yucca chips”); green peppers (“We just did these peppers last night with olive oil and salt”); and pitanga. “Have you ever had pitanga?” Bündchen proffers a cherrylike berry.
The kitchen is all bustle: Bündchen pours smoothies for her kids, Jordan (one of the children’s teachers), Jordan’s “lady,” “las chicas” (two women preparing food in the kitchen), and me. She built this main house to accommodate group hangs, mainly with her big Brazilian family. The casita, though, is her “sanctuary,” she says as she leads me there via short stone pathway.
Hers is a magnificent she shed, all clean, blond-wood lines of her own design, flanked by banana and papaya trees, a cold-plunge pool and a hot tub for one carved into the ground outside. Her 900-square-foot “little house”–cum-bedroom is “100 percent off the grid,” Bündchen says proudly, pointing to the lone light bulb dangling above a kitchen island lined in books. Titles range from the spiritual to pseudoscientific: neo-shamanistic author don Miguel Ruiz (no relation);*Sextrology: The Astrology of Sex and the Sexes*(Bündchen is a family-oriented, homemaking Cancer);*The Miracle of Water* by Masaru Emoto, which argues that positive words spoken to water (“hope,” “adoration”) have the power to form snowflake-like crystals in H2O, while negative speech (“ugly,” “hopeless”) creates murky ones. It’s instructive for the way people speak to themselves and others, Bündchen posits, as “we are mostly water.”
Tank top by **Dior;** bikini bottom by **Norma Kamali;** cuff by **Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.** Throughout: makeup products by **Chanel;** nail enamel by **Chanel Le Vernis**Photograph by Lachlan Bailey; styled by George Cortina.
Crystals stud inside and out, including a hunk of purple amethyst and a milky selenite angel, which Bündchen says “clears energy” (presumably not the positive kind), sitting on her nightstand. Her bed is made in crisp white linens with an Hermès scarf featuring elegant leopards folded at the edge (Vivi has been sleeping with her lately). Above her bed hangs an oversized black-and-white aerial photo of a surfboard-wielding Bündchen dwarfed by the enormity of the ocean. From a deep drawer at her bedside, Bündchen reaches for the Kuan Yin Oracle, a collection of feminine-focused, tarot-like cards centered on Buddhism’s goddess of mercy and compassion. Two days before, Bündchen pulled the card for “dynasty of the divine mother,” which urged her to “look to what is happening in your life,” she reads as incense burns on the cedar table before us, “and trust that you are progressing with perfection.”
“This is why they called me a witch, I guess,” Bündchen laughs, considering the cards before us, but she is less peeved by WitchTok’s speculations than prepared to agree with them. “If you want to call me a witch because I love astrology, I love crystals, I pray, I believe in the power of nature, then go ahead.” A lapsed Catholic, Bündchen’s mystical proclivities are her gospel now, one that has been a salve and a source of strength when she’s needed it most.
She used to believe in fairy tales, but not anymore. “No one is going to come save you,” Bündchen says. “Never give your power away to*nobody.* This is your life. This is your movie. You are the director on it.”
After our interview, Bündchen, Vivi, and Benny jetted back to Miami, but she was still thinking about the wounded bird she helped set free in Costa Rica. A few days later, Bündchen googled its potential meaning and sent me a screenshot. “Seeing a robin encourages us to let go of the negative affecting our lives,” she had circled in yellow, “and embrace a new and happier phase.”
“The robin,” she’d underlined, “symbolizes new beginnings.”
*HAIR, SHAY ASHUAL; MAKEUP, DIANE KENDAL; MANICURE, KRISTINA KONARSKI; SET DESIGN, BELINDA SCOTT. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY SELECT PRODUCTIONS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.*
- Paris Hilton Remembers the[“Bimbo Summit”](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2023/03/paris-hilton-memoir-excerpt?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-032223) in Her New Memoir
- [What Is Cinema?](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/what-is-cinema?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-032223) Rian Johnson, Halle Berry, and More Share Their Inspiration
As we continue [week two](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/manhattan-grand-jury-wont-discuss-trump-in-thursday-meeting.html) of the Donald Trump–indictment watch, questions abound. Is it really [going to happen](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/the-first-criminal-case-against-trump-is-this.html)? Did last week’s testimony from lawyer [Robert Costello](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/team-trump-launches-a-preemptive-strike-on-michael-cohen.html) in defense of Trump successfully throw a wrench in the process? Does [the testimony](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/nyregion/trump-grand-jury-witness-indictment.html) on Monday from David Pecker — the former publisher of the *National Enquirer* who helped arrange the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels that appears to be at the center of the prospective prosecution — mean that the case is back on track for an indictment? And what, exactly, is the holdup?
The answers to these questions are as elusive at the moment as they are tantalizing, but one thing has become clear: Key witness Michael Cohen and his pathological need for media attention have not been making things easier for the Manhattan district attorney’s office in recent weeks.
The former Trump lawyer has always been a curious figure in this saga. He [pleaded guilty](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax) to a slew of criminal charges during the Trump administration, including [lying to Congress](https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/29/michael-cohen-making-surprise-court-appearance-in-new-york-1026107), lying to a bank, tax evasion, and campaign-finance violations based in substantial part on his role paying off Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. Cooperating witnesses in criminal prosecutions often have baggage, but the way prosecutors generally try to deal with this is by forcing them to admit responsibility for their own criminal offenses and corroborating as much of their testimony as possible through independent sources of evidence, including other witnesses and documents.
Cohen, however, presents additional challenges. He clearly thinks very highly of himself and seems to have little awareness of his limitations — a toxic combination in both life and the law. He appears constitutionally incapable of telling the same story twice in the same way, though whether that is a function of malice, dishonesty, or some other factor is never entirely clear. He is also obsessed with taking down his former boss Trump, and he has managed to make a second career out of it — both through [his podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mea-culpa/id1530639447) and his countless appearances on cable news, which have been crucial to maintaining his public prominence.
The voluminous record of Cohen’s public statements has always been a problem for prosecutors because it creates a risk that he could be confronted with inconsistent or problematic past statements at trial to undermine his credibility. That risk was on full display in what was supposed to be the final stretch leading, at long last, to charges against Cohen’s arch nemesis. Indeed, Cohen has said at least two things in recent interviews that would ordinarily raise red flags for prosecutors working with an important cooperating witness — first, that the cooperator is unwilling to fully accept responsibility for his prior criminal conduct and, second, that even now he is unwilling or unable to be forthright about unhelpful facts.
Take, for example, [an interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W295sdkklic) with Cohen conducted by CNN’s Don Lemon. This was styled as Cohen’s first television appearance following the conclusion of his grand-jury testimony, which, by itself, almost certainly drove prosecutors in the Manhattan DA’s office crazy. Ideally, a key cooperator in a high-profile criminal case would not be talking to the press at all at this point, if ever.
That, however, was not the end of it. At one point in the discussion, Cohen touched on his criminal convictions but suggested that he had in fact been unfairly prosecuted. “One of the things that I think will come out of this investigation,” Cohen told Lemon, “other than the potential indictment of Donald Trump, is a lot of information about how the Southern District of New York dealt with me in my specific case.” Referring to his current lawyer, Lanny Davis, Cohen added, “He has so much information about the weaponization of the Justice Department against me that — there’s nobody else that knows the story better.”
Lemon did not seem to register what Cohen was saying in the moment and moved on, but this was by far the most interesting and potentially consequential thing Cohen said during the sit-down. What exactly did he mean? Davis, for his part, seemed to back Cohen up late last week in an [interview with Politico](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2023/03/24/cohens-lawyer-dishes-on-the-n-y-trump-investigation-00088701), recalling that at one point in the history of his dealings with his client “Michael was angry because he had been, I think, mistreated by law enforcement in the Southern District, and prosecuted.”
