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The Girl Who Played With Marc Jacobs

Meet the woman who claims Marc Jacobs isn't gay, terrorised her and stole all her ideas.

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Recently I was on some site that steals stuff from Reddit and repackages it for clicks, when I started reading the comments—because they are the best part of the Internet. In between lots of bad opinions chirped with unholy amounts of confidence, there was a recurring birdie imploring everyone to click here and read about what a monstrous soul Hollywood fashion lord Marc Jacobs really is. I’m all about weird spam so I took the bait. What I found was Angel Barta, a 22-year-old Hungarian model and clothing designer. Angel not only claims she had an intimate relationship with the openly gay Marc when she was 16, but that he also terrorised her, stole all of her ideas, and continues to terrorise her to this day. She’s even written a 500-page book about it.

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VICE: Angel, hey. How did you meet Marc Jacobs?
Angel Barta: When I was 16-years-old I went to Paris to make my dreams come true. I was a very happy and optimistic girl with hopes and dreams. I wanted to become a model first and then a fashion designer. My biggest wish was to walk the runway in Paris. I fell in love with the city and with its romantic atmosphere. I liked the friendly people there and I really felt at home in Paris. Since I wanted to become I model, I had to keep my body in shape. I went to the gym every day, just like I did in Hungary. I had already been living in Paris for a while when I first met Marc. Marc noticed me from the first moment. He was always working out near me and staring at me. Then one day he came to me and asked if I was an actress. That’s how we first started talking. He told me he liked me a lot and wanted to get to know me more. He asked me out.

And then?
He invited me on Valentine’s Day to the party of Sofia Coppola where only a few people were, the closest friends of Marc. I was planning to come back to Hungary for a week in March, but Marc asked me to stay in Paris because he really wanted me to see his fashion show. He said my opinion about his collection was very important to him. Backstage he told me for the first time that I gave him an inspiration for his collection. After his show he invited me to the dinner. When I was in Paris I was hanging out with him, when I was in Hungary we still kept in touch by phone, text and chat. We spent more and more time together, like 10 hours a day for a long time. He wanted to know everything about me, every single detail of my life. I loved him and I always told him everything honestly. When I wasn’t with him he wanted to know what I was doing, he wanted to know about my every minute. He said he fell in love with me because I was the most beautiful woman in the world to him. He said I was the only person he could trust in, because the other people only wanted his money and fame and the others only saw “Marc Jacobs The Fashion Designer.” He liked it that I liked him for being himself, for being Marc, and I guess that I was with him even though he never gave me anything.

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Angel claims Marc stole her use of a tapestry background in his Marc by Marc Jacobs 2009 campaign.

Isn’t he gay? Like, very extremely gay? Openly gay?
He never acted like a gay man with me. He said he would marry me and tell the world that he is not gay and that he loves me. About his sexual orientation: Marc has a man’s body. He is capable of sexual acts with women, has everything that it takes to do it. At the beginning he told me I was the first woman he was sexually attracted to, later he opened up about his sexual experiences with women. He is really perverse with dirty fantasies and seems crazy for women! At his apartment in Paris he has a John Currin painting, showing two naked women having sex with a man. This really pornographic painting depicts Marc’s sexual orientation for the skeptical people who just can’t imagine that a person who is openly gay in public can actually be heterosexual or bisexual (I suspect that he is at least bisexual). Just because one has a public images as a “gay fashion designer” does not necessarily mean that he is gay. Only two people can know for sure what is going on inside their private bedroom.

Okay, so what went wrong with this supposed relationship?
He always lied to me. He seduced me with love poems, nice words, promises. He knew that I believed his every word since I was infatuated or even in love with him. He asked me to never tell anyone about our relationship because if the world knew he wasn’t gay, it would be bad for business and for his image. Then he promised me every single time before his fashion shows that he would tell the journalists that I was his inspiration and that he was designing my style. Invariably, “the timing wasn’t right” and he asked me to wait a little more. Then I started to see that he just used me and wanted my talent for himself. In 2010 I wrote a 500-page book about the first two years of my relationship with Marc, called “The Secret Love Affair in Paris.” After he read my book, he learned all my weak points and used all the information against me. He did anything he could to hurt me and terrorise me. Not only did he copy my ideas, he also replicated them using other Hungarian girls – girls from my country. He gave all my dreams to them in order to hurt me. The models have to dress up in MY style and copy me and my poses in their editorials. He cast a Hungarian girl in his Marc Jacobs Daisy campaign. Everywhere I look I must face the photos he’s copied. I see my ideas in magazines, in campaigns, and on the streets. Marc is more than pleased to show me how other girls easily get success in the fashion world through him, meanwhile he isolates me from the fashion industry.

