Hotelier and ex-St. Barts leader’s long-running feud explained – how Uma Thurman is involved: book

A new book has revealed a bizarre feud between Andre Balazs and a former St Barts political leader – with the hotelier claiming the pole sabotaged his attempt to build a hotel on the island. A new book has revealed a bizarre feud between Andre Balazs and a former St Barts political leader – with the hotelier claiming the pole sabotaged his attempt to build a hotel on the island.

In “Treasured Island: The Story of St. Barth…And Its Barbarians, Billionaires and Beauties”, author Michael Gross claims the beef began decades earlier when Balazs was dating Uma Thurman, and the Standard’s founder claims that local bigwig Bruno Magras informed the paparazzi when the couple visited the island. (Balaz dated the Hollywood legend from 2003 to 2007.)

But according to Balazs, who owns the Chateau Marmont in LA, the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, Sunset Beach in the Hamptons and the Chiltern Firehouse in Lone Don, among others, it got even uglier when he tried to build an eco-hotel behind the dunes of Saline, the famous nude beach.

The project sank when 1,200 island residents signed a petition opposing it.

Nevertheless, Balazs now accused Gross that the real problem was that Gross had made a deal with a new island homeowner, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, to expand his nearby property rather than support the hotel.

Magras dismissed Balazs’s allegations as “intellectual masturbation” and, oddly, “cat food”.

After Gross’s final words, Balazs stuck to his story of “corruption so serious” that his lawyers “couldn’t get into it.”

He says he still has ownership rights on the land. He quipped, “I think I might camp on it one day.”

The book is now published by HarperCollins. Gross is the author of nearly a dozen books on the American upper classes, including “Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class”, “Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers” and “Rogues Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of “Art”.