One interpretation of these comments is that Cohen does not actually believe he should have been criminally prosecuted and does not believe he should have had to plead guilty to the litany of federal offenses that now make up his criminal history. If that is the case, it would be difficult to understate how large a problem this would be for his credibility — and for prosecutors. Either he committed the offenses at issue and has accepted responsibility for them, a fundamental prerequisite for a crucial cooperating witness, or he was unfairly railroaded and forced to plead guilty despite being innocent of some or all charges. He cannot have it both ways, and there is no way that [Trump’s lawyers](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/joe-tacopina-donald-trumps-lawyer-vs-e-jean-carroll.html), in a trial setting, will let this slide.
Cohen’s slipperiness was on display elsewhere during the discussion. He described his willingness to cooperate with the Manhattan DA’s office as reflecting his newfound commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and he said he had told the federal judge who sentenced him that he would work to help the government. Cohen told Lemon that he did not ask for a cooperation agreement (potentially protecting his legal interests in the future) when he was dealing with the Department of Justice in his own criminal case — in his telling, a signal of his own good faith and public-mindedness.
He left out an important fact, though: The reason he did not have a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors is that they did not actually believe Cohen had fully cooperated with their investigation. The sticking point was that Cohen would not agree to disclose to them any criminal conduct they had not already uncovered — a prerequisite for cooperation with the Southern District of New York (though not all prosecutors’ offices).
As the New York *Times* [reported at the time](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/nyregion/michael-cohen-sentencing.html), “prosecutors made clear” to the presiding judge “that Mr. Cohen was less useful to their investigation because he would not fully cooperate, therefore he would not reap benefits, such as a government letter on his behalf” advocating for a reduction in sentence. “Had Cohen actually cooperated,” prosecutors told the sentencing judge, “it could have been fruitful,” but because he did not, the government was unable to “fully vet his criminal history” and assess “his utility as a witness.” This is important not only because it undermines Cohen’s claim that he is deeply committed to cooperating with the government — and not only because it is almost certain to come up if Cohen is ever cross-examined — but also because his unwillingness to be completely forthright with Lemon about what happened seemed to reflect a deeper, more problematic relationship with the truth.
In [another](https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari/watch/trump-clown-show-see-key-witness-scorch-trump-ally-s-testimony-165838917597) [appearance](https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari/watch/-panic-trump-melting-down-over-imminent-arrest-says-star-witness-cohen-165838405569) on Ari Melber’s MSNBC show, Cohen offered Trump’s lawyers more future ammunition. At one point in the discussion, Melber played a clip of Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina attempting to discredit Cohen at length by referring offhand to Cohen’s misconduct “with the medallions and all that stuff.” Cohen began his response to Melber by saying, “Shame on Joe Tacopina. First and foremost, there was no fraud in the medallions. I don’t know even what he’s talking about.”
Here is a good guess: Tacopina was probably referring to the fact that Cohen [pleaded guilty](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax) to tax evasion in connection with millions of dollars in revenue that he received through [taxi medallions](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/23/taxi-commission-warns-michael-cohen-they-may-revoke-his-medallions.html) he had acquired. The conduct formed the basis for five of the federal charges against him, which makes it very difficult to believe he did not know what Tacopina was talking about. (Again, if Cohen is actually maintaining his innocence on those counts, that would be very bad for the case against Trump.)
Cohen also took aim at Costello, who evidently briefly served as [a legal adviser](https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/20/former-attorney-to-michael-cohen-tries-to-discredit-him-in-grand-jury-testimony-00087982) to Cohen. The two now seem to dispute the extent of their relationship, but Costello had been allowed to testify before the grand jury about his dealings with Cohen as the result of an agreement that Cohen executed to waive any attorney-client privilege between the two men. Cohen told Melber that he did not recall such an agreement. “If in fact I waived attorney-client privilege, I’d like to know when, how, where. I don’t recall waiving anything.” Later that night, Costello presented a copy of the agreement with Cohen’s signature in [an interview](https://www.foxnews.com/video/6322993205112) with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
The odds that the waiver was a fabrication of some sort, even before Costello presented the document on live television, were very low, whatever one might think of Costello himself. The reason is that prosecutors in the Manhattan DA’s office would have been treading on ethically problematic ground if they had allowed a lawyer to breach his privilege with a former client in the absence of evidence that their dealings had furthered a [crime or fraud](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/us/politics/trump-lawyer-classified-documents-investigation.html), which has not been alleged here.
It is not clear whether or to what extent Cohen’s comments — or questions about his credibility more generally — might be playing any role in the apparent delay in the Trump proceedings. Prosecutors may already have reconciled themselves to the notion that Cohen is both central to their prospective case and that he will continue to be a nuisance until the proceeding ends, one way or another, years from now. There is, however, no question that it would be better for the case if Cohen could bring himself to stop talking for the foreseeable future, even if he appears incapable — financially, temperamentally, and psychologically — of exercising some much needed self-restraint.
How Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Delaying Trump’s Prosecution
On visiting Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele.
Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
- Published March 20, 2023Updated March 24, 2023
### Listen to This Article
Imagine walking into a party where you know almost no one (pathetic) — a party at which I, a stranger to you (probably), have arrived well before you (sorry). Should this occur in real life, it is inevitable that shortly after your entrance, as you are tentatively probing the scene in search of safe ingress into social traffic, I will yank you, abruptly, into the middle of a conversation. I will turn to you and start talking as if you’d been involved in the discussion for an hour. I will lob questions at you that are tailored so that any answer you give can be right. Soon, you will forget I dragged you into this interaction; your easy popularity will seem, in retrospect, inevitable. You will most likely feel at least vaguely friendly toward me, because I so clearly want to be your friend. And the whole time I am doing this — because, despite your rewritten recollections, I am the one doing all of this — I will be thinking: Oh, my God, I’m doing it again. I hate this. I hate this. Why can’t I stop doing this to people?
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.
That millennials are the largest human adult cohort alive; in or about to enter their peak-earning years; less likely than earlier generations, at the same age, to live with a spouse and/or offspring; and highly susceptible to YOLO — a brain condition that makes a nine-day vacation to Croatia sound like a fun and affordable alternative to homeownership, which seems impossible anyway — would seemingly be enough to justify the existence of a travel company dedicated to serving them. Indeed, there is a nascent industry devoted to creating millennial-oriented travel package experiences of the type generally set aside for people much younger (e.g., [Birthright Israel](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/us/israel-birthright-jews-protests.html)) or older (e.g., [Rhine river cruises](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/travel/river-cruises-drought-europe.html)). In promotional copy, these companies’ sleek websites deploy the verb “curate” to describe the work of travel agents. Flash Pack, which aims to lure vacationers who would otherwise be traveling solo and marshal them into traveling bands of up to 14, is one such business.
What makes Flash Pack unusual is its “mission” — “to create one million meaningful friendships” — and a method of execution that it telegraphs with evangelistic zeal: “We obsess over the group dynamics,” its website explains on one page. “We absolutely obsess over the group dynamic,” it states on another. “We’re completely obsessed with it” (“it” being the group dynamic), Flash Pack’s 42-year-old chief executive, Radha Vyas, is quoted as saying on an F.A.Q. page intended to calm nervous vacationers. Another page, titled “How It Works,” opens with the promise that the company “obsesses over the group dynamic, doing everything in our power to ensure you’re comfortable and building friendships within the first 24 hours.”
With this intention, the agency stands in stark, even proud violation of a sociological paradox: to have many friends is a desirable condition; to plainly seek to make friends is unseemly and pitiful. Millennials’ broad acceptance of the taboo around extending oneself in friendship — perhaps an aversion to participation inherited from their direct predecessors, Generation X — is particularly irrational, given that millennials report feeling lonely “often” or “always” at much higher rates than members of previous generations.