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This photo of a Hungarian model in Louis Vuitton appeared in Numero 2011. Angel said the concept was stolen from a photo of her in 2008.

This New Yorker profile of Marc Jacobs mentions you. It’s not very flattering, and it doesn’t seem to indicate he was interested in you. It actually seems to imply he was taking pity on you.
He had that article written to portray himself as a generous man helping a girl to become a model. He already knew that he had to trample on me and humiliate me because he realised that my talent is/was a huge threat to him. He is an egomaniac and he can't stand the fact that I refused to do the humiliating things he asked me to. I am a very modest, innocent woman. I wasn’t used to that type of dirty talk. For example he asked me to take a naked picture in the shower, a picture of me touching myself while thinking about him. I don’t want to go into more details. Isn’t it ironic that in this article he and his assistant are making fun of my hat and outfit, then they designed it for the Marc Jacobs collection because they saw big money in my style? Here is a photo) from the spring 2011 collection where many models were wearing a large hat.

The infamous hat.

What do you want out of this?
First, I want it to be out in public that Marc Jacobs and the big fashion brands have been using and designing my style, my ideas, for almost six years. I want to get recognition for my work. I want to have a free life, where no one is inside my cell, my PC, my Internet.

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Wait, what?
My problem is that he stalks me, he took away my freedom, he reads my messages and harasses my friends online. He is "inside" my phone, often calls me and doesn't say anything, he does it to my best friends also. If I meet someone new he either threatens him, or enters his laptop, finds something private in it and threatens him with that, or tells him lies about me. For example I met a guy, and not long after Marc sent his buddy to him to scare him. He told the guy that I had a son, which was not true. I don't have children.

Do you have proof of any of that?
Yes, I have a computer’s worth of proof. I will present my evidence to the court if I’ll have to and the world will see them after. I don't know how to explain this to you. He knows all my steps and builds walls around me. He wants me to sit at home alone, love him, design more and more clothes for free that he copies and enjoy the success instead of me. He said he would go on torturing me until I give up my goal to work in the fashion industry. So I decided that I will never give up!

You also claim that Marc Jacobs, “controls Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Terry Richardson, Kanye West, and more.”
Marc knows all the celebrities; they party together all the time. He was the creative director at Louis Vuitton for 16 years. He had the power to give 10 million dollar contracts to celebrities, photographers and models. For such great contracts, the celebrities are grateful to him. So they happily dance, act (stick out their tongue, touch themselves on stage and in pictures) and sing the way Marc wants them to. Marc’s friends direct the singers’ video clips; they act out his fantasies in the clips. It makes Marc happy because he is an egomaniac and he wants to control everyone.

So you mean to tell me Miley Cyrus sticks her tongue out because Marc Jacobs wants her to?
Yes. I already exposed on my blog in August 2013 that Marc Jacobs is secretly supporting and controlling Miley Cyrus and he is responsible for her shocking new image and for her controversial VMA performance a few months later Miley Cyrus admitted in her interview for Hunger TV that Jacobs is her mentor since she was only 16. He introduced her to the high fashion world and he has a big role in her shocking new image and her video clips. Then in 2014 she became the face of the Marc Jacobs campaign. So, first I exposed these secret connections and later it turned out that what I said is true and it will be the case with everything I said, it is just a matter if time. You can check a picture of Marc sticking his tongue out already in 2012, it was around that time when Miley first started to make those kind of poses:

Right now, all the proof you are showing is vaguely similar comparisons between your work and Marc’s. They could be coincidental. Where do you plan to go from here?
There can’t be that many coincidences. Marc copied my ideas mostly with the same people, same models, actresses and for the same brands. They are all related to Marc and where his best friends work. More than 617,000 readers are on my blog. I think it is really time for the media to talk about this injustice that he been going on for many years. I want my story to get big publicity in the world, to be published at many places so Marc will have to react to it in public. I believe in people’s sympathy and love to each other, and I know that people will support me so such an unfair thing will not happen to other people in the world in the future. Because this can happen to anybody’s child or sister. That’s why we the people have to do something about it. We can’t let one egomaniac person  pressure, manipulate and control everyone.

Follow Toby on Twitter: @jane_tobes