Natalie Massenet and Erik Torstensson’s Messy Split, in Dueling Lawsuits

Erik Torstensson and Natalie Massenet didn’t just tell their love story. They branded it.

She was the superstar founder of luxury shopping site Net-a-Porter turned venture capitalist. He was a Swedish creative director who worked with the industry’s biggest names and co-founded a denim brand favored by supermodels.

Together, as fashion’s golden couple, they flew private and partied with people like Dasha Zhukova and Victoria Beckham. Ms. Massenet wore Valentino, Chanel and Oscar de la Renta; Mr. Torstensson was rarely without his Patek Philippe.

At galas and in interviews, they touted their love for each other’s style and minds, and extolled the way their personal and professional lives were intertwined, though they never married.

Speaking with The New York Times in 2023, Mr. Torstensson hailed Ms. Massenet as “the queen of everything,” describing her as “the smartest person in the world. And the kindest.”

“She literally doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone,” he added.

That was before this summer, when he sent his friend Marcus Dunberg, a Swedish novelist and consultant, a text message that ended: “She’s going to war.”

On Aug. 20, their expertly curated life exploded in spectacular fashion when Ms. Massenet, 60, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Torstensson, 46, in California Superior Court in Los Angeles.

She accused him of conning her out of $95 million over the course of their relationship. She also said Mr. Torstensson used her for her money and her fashion connections, and then left her “cash strapped” by reneging on a promise to pay back her investment.

In her complaint, she said he had cheated on her almost from the beginning of their relationship, and that he had admitted to alcoholism, sex and drug addiction. Her suit said he regularly hired prostitutes. Offered as evidence were text messages said to be between Mr. Torstensson and a drug dealer, and between Mr. Torstensson and an unnamed woman who sent selfies to him, wearing lingerie.

Days after she filed the suit, the claims appeared in multiple news outlets in the United States and Britain.

The suit, which has not been previously reported, also accuses Ms. Massenet of being a woman “who loved the limelight,” who used her power to “exert control of him,” and who retaliated against former colleagues who crossed her professionally. It claims she “used drugs regularly,” “ingested alcoholic beverages heavily,” adding that when under the influence, she sometimes “turned violent” with him. It concluded that all of this raises concerns about her “capability to provide responsible care” for their child.

Unlike her suit, his does not include text messages or supporting evidence, though both complaints offer a deluge of unflattering details.

He seeks legal custody of their child (and further relief as the court decides). She wants an unspecified amount of monetary damages (as the court decides).

He is painting her as a partying narcissist; she is depicting him as an amoral grifter.

Each claims the other was blinded by money.

Bonnie Eskenazi, Mr. Torstensson’s lawyer, called Ms. Massenet’s suit “vengeful and obviously meritless without any regard to the harm it would cause their family.”

A spokesman for Ms. Massenet called Mr. Torstensson’s filing “an improper use” of the court process and “nothing more than a vindictive smear campaign in response to Natalie’s claim against him.”

Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet both declined to be interviewed for this article. Their representatives declined to respond to questions about the allegations of substance use.

The collateral damage could include not only their young child but both of their reputations, and may drag in a number of businesses: Imaginary Ventures, the fund Ms. Massenet started with the venture capitalist Nick Brown in 2017 and which now has $1.5 billion invested in a range of companies; along with Frame (which Mr. Torstensson co-founded) and Skims, Kim Kardashian’s multi-billion-dollar brand (in which both Mr. Torstensson and Imaginary have invested).

As fashion shows begin in New York, the saga has consumed the industry. Interviews with dozens of the couple’s friends, few of whom wanted to talk on the record but most of whom wanted to talk, revealed the immediate reaction was sympathy for Ms. Massenet — Mr. Torstensson had seemingly behaved appallingly, and she was clearly in enormous pain — followed by shock that she had decided to go public the way she did. And a slew of questions about what really happened.

What did she mean, they wondered, when Ms. Massenet said she was “cash strapped,” as she put it in her lawsuit?

Had he really induced to her spend all that money?

Or were they mutually swept up in their own aspirations and illusions, as so many ambitious, creative types have been before?

The Beginning

The meet-cute Ms. Massenet and Mr. Torstensson liked to recount took place in London in 2009.

Long past her days as an editor at WWD and Tatler, she was now negotiating big deals at Net-a-Porter with brands such as Jimmy Choo, Alexander McQueen and Chloé.