Who, I wondered as I scrolled through the inviting images on the company’s home page, are the millennial adults drawn to a pricey international vacation for the purpose of befriending strangers? If I plunged into a trip chosen at random, would I surface to find myself flailing among social incompetents — phone-addled young people who yearn for real-life connections but are unable to forge them under normal conditions? Or would I be surrounded by the sociopathic winners of this great game — the Jeff Bezoses of friend-making? Obviously, my fellow vacationers would be natural freaks of some kind — but would they be so because they had overcome the intrinsic shame of seeking friends or because they were naturally immune to it?
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
The mystery started to resolve itself two weeks out from our trip, when every participant of the “Morocco Highlights” tour was added to a WhatsApp group and encouraged to introduce themselves — a suggestion we responded to with so much zeal you would think it were an assignment that constituted 60 percent of our grade; and we were determined to maintain our perfect grade-point average; and we had actually been secretly hired as “plants” by the school administration to sit in on this class, in the hope that we would contagiously motivate the real students to strive for comparable excellence, creating a domino effect that would boost the school’s rankings; and we would love to take advantage of extra-credit assignments (if they were available); and, actually, we had gone ahead and conceived and executed what we felt might be some edifying extra-credit assignments, in case none were available.
We sent portraits of our pets, announced which items on the itinerary we anticipated most eagerly and provided photos of what we loved most about the places where we lived (the mountains of North Carolina; sunlight gleaming off the Charles River; the solitary beauty of a Baltic beach, which, it was hoped even before meeting, some of us would “come visit one day!”). I wondered publicly in the chat if anyone in the group might be “superorganized” and willing to share a packing list. Within 60 seconds, I received in reply an image consisting of a tabular representation of our itinerary, each column head designating a day, underneath which was a cell listing the major activities of that day (extracted and paraphrased from the official itinerary), underneath which was a full-length photograph of the sender, wearing the exact outfit, including shoes and coat, she intended to wear on that day, for those activities.
When I asked Radha Vyas, who founded Flash Pack with her husband, Lee Thompson, to give me the profile of a typical patron, she described her clients as “decision makers or leaders” in their regular lives who “want somebody else to take control” of their vacations. “Lots of our customers are lawyers, doctors, and they’ve done really, really well in their careers,” she said over video chat from London — so well that they have developed “decision fatigue” from the litany of correct decisions they have been forced to make while scaling new professional heights. “They just want to turn up,” Vyas said. “Somebody tells you where to be, what time, what to do, what to wear, and you can just let go.”
**My group’s official** welcome meeting was scheduled for 6 p.m. the Sunday of our arrival, by which point nearly all pack members had taken it upon themselves to welcome one another in various permutations as they arrived at our Marrakesh hotel from Denver, London and beyond. I was still asleep, flying over the Atlantic Ocean, while the unofficial pre-welcome welcoming logistics began to be codified, and then continuously revised and expanded in the WhatsApp group. Before I got off the plane, most of the other travelers were already linking up, grabbing lunch, or coffee, or rooftop drinks at a restaurant near the hotel.
I had been distressed that my late-afternoon arrival (well within the company’s recommended arrival window) precluded my participation in the unsanctioned, prefatory socializing. But then, while I was waiting in line at the hotel’s check-in desk, I was approached by a brisk British stranger who gave an instant, slightly terrifying yet invigorating impression of uncanny competence, who asked, “Are you Flash Pack?” She had spotted the small brown bag containing a tiny hamsa-shaped welcome soap I had been given by a company representative at my airport pickup, and recognized it as the twin of the small brown bag containing a tiny hamsa-shaped welcome soap she had received, she explained — and so I was able to be unofficially pre-welcomed anyway.
There were 13 of us total. Each day of the trip, I would spend a little time privately trying to map the biblical significance of this number neatly onto our group, frustrated that no clear stand-in for Christ ever emerged. (If it was anyone, it was the vivacious and bubbly woman from a village called Burnham, which she described as “near Slough,” who was legitimately nice to everyone, and whose job investigating international commercial real estate disputes gave her experience performing little miracles in the Middle East.) Ultimately, the best I could come up with was that if Jesus had surrounded himself with 12 such team-oriented, schedule-conscious youngish (kind of) women, he might still be alive today.
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
It is a matter of historical record that Flash Pack has some male customers. However, there were none on the mid-February Morocco tour. What were the women like? Slightly more likely to be white than not, to be single than not and to not have come from the British Isles ... than to have not *not* done that; but only just barely, in every category. Our average number of offspring was 0.15 per person, because only one of us had children. There were two doctors (American) and one pharmacist (not). There was a project manager; an account executive; a head of; and a director (not that kind). There was the “quantity surveyor” from near Slough, and a person whose job title was five words long, two of which were “learning” and “partner.” There was a health care data analyst and a person who coordinates tour logistics for adventure-travel companies, who insisted she was, in fact, on vacation. There was a woman who was Irish, which was not her job, but, my God, she was good at it; she owns a pug who apparently is a successful working actor, which was also not her job. We ranged in age from 31 to 45.
“Morocco Highlights” is an expensive way to make friends: The price of the eight-day trip (the first and last days of which are devoted to arrival and departure) starts at $2,395. This includes shared accommodation in twin rooms with another traveler, most meals and all group activities. The additional expense of round-trip economy flights brought my cost to around $4,165 — within $30 of the median monthly income for an American woman at the end of 2022. The price and premise all but ensure that bookers will spend their trip surrounded by people who share not only their approximate income level (high, though not so high that they could fly a bunch of their actual friends to Morocco) but also their principles about what makes a vacation successful (an efficient use of time; a wide variety of commitments; transforming strangers into acquaintances).
At 6 p.m. sharp, by the cold hotel pool, we officially met and were welcomed by Ismail, our guide. Ismail’s command of English — his fifth language, he told us, by way of apology — was so strong he was able to be genuinely funny in it. (“Call me Ishmael!” he said — and many people did, the whole time.) His opening remarks included polite yet firm advice regarding group punctuality: If you were going to be “five minutes late” for any activity, at any point, please send a quick note via WhatsApp informing everyone else. I thought of this counsel when Vyas told me later that as Flash Pack trains its guides, it makes a point of teaching them to instill confidence in their administrative abilities at the very first meeting. “Because if they don’t,” Vyas said, “our customers will try and take control — because they are natural leaders.”
Over the course of approximately 30 distinct group activities — several of which required rising before dawn — there were two or three occasions when people dutifully gave warning that they could be very slightly late. Otherwise, all 13 of us were ruthlessly on time, except when we were early, which was often. It was the most exhausting vacation of my life.
**Picture a normal** vacation. Now, picture an activity that would be the primary event of one vacation day — possibly of the entire trip. Now, picture scheduling it to happen first thing in the morning. And then, immediately after that, another diversion of equal heft, and sometimes another, and possibly a fourth. Interspersed within the tent-pole itinerary items are more options for spontaneous activities. That’s what every day of this trip was like.
We started our first morning barreling through the thousand-year-old alleyways of Marrakesh’s serpentine medina in stylish retro motorbike sidecars; then headed straight into a self-guided tour of the Jardin Majorelle, the electric blue cactus paradise restored by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent; then took another tour of a secret garden (quite crowded, perhaps because it is well advertised as Le Jardin Secret); then had the option to embark on a supplementary souk shopping excursion before dinner, which itself consisted of an hourslong walking tour of medina food stalls and ended with one or two more spontaneous opportunities for shopping.
The dinner tour was led by a young man named Abdul, who, like all the men who led any of the tours, was young, handsome and dressed as if he could, at a moment’s notice, be called to ride a motorcycle to the offices of a men’s fashion magazine for an emergency photo shoot. Abdul ushered us past corridors of pierced metal lamps that glowed with the diffuse light of distant galaxies, brightly dyed babouches perched in rows like colorful parrots and jeans for babies, stopping every few minutes when, all of a sudden, we would be handed things to eat: olives plucked from glistening heaps; shards of fried puff pastry; orange soup; a sheep’s eye; nuts. In fact, this is how most of our meals occurred, even in restaurants (where, invariably, we would be seated together at one long table): Food would simply be placed before us without anyone having ordered.
