After a brief stint in Los Angeles, Simmons returned to New York, where, in January of 2023, according to the NYPD detective on the case, he “turned himself in” on the charges that had been brought against him by Buccini. In Simmons’s telling, however, “I went to the precinct…and I dealt with it with them,” he says, “and I actually left.”
“What’s also crazy is that they reached out to me to come back and work there last year,” Simmons tells me—a claim Buccini denies. A screenshot she shared with Vanity Fair purports to show their last messages to each other:
“Okay so now I’m out of a job lol,” he texted her on June 28, 2024. “Are you willing to just put the past behind [us] and let me come back?”
She never responded.
At the same time that he was working at Kirna Zabête, Simmons was living in a Gramercy apartment, where he also allegedly paid rent for only a couple months. A desperate sublessor agreed to a less formal agreement, but just a couple of months into the lease, she claims, Simmons stopped paying his $2,400 portion. “I found out that he wasn’t even there. He was in LA,” she says. “I would look at his Instagram, and he would be at the nicest restaurants LA has to offer, carrying the nicest bags, head-to-toe designer, living the highest life you’ve ever seen. And meanwhile, he will not pay rent.” Simmons calls this sublessor “the only person that I think I actually might owe,” saying that he texted her trying to make amends but that she never responded.
While the accusations swirled in New York, Simmons was indeed in Los Angeles, and cycled through three apartments in expensive zip codes and three high-end retail jobs in less than a year, with each housing situation ending in allegations of squatting and his work overshadowed by claims of theft. Former sublessors and roommates allege that Simmons stopped paying rent weeks or months into informal arrangements, or did not pay at all, even as his Instagram depicted a life of designer clothes and high-end dining; Simmons disputes those accounts, saying rent obligations were waived or misunderstood. “I wanted to kill this guy,” one sublessor says, noting that he ended up owing thousands to the management company of the apartment he sublet to Simmons. “Literally.”
Simmons, meanwhile, told that sublessor that James Perse was going to call the mayor of Los Angeles on his behalf. (A former colleague at James Perse alleges to Toufanian that Simmons attempted to steal a cashmere set; when asked about the missing cashmere, Simmons laughs. “I got a new job,” he tells me—plus, “I didn’t really like the uniform…. I didn’t steal any scarves.” James Perse did not respond to a request for comment.)
Colleagues at Curve Los Angeles describe escalating disputes and more missing merchandise—namely, as Curve’s owner alleges, roughly $11,000 in jewelry, reported stolen from her boutique—claims Simmons, again, denies. By the time police went looking for him in connection to the missing jewels, he’d changed jobs and was working at nearby H. Lorenzo, where, according to three sources, he clashed with management over allegations that he used others’ employee discounts and attempted to receive a duplicate payment on a check (Simmons says that the check saga was a lapse in memory—that he didn’t realize that he’d received the check in the first place). Police were unable to locate him. Around that time, Simmons left Los Angeles, ping-ponging across the country once again.
And that brings our story back to New York, where Simmons secured a job working the floor at Khaite in July of 2024, moved in with Toufanian in February of 2025, and seemingly ignited new tensions with a fresh crop of downtowners.
“He threatened [to file] a restraining order against me,” a restaurateur and former friend, who says he lent Simmons money for his rent, DM’d Toufanian. “He made some veiled threats about how he could cancel me, none of which had any basis in facts.”