Mr. Torstensson approached her with the idea for a men’s offshoot of the site; he had already thought of a brand, Mr. Porter, and purchased its domain name. She accepted his pitch and hired him to create it.

At the time, Ms. Massenet, who spent her childhood in Paris and moved to California at 11, lived in London with her husband, the French investment banker Arnaud Massenet, and their two young daughters. Net-a-Porter established her reputation as the seer who foretold the age of online luxury when conventional wisdom held that consumers would never buy expensive handbags they couldn’t touch.

She spoke at invite-only conferences like Google Zeitgeist where, she told the Financial Times in 2011, “I’m one of about 20 women and five fashion people out of the 400 there.” Her name would sometimes come up as a successor to Anna Wintour at Vogue.

Mr. Torstensson, 13 years her junior, had grown up on a farm in rural Sweden, where he spent his youth traveling the country as a competitive swing dancer. He was determined to get off the farm.

In 2010, Ms. Massenet sold Net-a-Porter to the luxury goods conglomerate Richemont, in a deal worth 350 million British pounds (approximately $525 million at the time). She netted a reported £50 million; the next year, she got divorced.

Though Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet spoke publicly over the years about having been attracted to each other from the time they met, they maintained that their relationship was platonic until Ms. Massenet’s marriage ended.

In 2012, Mr. Torstensson and Mr. Grede started Frame, a Los Angeles-based denim brand that turned its skinny jeans into a $240 million a year business. And in 2013, Ms. Massenet took the reins of the British Fashion Council, reimagining the British Fashion Awards as a national version of the Met Gala. Friends said the couple seemed very much in love, their romance playing out at social affairs populated by royals, fashion titans and business magnates.

In 2015, for her 50th birthday, she brought 150 friends to Positano on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

It was a weekend that “was unlike anything any of us had ever seen,” said Mr. Dunberg, Mr. Torstensson’s friend. “It was done in good taste, but it was just grand.” (In his lawsuit, Mr. Torstensson now says the event cost 3 million euros).

Just over a month later, and following Richemont’s agreement to merge Net-a-Porter with Yoox, another online site, Ms. Massenet resigned from the company she had founded. Though she had sold her stake for approximately 100 million British pounds, she was not a fan of the merger, according to reports. She later cast the experience as that of moneymen in suits bullying a female entrepreneur.

Meanwhile, Mr. Torstensson’s ascent continued. In 2016, the major advertising firm BBDO spent around $20 million to purchase a stake in Mr. Torstensson’s advertising and branding empire.

For her part, Ms. Massenet was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for her services to the industry, and in 2017 she and Mr. Brown began Imaginary Ventures, which helped establish Ms. Massenet as a Sheryl Sandberg for the fashion set.

“She has been an unbelievable friend and unbelievably supportive of women in business,” said Tamara Mellon, the former impresario behind Jimmy Choo, the first brand to sign with Net-a-Porter.

“I’ve known her for 30 years, and she’s never not done what she says she is going to do,” she said.

(That home was the subject of a gleaming multi-page article in The Wall Street Journal’s magazine that showcased the Francis Bacon painting on their mantle.)

The couple loved to host. According to Ms. Mellon, Ms. Massenet always made “everybody feel welcome. She thinks about every detail.” A weekend spent at their English countryside estate typically involved a printed itinerary laid out on the guest beds, clothes provided by Ms. Massenet for themed costume parties — fairies or Ali G — and a “disco room.”

It was all like being in a movie directed by Ms. Massenet, Mr. Dunberg said. “You are in a supporting role. Erik is second lead. But it is Natalie’s show.”

The parties tended to run late and sometimes involved drug use, said others who attended. Both Ms. Massenet and Mr. Torstensson were known for being able to outlast their guests.

“We inspire each other,” Ms. Massenet told The New York Times in 2023.

Shattered Illusions

In good times, Ms. Massenet called Mr. Torstensson her “best investment.”

Now, Ms. Massenet’s suit positions Mr. Torstensson as a cunning Casanova whose sights were on her money, and who saw his “window of opportunity” to seduce her as she was separating from her husband. She claims his scheme was simple: to establish a business relationship with her, turn it romantic and use her network and finances to further his own aims.

According to Ms. Massenet’s suit, Mr. Torstensson promised her that “if she funded the extravagant lifestyle that he desired, introduced him to her high-profile business contacts, and supported his business ventures, he would repay her.”