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
The first time the food magically appeared, at our welcome dinner on a terrace overlooking the medina, we were served warm glasses of mint tea and tagines, which — not realizing these were but the first of 900 glasses of mint tea and 10,000 tagines we would be invited to consume over the next week — we ate heartily. The announcement of the final course inspired me to declare, in case anyone was listening, that I am “a dessert person.” Ismail was listening. Exhibiting the preternatural ability to get out ahead of potential threats to mood that the company strives to inculcate in its guides, Ismail informed me, as gently as possible, that “dessert in Morocco can be just fruit.” I began musing excitedly about the various fat and sweetness enhancements to which fruit can be subjected, transforming it into dessert. Ismail held my gaze. With the delicate assertiveness of one determined to form a connection with a jumper poised on the side of a bridge, he clarified: “Just fruit.” (As darkly foretold, the final course proved to be just orange slices.)
We travelers were almost never asked to produce money for any service, experience or tagine. Those few times we were — purchasing souvenirs, for instance — the transaction was typically conducted on our behalf, in Arabic, Berber or French, by Ismail, who then told us in English how much colorful Moroccan currency to hand over. These encounters suffused our tour with an intoxicating ease. Each day was crammed with activities, but we were shepherded through them in a state of such perpetual mollycoddling that, increasingly, our travels around Morocco felt like trekking through a gentle dream world.
We were driven into the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and introduced to a young Berber woman named Saida, who taught us how to make a meal (tagine) on her expansive living-room terrace, then gave us a tour of her apricot-colored stone-and-clay house. We were led virtually nude (not by Ismail), in trios and pairs, into a polished stone steam chamber where we were scrubbed, slathered, oiled and boiled until we resembled hot dogs fresh from the package. We were escorted across two lanes of traffic to an argan tree whose branches served as scaffolding for goats, and invited to hug the goats’ sweet, warm, soft babies to our chests. We were deposited before a squadron of ATVs and trusted to operate these roaring vehicles over a route of rocky desert terrain — pausing midtrip so that we could be guided, via graceful pantomime, through a sequence of photo poses — until, an hour later, we had driven ourselves to the sumptuously appointed canvas tents that would be our sleeping quarters in the Agafay Desert.
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
It is Flash Pack’s good fortune to attract the kind of control freaks for whom the delicious little thrill derived from living through an incident of well-executed planning is entirely distinct from, and in addition to, their enjoyment of the activity itself. “I like the way it’s being incorporated into the schedule,” the angel of near-Slough confided in me, reflecting with satisfaction on the way the ATVs did double duty as transportation and excursion. I was terrified every single second my ATV was in motion at the uncontrollable speed of 19 miles per hour — but I had to admit that I liked it, too.
**The company’s terms** and conditions grant it “the right to decline any booking at our absolute discretion.” In separate interviews, the founders described a postbooking process whereby a customer-service representative can internally “red flag” an individual who they suspect could pose a risk to the cohesion of the group.
“Normally, if there was a flag against the individual,” Thompson said, “we speak to them to make sure we’re managing their expectations and make sure they’re booked on the right trip.”
“One really cantankerous person can disrupt the group quite quickly,” Vyas said. The failure of a group to click, according to Vyas, can usually be laid at the feet of “one person whose expectations are completely out of sync with what we can offer.” A tip-off is when someone gives the impression of being “extremely demanding” about their personal preferences for the trip. While Flash Pack does not loudly advertise that customers are at theoretical risk of pre-emptive ejection from a trip (with refund) if the company suspects them of being the kind of person who will try to ram too many solo-vacation elements through the intricate itineraries on offer, it’s quite possible this threat would only make the offerings more appealing to the plan-loving, rule-following, fine-print-studying, steadfast competitors who form its client base.
About half the women on our trip had come to Morocco because they had always (or near enough) wanted to come to Morocco; the other half of the group had come because they wanted to take a trip of about one week’s duration sometime in mid-February, and the “Moroccan Highlights” tour satisfied this brief. If anything, those who ended up in the country by chance seemed especially delighted with how much they were enjoying a place that had never particularly occurred to them. Two members of the group — one British, one American — met on a previous Flash Pack excursion to Vietnam, during which they (as advertised) became good friends, such good friends that they decided years later to check out Morocco together.
An I.T. consultant on the trip who was a veteran of multiple Flash Pack tours, and of the U.S. Army, observed to me that on every vacation she has taken with the company, across four continents, every single participant she has met has had “a Type A personality.”
The notion of “A” as a “type” was theorized in the late 1950s by Dr. Meyer Friedman and Dr. Ray H. Rosenman, two American cardiologists who believed that most heart attacks suffered by people under 70 were directly attributable to an abundance of emotional stress. Such high stress levels, they proposed, were found in individuals who tended to exhibit a cluster of personality traits: “excessive competitive drive,” “aggressiveness,” “a harrying sense of time urgency,” feeling “vaguely guilty” when relaxing, etc. These were meant to be habits, not traits — something a person could unlearn. Yet almost from the moment the concept was introduced to the public, “Type A personality” has been used as shorthand to describe an intractable manner of being.
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
I had never thought of myself as Type A before my fellow vacationer’s observation. I had assumed the designation implied at least a moderate degree of neatness, which I have never exhibited. But the hallmarks she identified (per the American Psychological Association: “chronic competitiveness”; “high levels of achievement motivation”; “a distorted sense of time urgency”) all felt familiar. Later, when I learned that Friedman and Rosenman described individuals with Type A traits as “quite prone to exhibit a free-floating but extraordinarily well-rationalized hostility,” I became convinced. My tendency to mechanically entrap others into friendship seemed suddenly explicated: I do it because I have no tolerance for those who unintentionally imperil fun party moods by fostering atmospheres of social awkwardness.
I do not mean to suggest that all the women on the trip approached friend-making similarly. The lack of time for indecisive dithering was what made the trip soothing for me. For someone else, it may have been the ability to wonder, one afternoon, if it might be possible to get a tattoo while in Morocco — and then, by dinnertime, to have a brand-new tattoo, seamlessly facilitated by Ismail. But I contend that every member of our group, to some degree — to a very high degree — exhibited many of the traits designated Type A. I believe this because a vacation experience like the one Flash Pack offers — which promises a detailed itinerary, strict schedule, mandatory fun, controlled explosions of joy and defined periods of prearranged “free time” — is unlikely to attract a person who does not exhibit these tendencies, and also because by the end of the trip we had all memorized one another’s food allergies and were pre-emptively checking with waitstaff about them on one another’s behalf. (Vyas said that “stereotyping our customers as ‘Type A’” would be “a gross overgeneralization.”)
> ## The less said about Wine Day the better.
**We awoke on** the fifth day to a world of paradisiacal beauty. The clouds over the Agafay Desert were shot through with beams of gold at dawn. As the morning unspooled, these gave way to a creamy wash of slate blue and pearl gray, revealing our camp to be afloat on an ocean of gently swelling rocky dunes that stretched to the distant purple Atlas Mountains, whose peaks were luminous beneath fresh snow. The numbing cold of the previous day prevented us from using the pool that had, improbably, been built into the desert ground — and already it was time to depart. We were too committed to successfully executing the tour’s mission to be outright grumpy as we piled shoulder to shoulder into the van, staring down a three-hour drive to our vineyard visit. But it was clear to all, on the unusually quiet ride, that we would have to take proactive steps to turn the day around. And that well-intentioned resolve, I suspect, is what threatened to send the meticulously calibrated nuclear reactor of our group dynamic into meltdown.
