After some long gaps in their relationship, Chambers and Schnabel had recently “started to coalesce nicely,” he said. She was on her way to meet us after seeing the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along with her Saint Ann’s classmate Zac Posen, the fashion designer who once described her as his muse. “He dressed up as the pope for graduation,” Chambers said. “He’s a very nice guy. Not a politically serious person.”
He seemed to have come to terms with his girlfriend’s world, stressing again that it wasn’t really one that he had known prior—she was the “first rich person I’ve ever been close to.” “Even Stella’s brothers are chill,” Chambers said. “Whatever.” Still, as he saw it, Schnabel long “had some inkling that there was something very fucked up about the ideology of the place she came from” even if she wouldn’t have known “how to articulate that”—but “she would put it better than I would.”
“When I was living here,” Schnabel said after she arrived, “I was constantly trying to get out.”
She was wearing fuchsia snakeskin-print pants and a beige coat, and Chambers gleefully relayed what had happened earlier. “I almost got into a physical fight with a cop on the street,” he told her. “We were up in each other’s face.”
A couple of days later, passing through the neighborhood again, Chambers posted a selfie wearing a Stalin T-shirt on X, writing, “Greetings, Manhattan’s Ukrainian Village! I heard there might be some crop-hoarding going on?” There were new swaths of observers to note that an heir to the Cox fortune was cheekily commemorating the man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.
Chambers had already told me in person that gestures like his police run-in weren’t ultimately principled or important, and that he had outgrown thinking of such a skirmish as an accomplishment. He didn’t betray much anxiety about this at the time, but he texted the next day to say, “Still embarrassed about the cop lol.”
Growing up, Chambers thought of his father as a radical—he learned early on to hate the police—and they bonded around politics and sports. “I really loved my dad,” he said, and in his 20s, as he dealt with his first divorce or had a bad trip, he called him for help. But he came to resent how Jim’s politics never “crossed the line of class struggle” as his had, and how he softened on his principles while “getting tired and old.” Jim’s new wife, Nabila Khashoggi, was another child of immense wealth and a former actor who once professed her devotion to Scientology to a British tabloid. In 2013, as part of the family’s new estate planning strategy, Anne transferred almost all of her 49 percent share in Cox Enterprises in equal parts to her three children. Jim became a billionaire, and “he’s the one getting phone calls from Rahm Emanuel,” Chambers said. “He’s the one that has access to the NBA ownership group.”
Chambers doubted that his father would speak to him again, and he didn’t “especially want” Jim to have a relationship with his kids. “I don’t know what it was that made me feel confident enough to not really fuck with really anyone in my family anymore,” he said. He wasn’t as certain of his mother’s attitude toward having a relationship with him but guessed she would like to maintain one. He wasn’t interested.
In the fall of 2021, he said, while he and Schnabel were in a protracted fight and when a friend had recently died, his mother called her on the day of the funeral and told her he was bipolar and needed medication. He wrote to his mother.
“I sent her the most scathing note,” Chambers said. “It said something like, I’ll see you at my grandmother’s funeral, not before or after.”
(Hamilton didn’t return requests for comment. Reached by text, Schnabel first said Hamilton never called that day or told her that; a few minutes later, she said Hamilton had called her a few days after the funeral; then she said, “I have no comment about his mother.”)
Chambers and Schnabel reunited a few weeks later when he went to the Hamptons for an “awful” Thanksgiving with her family. “They would probably both hate to hear this,” Chambers said, “but I think my father has plenty in common with someone like Julian.” Chambers stayed with Schnabel for a few weeks with her mother and the baby, and they started to work it out. They went to meet her sister in Sicily for Christmas and extended their trip while Chambers tried to “figure out what the makeup of the European communist movement looked like, just for fun.” He was continuing to finance the Massachusetts land project, with stipended workers now living on it, but he thought about moving to Long Island to be closer to Schnabel when she wanted to be near her mother.
In recent months, Schnabel has become increasingly vocal on Instagram—her bio reads “anti racist anti fascist”—and both she and Chambers have turned their ire toward the classes of New York wealth in which they grew up. There are rumors and jokes among her friends about some sort of cult taking place on the land project, though the reality may be closer to a state of perpetual disorganization. One woman in downtown circles went to work there, but it seemed to end poorly. Schnabel bemoaned “evil hoarding bitches” on Instagram and wrote that the woman was “that stupid you don’t know when you miss out on a great opportunity.” (Schnabel later described her to me as a “great friend” and a “great part of the collective” who didn’t want to stay in the country.)
“Are they still together?” a friend of Schnabel’s asked me. “He’s a pathological narcissist.”
But “everyone knows that,” the friend went on. Their deeper breakthrough took more observation. “I’m a communist, I don’t want it,” they imagined Chambers boasting. “It’s his way of letting you know he’s got lots of money.”
To get to Ukraine in 2022, Chambers had to go to Russia first. He called and emailed embassies throughout Europe, with flights already canceled and sanctions underway. He rented a car in Sicily and drove to Tuscany, and then Florence, and then to Moldova and Romania, where he tried to get a visa. After living in St. Petersburg and purchasing an apartment where his first wife’s uncle now lives, he had some advantages.
His mission was to write the story of the Russian invasion from his perspective. Given his resources and the prevailing Western sentiment, it felt to him like an obligation. A representative for the Luhansk People’s Republic’s Federation of Trade Unions helped him get press accreditation for the separatist regions, and the consulate in Moldova eventually supplied a visa. He headed to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and then Rostov, close enough to the war that he took a taxi to the Donbas border.
Chambers said he saw shelled neighborhoods and a recently bombed market, where he came across the body of an elderly woman on the ground in pieces. “The only thing anyone’s angry at Putin about there,” he claimed, “is that he didn’t intervene sooner.” He believes that the US sending weapons is the largest impediment to peace in the area, and, like his former gym employee Greene, that the Ukrainian government and military contain significant Nazi elements.