Instead, she claims, he used his money to “rent flashy private planes” and buy “art to impress his peers.” As well as to “rack up investment and equity positions worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” all while cutting her out of “any potential earnings from her significant investment” in him over the duration of their relationship.

Mr. Torstensson’s suit portrays him as the submissive.

Their romance began, he claims, in 2009 on a flight to Milan, when Ms. Massenet turned to him and said, “Kiss me.”

She was still married at the time.

Things progressed from there. According to Mr. Torstensson’s suit, they had sex in her car outside her London home, while her daughters sat inside the house. He and Ms. Massenet had sex again in her car in Ibiza while she was on a family vacation.

Eventually, he says, Ms. Massenet went to the Hoffman Institute in California for a weeklong retreat, popular with celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Katy Perry, where people give up their cellphones and renegotiate their relationship with themselves. When it was over, Mr. Torstensson said, she decided to get divorced.

He presents the publicity he and Ms. Massenet received in the ensuing years as an unwanted distraction from work. He says that he spent more than $20 million of his own money financing their lifestyle.

Ms. Massenet’s suit claims Mr. Torstensson urged her to make big real estate purchases because “it would improve his social profile and earnings potential, by allowing him to invite and impress his business associates.”

Her suit states that in 2025 Ms. Massenet discovered an “old phone” belonging to Mr. Torstensson that contained “indisputable evidence” that included “explicit texts and photographs” showing that Mr. Torstensson had “maintained multiple affairs with several younger women for years.” She said she also found proof that he had “purchased and used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and oxycodone.”

For his part, Mr. Torstensson’s suit claims Ms. Massenet once overdosed on MDMA at the Glastonbury Festival. He claims she drank heavily and, under the influence, would sometimes “lash out physically,” including one interaction in which she “clawed” his arms “until they bled.”

As he presents things, he was the primary caregiver for the couple’s son, Jet, who was born in Los Angeles in 2017 via surrogate and egg donor.

Her lawsuit alleges that “he hired prostitutes in Los Angeles just days after the couple celebrated their son’s embryo being implanted with a surrogate.”

He alleges Ms. Massenet said sex was “only 25 percent of a relationship — I can do without it.”

She claims she has been “in intensive therapy and had to take off eight weeks of work following the shock of Torstensson’s misconduct.”

The Fallout

A spokesman for Ms. Massenet said her claim was “filed as a last resort, after many months of trying to persuade Erik to mediate privately and thoughtfully.”

Now, very little is private, and the fallout — both personal and professional — from the dueling lawsuits has already begun.

Almost immediately after Ms. Massenet’s lawsuit became public, Frame, Mr. Torstensson’s denim brand, announced he had “decided to step away from the company to attend to personal matters,” though he retains his ownership stake. The statement added that his alleged behavior did not reflect the brand’s values.

Skims, the body-conscious active wear brand, has begun distancing itself from both Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet. In a brief statement, a spokeswoman for the company echoed that the behavior described in Ms. Massenet’s suit did not align with its corporate values and described Mr. Torstensson as a “very small early-stage, minority stakeholder.”

John Howard, a Skims board member, said of Ms. Massenet: “Natalie is not on the board and has been uninvolved in the business.”

Whether or not the former couple are essential to Skims’ success, however, its importance to them is hard to deny.

If Skims, which was estimated to be worth $4 billion in 2023, were to go public at a similar valuation it could provide a windfall of more than a $100 million for Mr. Torstensson — and even more for Imaginary, Ms. Massenet’s venture firm. (He has less than a 5 percent stake in the company; Imaginary has a 10 to 15 percent stake.) With plans for it to go public on hold because of market concerns, according to Mr. Howard, that money is largely out of reach.

Given the allegations about Mr. Torstensson’s drug use and sexual habits, said numerous industry observers, it might be hard for him to find marquee work, at least in the near future.

But in exposing Mr. Torstensson, they said, Ms. Massenet, whose job is reliant on her judgment calls, had also created problems for herself.

“She’s offered deals because she is Natalie Massenet,” said William Susman, a managing director at the investment bank Cascadia Capital. Now, though, he added: “I do think new investors would pause.”

Imaginary, whose investors had not been alerted to the lawsuit until after it was filed, said through a spokeswoman: “The leadership and team at Imaginary Ventures always conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism, and of course, alcohol and drug use is not permitted at work.”

The problem for both Mr. Torstensson and Ms. Massenet, Mr. Susman concluded, is that a lawsuit “is not the kind of statement you can take back.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.