From this point, the less said about Wine Day the better. Was there wine? Yes. Was there more wine? Yes! Was there anything else to do during the two and a half hours we were scheduled to be at the isolated winery — a period we were forced to spend indoors because of a cold drizzle — but guzzle wine? Yes! — I mean no! A little more wine before leaving? Wine! Did Wine Day bleed into Mixed Drink Dusk? For some. Was it followed by Shots Night? Absolutely. Was there a reason the 13 of us all dined together that evening, which was the only night of the trip we were not obligated by the itinerary to have dinner as one huge group? Friendship!(?) Did half our group end up at a club? Yes. Did two members of that half vanish when Ismail was not looking and sneak off to the ocean for a late-night skinny dip? Allegedly. Did this sort of behavior appear anywhere on the itinerary, an incorruptible document listing all legitimate activities? No, it did not. Had Ismail already formed an emergency recovery plan for the fugitives involving our hotel’s night manager by the time they sheepishly returned, wet from the sea? Of course. Did the unscheduled actions of these successful professional women threaten to cast a pall over Hammam Experience Day? Yes, but only because they detected (and confessed to us that they detected) the next day, through imperceptible indications, that Ismail was disappointed in them — a fate that would have been unendurable for any of us, who live to not disappoint others at any cost.
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Credit...Rosie Marks for The New York Times
Of course, the controversial acts of Wine Day were arguably a direct result of what the company set out to do. Because the tour had outlined its goals — for everyone on the tour to relax and become friends — very clearly on its website, it had attracted, as participants, a horde of demented overachievers whose determination to relax and become friends far exceeded that of the average person; who would stop at nothing to complete these objectives; who had paid thousands of dollars to pursue these aims among like-minded maniacs. These two women, while violating the tenet that Flash Pack vacations are not only vacations but also group projects, in which individual whims must be subordinated to the needs and desires of the commonwealth, had, nonetheless, passed the larger test: They had found time, outside the packed schedule, to do the sort of spontaneous thing a pair of real adult friends might, in theory, do on vacation. Had their behavior in any way impinged on the remaining officially sanctioned good times scheduled to fill out the final two days of our itinerary, it’s possible the remainder of the group would have devoted a portion of its collective acumen and pragmatism to ruining these women’s lives.
But the next day we took a surprise excursion to a fish market, where Ismail arranged for a banquet’s worth of fresh seafood to be placed before us, and personally squirted soap into our hands so we could wash them, and then we did yoga on the beach, and then Ismail agreed to take us out for ice cream before bed, and everyone participated and was on time, and we still had one full day left after that. So everything was, in other words, back to normal.
Upon my return from Morocco, I awoke after dawn for the first time in over a week. Rather than dashing out of bed to learn to surf (and then, still in my wet suit, ride a camel), I luxuriated under my blankets. The obligations of my real life (work, chores) were a breeze compared with the responsibility of converting 12 strangers into new friends while participating in a full daily docket of group activities. In the WhatsApp group, my aggressive campaign to persuade everyone to stay friends forever was already underway. The vacation was over. I could relax.
---
**Caity Weaver** is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote [a feature about spending time in a room engineered to be soundless](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/quiet-chamber-minneapolis.html). **Rosie Marks** is a photographer based in London and Los Angeles whose work focuses on people engrossed in their own worlds. She has published two books of documentary photography, including “Pretty Hurts.”
When Jaylen Brown was being recruited to the University of California, he met Derek Van Rheenen, a prominent cultural studies professor. They struck up a friendship months later, in a Cal summer program that Brown attended. Impressed by Brown’s intellect and persistence, Van Rheenen pushed for Brown to receive a special exemption to enroll in his graduate course the Theoretical Foundations of the Cultural Studies of Sport in Education.
One morning, Van Rheenen led a discussion about the ignorant belief that Black athletes are genetically more gifted than athletes of other races. “The corollary there is that maybe they’re not as intellectually or cognitively up for the task,” Van Rheenen tells me. “Like, yeah, you’re really good at playing basketball, but we don’t expect much more from you relative to your intellectual scholarship.”
The lecture lingered in Brown’s mind long after class. At basketball practice later that day, he lagged through drills and missed basic instructions. “There was this intense conversation; I’m working through it,” coaches recalled him saying. “I can’t just do the thing that you’re asking me to do.”
Brown was Cal’s highest-ranked basketball recruit since Jason Kidd, but he committed to the school ahead of the 2015-16 season hoping to find an identity beyond sports and to play for the predominantly Black coaching staff led by Cuonzo Martin. But on the way to practice that fall day, Brown felt like he was just another athlete living out the stereotype he’d discussed in class. Worse, he was the face of an institution making money off his talent.
“It make you not want to play at all,” Brown tells me. “Make you not want to even show up.”
When I saw Brown in Boston in January, he was going through a similar conflict. In the seven years since the Boston Celtics picked him third overall, Brown has blossomed from an inconsistent contributor into the face of one of the most successful franchises in sports. On the floor, he helped lead the Celtics to their first NBA Finals in a decade last season. Off the floor, the 26-year-old has used his voice and profile to enact social change. His foundation has partnered with colleges to create a bridge program for underrepresented youth aimed at closing the educational gap between races. And in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he led protests, became an advocate for social change, and inspired the Celtics front office to revamp its approach to community outreach.
But his quest to find worth beyond the game resulted in a number of public missteps in the past year. Last spring, he signed with Donda Sports, an agency founded by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West; five months later, the agency went dormant, and the school associated with it shut down because of the musician’s offensive behavior and comments. A couple of weeks later, Brown publicly defended Kyrie Irving’s right to free speech after his former teammate tweeted a link to a movie that spewed antisemitic tropes.
His basketball life has also been complicated. He’s still reconciling the departure of Ime Udoka, the former Celtics head coach whom Brown advocated to hire but was later suspended before this season for an improper relationship with a subordinate. Brown also spent the summer in trade rumors, heightening his feelings about being a commodity for an institution rather than a partner in the quest for the Celtics’ 18th banner.
As this season grinds to a close, Brown’s Celtics, riding a breakthrough season from Jayson Tatum and following the lead of new head coach Joe Mazzulla, have struggled, but remain [among the favorites](https://nbarankings.theringer.com/odds-machine) to make it back to the Finals. But Brown is also striving to strike a balance between playing the game and being known beyond it.
“Obviously, our goal is to win the championship. That’s, I think, what everybody is focused on,” Brown tells me. “Me, I feel like I still have so many more limits to tap individually. To be better, to be a better leader, to be a better player, et cetera. As for now, I’m just playing my role on the team to help us get back to do what we got to do. So, nothing wrong with being a part of a team and doing your job. That’s how I look at it.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24524449/1239059338.jpg)Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images
The beginning of Brown’s NBA career was marred by inconsistency. As a rookie, he impressed with his defense on LeBron James in the 2017 postseason, and he excelled in a pivotal role the following season for a Celtics team that again reached the Eastern Conference finals. But his urge to live up to his draft position often overrode his desire to reach team goals.
“I wanted to win; I wanted to also prove that I was the third pick of the draft,” Brown says. “At the time, when you’re young, you see all your counterparts out there doing all types of stuff. Ben Simmons in Philly, Brandon Ingram in L.A., they are in the same draft, and so you want to keep showing people that you are not a bust. You are of equal talent. So during that time, that’s all it was for me, just trying to make sure people knew that Jaylen could play.”
When Brown played selfishly, shooting a contested jumper early in the shot clock or dribbling into a double-team, his teammates would grumble.
“He always used to get in trouble,” Marcus Smart, Brown’s best friend on the team, tells me. “Because he would go one-on-five a lot when he was young, and everybody would just be like, ‘Slow down, man.’
“So I asked him, I’m like, ‘J.B., what be going through your head when we be yelling at you, “Slow down”’?
“He’s like, ‘All right, listen. So, right, y’all screaming slow down—the defender hears that. So I’m thinking he’s going to think I’m slowing down, so I’m going to speed up.’
“And I’m like, ‘No, man.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, nah, nah, you got to change that. That’s not how you got to think.’”
Role changes also proved difficult. After starting during the 2017-18 campaign and helping to push LeBron and the Cavs to a Game 7 without new additions Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving, Brown was relegated to the bench for most of the following season. He began to wonder if he’d ever get a prominent role in Boston.
“The pain came from being ready to do more,” Brown says. “And not being allowed to. From a basketball standpoint, I always felt like … throw me out there no matter if I’m in Boston or in Japan \[playing for Team USA\]. I’m going to figure it out. I’m more athletic, I’ve got more skill than the majority of people in this league. And I’m a wing, which is of extreme value. I got long arms. I’m athletic. I can get to where I’m going. I can see the game. I got a feel for it. I had to learn more about how to play the game. And that came with experience.”
But the Celtics’ veteran core—which, in addition to Irving and Hayward, included the likes of Al Horford and Marcus Morris Sr.—didn’t have time to wait. When Brown, Tatum, or Terry Rozier would make mistakes, Irving would lash out, and Brown, the most outspoken of the young players, would push back.
“Me and Kyrie didn’t really see eye to eye when we was here,” Brown tells me. “Really at all.”
Irving, already with a championship under his belt, felt it was his responsibility to help facilitate Brown’s ambitious goals and to guide the young Celtics into contention for years to come. But Irving now admits he missed the mark.
“Sometimes—and I could say this for myself—sometimes our individual goals are before the team goals, and he had to adjust,” Irving says. “You think about our team. I want you to really look back at our team that we had and see how talented we were. And we had a lockup in every position. It was two, three guys in every position. So it was not only competitive with me and J.B., but it was competitive amongst all of us. And that wasn’t the best recipe for team success if you’re competing with your brothers every day.”
Prior to the 2018-19 season, Irving, who was in the last year of his contract, publicly committed to the Celtics at a season-ticket holder event. But Irving says his personal life began to interfere with his organizational promises.
“I mean, for me, I lost my grandfather my second year in Boston, so it was my first time really losing someone close like that to me, other than my mom and my grandmother when I was young,” Irving says. “So me being in Boston, not being home, not having that emotional support, I really felt alone, even though I wasn’t alone. So I didn’t really connect with everybody as much as I should, and I didn’t open up as much as I should.
“The week before my grandfather passed, I was committed to the Boston Celtics, and I wanted to stay here. And then my grandfather passed a week later, and then my whole world shifts after that point, and I don’t think anyone understood it. Not the Celtic fan base, not the NBA fans, not anybody from afar.”
As the season wore on, Irving says his plans changed. In the summer, he opted to move to New Jersey, where he grew up, and play for the Brooklyn Nets alongside Kevin Durant. Brown, meanwhile, began to blossom, earning an All-Star bid in 2020-21 and developing into one of the best two-way wings in basketball. In 2019, at the age of 22, he was named a vice president of the players union, quenching his desire for a leadership role. Brown didn’t hear much from Irving until the pandemic shut down the NBA in March 2020.
“He reached out to me, kind of let me know what his experience was when he was in Boston, what he was feeling,” Brown says. “And I understood what he was going through personally. So, life is a journey. We all got ups and downs. And most of all, we don’t always handle everything in the perfect media-appropriate demeanor. Kyrie, one thing about him, he going to be who he is. I appreciate that.”
A month into the 2022-23 season, Irving tweeted a link to an antisemitic film, garnering widespread criticism. After failing to apologize for promoting the link, he was suspended by the Nets and given six requirements to fulfill in order to be reinstated, including sensitivity training and a $500,000 donation to anti-hate groups. Prominent players spoke out against the ruling, including Irving’s former teammate James, who tweeted that the suspension was “excessive.” “I don’t believe in sharing hurtful information. And I’ll continue to be that way but Kyrie apologized and he should be able to play,” James [tweeted](https://twitter.com/KingJames/status/1590781218790211584). “That’s what I think. It’s that simple. Help him learn—but he should be playing.”
Brown had a similar critique of the suspension. When members of Israel United in Christ, a religious sect designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, protested Irving’s punishment in front of Barclays Center, Brown quote-tweeted a video of the group with the caption “Energy.” Brown later clarified that he mistakenly believed the group to be a member of the Black fraternity Omega Psi Psi.
Brown tells me that he still believes that Irving’s punishment was unjust, not because he agrees with the content of the film, but because the suspension violated the collective bargaining agreement.
“That’s my job as vice president of the union,” Brown says. “The union is supposed to be an entity to protect the players, especially their rights and their freedom of speech. I feel like what the Brooklyn Nets did—I still feel the same way—it was inappropriate. I think it was like a public ransom note almost, in a sense, where he had a list of demands he had to do to return to the game. It was a violation of our CBA. It’s a violation of our agreement and kind of got looked over like it was nothing.”
Privately, Brown reassured Irving that the controversy would pass. “He was one of the main ones that really stood beside me,” Irving says. “And was 10 toes with me and just telling me like, ‘You know, it’s going to be all right. There’s peace of mind at the end of this road, but I want to let you know that you’re not alone in this.’”
Irving now describes Brown as a “brother.” During February’s All-Star Game, Brown tweeted in support of Irving’s custom shoes that covered up the Nike swoosh, in protest of the brand that dropped Irving following the controversy in the fall. In the same exhibition, Brown covered up the Nike logo of his own Kobe 3 sneakers with the word “liberation.” Brown has been a sneaker free agent since leaving Adidas in 2021. In recent years, he’s criticized sneaker brands that have courted him for not wanting to [support his off-court initiatives](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/21/sports/jaylen-brown-celtics-sneakers/).
Irving has caused much public consternation over the past few years, including for his decision to sit out in protest of COVID vaccination requirements and his toxic relationship with the Nets, which recently led to his trade to the Dallas Mavericks. But Brown sees a different side of Irving.
“Kyrie is one of those people who isn’t afraid of being wrong,” Brown says. “He isn’t afraid of being embarrassed. He’s not afraid of big moments either, doing great things. He’s one of those people that’s special. We see him at the top of the world, and we see him make some mistakes as well. But I appreciate the fact that the fear factor for him, even though he might have been afraid, didn’t stop him from doing or saying what he felt was right, for what he felt he needed to do. And that doesn’t exist in 99 percent of people. So, people can say what they want about Kyrie Irving, but he’s definitely my friend.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24524452/1462356122.jpg)Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
A day before Boston’s 125-121 win over the Lakers in January, authorities released a 30-minute video of five Memphis policemen beating Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, causing injuries from which he’d later die. It marked another public instance of a private citizen dying from police violence, sparking outrage over America’s police practices. At the end of Brown’s postgame press conference, he was asked about the fatal encounter.
“I’d just be remiss if we didn’t ask you for comment about the situation in Memphis,” a reporter said.
Brown has come to expect these kinds of questions. He welcomes them. His interest in activism comes from his mother, Mechalle Brown, who instilled in Jaylen that being an athlete wasn’t enough. “I always stressed to Jaylen that no matter how tall you are, and how well you play the game, basketball is what you do, it is not who you are,” Mechalle tells me by email. “Who you are is measured by the mark you leave on the world. And to truly leave a mark on the world, you have to do the right things, and speak out against the wrong things. But in order to do that, you have to use your voice. After you use your voice you have to back it up with actions.”
That credo has motivated a lot of Brown’s decisions. At Cal, he participated in student-led protests on campus and frequently consulted with the school’s faculty on how to be an organizer. During his second season in Boston, he led a lecture at Harvard about the importance of athletes having a voice on social issues. Three years ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Brown drove 15 hours from Boston to Atlanta, his hometown, to lead a protest against police brutality. And in 2021, Brown’s 7uice Foundation partnered with MIT to create the Bridge Program, a 12-week summer course for kids from underrepresented communities to learn [artificial intelligence, biology, and civics](https://www.bridgefuture.org/curriculum).
“I’ve been doing this since I came from Berkeley,” Brown tells me. “It’s not like I started talking when the lights are on. I’ve done lectures. I’ve been able to speak on certain things since I was 18 years old: break them down, give my perspective.”
Because of this work, Brown has become a go-to voice when tragedies like the Nichols killing occur. After Floyd’s murder, members of the Celtics front office sought his advice about how to respond as an organization. Brad Stevens says roundtable discussions during the pandemic-induced bubble of 2020 featuring Brown, his fellow Black teammates, and Stevens gave the then coach a better understanding of his players’ feelings.
But Brown’s desire to speak out in support of the Black community also led to the largest error of his career. Last summer, he signed on as a client of Ye’s Donda Sports, the agency that also signed NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown and Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Aaron Donald. Members of Brown’s inner circle warned Brown of Ye’s growing erratic behavior. In 2018, he referred to slavery as a “choice.” And in months before Brown signed, the rapper harassed his ex-wife’s boyfriend and referred to former TV host Trevor Noah as a “koon” on social media.
However, Brown grew up as a fan of Ye’s music. In Ye, Brown saw a Black man building a self-sustaining community for his people, which is what Brown was hoping to achieve with his foundations. Ye’s father was involved with the Black Panther Party, a political organization Brown studied religiously in college. And the rapper promised an opportunity to teach students in person at the Donda Academy, Ye’s private Christian school, and mentor student-athletes from the Donda Doves, the school’s basketball team. “A lot of time goes into creating an entity or organization,” Brown told *The* [*Boston Globe*](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/24/sports/jaylen-brown-condemns-kanye-wests-statements-will-stay-with-his-agency/) last fall. “The reason why I signed with Donda Sports, it represented education, it represented activism, disruption, it represented single-parent households.”
But Ye’s grand plan of educating the next generation was undercut by prejudiced and often incoherent outbursts against Jewish people. In October, he posted on Twitter that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” a tweet that got him banned him from the platform. Despite Ye’s troubling behavior, Brown told the *Globe* in late October that he would stay with Donda Sports, figuring Ye’s words were separate from Brown’s initiatives at the school. “I don’t condone any hurt, harm, or danger toward any group of people or individuals whatsoever,” Brown told the *Globe*. “I’ve been a member of my community, trying to uplift my community, and I’m going to continue to do that.”
But a day later, Brown reversed course and left the agency.
“What would have happened if I stayed?” Brown [told reporters](https://www.boston.com/sports/boston-celtics/2022/10/29/jaylen-brown-donda-sports-academy-kanye-west-quote-why-he-left-support/). “I work hard to be able to have the platform that I have and use it to be a voice for the voiceless. So to potentially, maybe, have to sacrifice that platform, I don’t think that would be the right decision. So I had to do what we have to do.”
In his comments to the media and on Twitter after his departure from Donda, Brown lamented the closure of Donda Academy. “Education resources and opportunity is key,” Brown [tweeted](https://twitter.com/FCHWPO/status/1585719021969854466) on October 27. “Donda Academy supplied that for these student athletes in hopes to get exposure and potentially change there families lives generationally that opportunity was taken away from them today to prove a point? Why make them apart of this?
“Anti-Semitism should be handled with sensitivity and respect, Inequalities /lack of opportunity in our education system should be handled with sensitivity and respect,” Brown continued, as part of a tweet thread. “A school with resources/ opportunity academically and athletically have been taken away abruptly without notice.”
When I broach the topic of Ye to Brown in Boston, the guard quickly declines to comment. “I don’t want to answer that question,” he says. “I don’t want to answer that.” When I followed up weeks later, I was directed toward the [official statement](https://twitter.com/FCHWPO/status/1585036696667951107) he tweeted in the fall.
People close to Brown say that the young NBA star was naive, that despite their warnings about Ye before signing with Donda, Brown’s passion for uplifting the Black community, and maybe even his connection to Ye’s music growing up, masked the troubling behavior brewing in Ye’s personal life. But even the best intentions are undermined by the mere association with someone like Ye, who since the disbanding of Donda Sports has continued to make hurtful and bizarre comments.
“The longer you stay with people with really, really compromised values, people believe that they’re also yours,” says DeRay Mckesson, a prominent civil rights activist. “Whether you say the things or not. I don’t think that people can pull up quotes where he was antisemitic, or a host of things, but he stayed too long.”
But Mckesson also thinks there’s a chance for Brown to bounce back from his mistakes.
“People love a comeback. People love a redemption arc, and the best thing for Jaylen would be to learn and reflect and grow from it,” Mckesson says. “In organizing, we talk about the idea that we don’t throw people away, that people will do things imperfectly, and as long as they grow from it, there’s always a place in community.”
Despite the recent fallout, Brown still wants to be a voice on social issues. He isn’t exactly sure why people turn to him for guidance, but he welcomes the burden.
“I don’t know how it came about,” Brown tells me. “But I guess people feel comfortable hearing me talk about certain things. That might be part of the problem. But I definitely plan on doing it more. Sometimes getting people out of their comfort zone is where change can happen.”
So when he was asked about Nichols soon after scoring a team-high 37 points, including a layup plus and-1 to send the game into overtime, in an eventual win over the Lakers, Brown took a deep breath and spoke.
“I break it down as like, there’s certain people that want the world to change and continue to move forward, and there’s certain people that’s OK with where the world is at,” Brown said. “I’m going to continue to challenge those people, because it doesn’t matter if it benefits your pockets or benefits your financial opportunities.”
“We have to push our society forward, and we’ve got to do better in a lot of regards. As we’ve said many times, and we’re going to continue to say, our society has to do better.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24524454/1239171017.jpg)Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images
Last month, Brown participated in his second All-Star Game, playing against his teammate Jayson Tatum. LeBron used his second pick among reserves in the All-Star draft on Brown, while Giannis Antetokounmpo picked Tatum as his first starter. Little defense was played throughout the matchup in Utah, but Brown and Tatum playfully guarded each other on several occasions.
Brown and Tatum have become simultaneously the most successful and dissected duo in the league. Since the turn of the century, Brown has the 10th-most postseason wins over a player’s first six seasons; Tatum, who came into the league a year after Brown, is already 23rd on that [list](https://stathead.com/basketball/player-game-finder.cgi?request=1&match=player_game_count_career&order_by_asc=0&order_by=name_display_csk&year_min=2000&comp_type=post&comp_id=NBA&team_game_min=1&team_game_max=84&player_game_min=1&player_game_max=9999&season_start=1&season_end=6&game_result=W). Tatum is the star of the group, a potential MVP candidate; Brown has become an All-Star himself but is often painted as the more defensive-minded costar. How they approach fame differs as well: During the All-Star festivities, Tatum was never far from his son, Deuce, while Brown, forced to play in a mask after a recent facial fracture, keeps much of his life and family away from public view, and seemed to soak in the scene by himself.
“I prefer to be alone at times,” Brown says. “I’m not saying that because it sounds cool or it’s the healthiest thing. I think it’s how I’m designed. I’m OK with being alone. I like space. Quarantine was fine for me. There was nothing wrong with quarantine. So, that’s just how I am. I go through times where you like human interaction. But a lot of the time, I’m fine with all of you humans leaving me alone.”
But Brown says he’s been able to coexist with Tatum where it matters most: “Basketball. That’s where we find common ground: on the court. Basketball is the greatest teacher and the greatest equalizer as well,” he says. “A lot of people, fans, are fascinated with our relationship and how that has developed and grown over time. He’s got fans within the Celtics fan base. I got fans within the Celtics fan base. And I think our fans have more of a hard time coexisting than me and him do. We never had an argument. I don’t think we’ve ever had a real argument, fight. Nothing crazy like that.”
Smart says Brown and Tatum are “probably better friends than most in this league—that people don’t really understand. You might not see them talk to each other a lot in person, but that don’t mean they ain’t talking. You know what I’m saying? Because not everything’s supposed to be for everybody.”
But the collaboration between Brown and Tatum nearly ended last July, when Kevin Durant requested a trade from the Nets. The Celtics were among the teams to express interest, reportedly offering a package that included Brown, Derrick White, and future draft picks.
“\[KD\] and JT are friends. They was working out together and whatnot,” Brown says. “So, I wasn’t sure what the energy was. I wasn’t sure what the direction of the organization was.”
Puzzled, Brown placed a three-way call to Stevens and Tatum. During that discussion, Stevens says he assured Brown that the guard wasn’t going anywhere. “You just have to have a direct conversation,” Stevens tells me of the meeting. “And you just have to be able to say, ‘This is what’s real. This is where we are. Obviously, you and Jayson are the two guys that we’ve built the whole roster around. And our every expectation is for us to come and compete together and try to be two games better than we were last year.’”
Brown says, “Once we all got together and kind of talked it through, we all left on the same page. But the actions that was taking place during that time, it just didn’t seem like that was the direction that the organization was going in. I don’t know. It was hard to tell, at least.”
For as long as Brown has been with the Celtics, he’s been involved in trade rumors. Last month, when Durant again requested a trade, Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck called Brown to squelch any worry Brown might’ve had. The nearly endless cycle has left some scars. Brown generally doesn’t trust easily, and that now extends to his relationship with the Celtics.
“It’s hard coming into teams and organizations and being warm. They operate on different principles, I think. This is an organization. They look at it as a business, where they’ll tell you one thing, and then behind closed doors, they’ll say another, and they’ll trade you off,” he says. “Tell you, ‘We love you,’ and they’ll be having like, ‘We’re going to trade him next week.’ I think that’s just how business is run.
“Like, where I’m from in the South, if you don’t come through the front door, it’s considered disrespectful. I feel like a lot of times, when you deal in these corporate spaces, everybody wants to come through the back door or come through an angle.”
As if the trade rumors weren’t enough, the Celtics’ bid to return to the Finals only became more complicated when Udoka was suspended for the season just days before training camp. Brown had advocated for Udoka’s hiring in 2021, after working with him on Team USA at the 2019 World Cup. Brown also credits Udoka’s leadership for giving the Celtics the edge they needed to make it to the 2022 Finals.
“I didn’t know how to feel. I was a little bit shocked, to be honest,” Brown says. “It was not the vibe, you know what I mean? That’s the way I always describe it. It was not good vibes.”
The Celtics have provided little information about what reports have described as Udoka’s improper relationship with a subordinate, attributing his season-long suspension merely to multiple violations of team policies. Udoka has been a candidate for recent head-coaching openings in Brooklyn and Atlanta, and Brown hopes his former coach lands on his feet.
“I hope Ime is doing well,” Brown says. “I haven’t talked to him, but I hope he gets another chance coaching again. There were some conflictions on the information that was kind of going around and stuff like that … that has put some dirt on his name. It’s a lot. It’s very nuanced. So, whether you stood on this side or this side, they was going to find wrong from a coach that I advocated to bring here to Boston. I wanted to see him back on his feet here, no matter what it was. I don’t think that’s the wrong thing to feel.”
But any lingering feelings of resentment over Udoka’s dismissal subsided just a few days into the tenure of Joe Mazzulla, who took over as interim head coach after just three years as an NBA assistant. “He helped the most by trusting me right off the bat,” Mazzulla tells me. “He didn’t have to do that. … And so his open-mindedness to say, ‘Hey, I trust you. We’ll see what we can do here,’ allowed me to be myself and allowed me to coach him, so I’m grateful for that.”
Mazzulla, 34, is taking a different approach with the Celtics. While Udoka roamed the sidelines with a scowl, barking defensive orders to his players, Mazzulla is more reserved, often standing stoic near the scorer’s table as the game unfolds and letting his players feel out the game on their own. Though the Celtics have faltered lately, falling to third place in the East, Mazzulla’s lighter touch has had success: Boston has the third-best record in the NBA, and the second-best title odds in [*The Ringer*’s Odds Machine](https://nbarankings.theringer.com/odds-machine).
Brown and Tatum have flourished individually too. Both are putting up career statistics virtually across the board. Tatum was named All-Star MVP after putting up a record 55 points, and a [recent ESPN poll](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35658669/nba-mvp-straw-poll-20-nikola-jokic-chasing-history-here-why-capture-it) had him in fourth for the regular-season honor. Together, they are on pace to become one of only four duos in NBA history to both average over 27 points per game or more, according to [*The Ringer*’s Zach Kram](https://www.theringer.com/nba/2023/2/1/23580604/jayson-tatum-jaylen-brown-boston-celtics-scoring-duo).
“It’s been a long time coming,” Tatum said in early February. “I talk about it pretty often, and we’ve had our good times and not-so-good times. But I think those are just growing pains. We were just both 19-year-old kids that came into the league hungry and trying to get better and help our team win. And through that, we’ve had to learn how to play in this league, learn how to play with each other, learn how to lead a team, and I feel like we still have a long way from ultimately where, exactly, we want to be, but we’ve made amazing strides from the beginning.”
Even though they’re widely regarded as one of the best tandems in the league, Tatum and Brown are still missing one key component to be lauded among the best locally.
“I don’t see them anywhere right now—until they win a championship. At the end of the day here, you’re judged by bringing another banner. So to me, they are unfinished,” says Cedric Maxwell, a Celtics radio color commentator who won two titles with Boston in the 1980s. “These guys are going to be pillars for a long time. ... Barring injury, I could see both of those numbers being retired.”
Tatum has two more years left on his current contract after this one but will likely be eligible for a supermax extension before that. Brown has just one more year left, and given the expected spike in revenue coming to the NBA from new national television deals, [most analysts don’t expect him to sign an extension](https://theathletic.com/3448724/2022/07/26/jaylen-brown-r-j-barrett-nba-salary-cap/). When asked whether he wants to stay in Boston long term, Brown is noncommittal.
“I don’t know. As long as I’m needed. It’s not up to me,” he says. “We’ll see how they feel about me over time and I feel about them over time. Hopefully, whatever it is, it makes sense. But I will stay where I’m wanted. I will stay where I’m needed and treated correct.”
When asked how long he wants to play with Tatum, Brown keeps his focus on the immediate future.
“I just enjoy the time that you have now,” he says. “If it’s your whole career, it’s your whole career. If it’s not, it’s not. Some of the greatest players of all time haven’t finished with their organization. Michael Jordan retired a Wizard. As much as we like it here and enjoy being here, you see where life takes you. You see how the process goes. All you do is really focus on what’s in front of you right now, to be honest. But I don’t really know or want to answer that question because that type of stuff makes Celtics fans speculate and go crazy. Especially right now, I’ll just say we’ll get there when we get there.”
But Brown is searching for more than just on-court success. Yes, he wants to win a championship. And yes, he still wants to succeed individually, much like he did when he first entered the league. But he wants every other pursuit in his life to matter, too, no matter how complicated that’s been lately.
“I’ve grown up a lot,” he tells me. “I’ve learned a lot. I’ve experienced a lot. I’ve been able to travel the world, study different cultures, meet different people, which has made me, I feel like, a more experienced human being. I still kind of feel like that same kid on the inside. But for now, I’m definitely moving along in the journey. Shit, I’m the leader of this team. I’m one of the faces of this franchise, trying to be a global representation or an ambassador for our league and trying to bring people together.”
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2 years ago