The Life and Times of Fergie Chambers

There’s a story among the Saint Ann’s School class of 2002, so neat as to seem apocryphal, that Jim “Fergie” Chambers first learned the extent of his family’s fortune from a magazine. In his own telling, when he was around 11 or 12, a classmate showed him a copy of a Forbes 400 list. While Chambers had previously marveled at his grandmother’s estate in the South of France with its 75-acre vineyard, only now did he realize that Anne Cox Chambers was something like the 10th richest person in America and among the 10 wealthiest women on earth.

His Brooklyn private school possessed an air of bohemianism. The parents were successful artists, not bankers or lawyers like the ones at Manhattan schools with similar tuitions. Chambers’s classmates, whom he’d largely known since kindergarten and who have known him almost exclusively as Fergie, were rich too, and they went off to elite colleges. But as they understood it, they were not that kind of rich.

“It wasn’t talked about at all until maybe that Forbes thing,” one of them recently recalled, “and even that memory is kind of replaced by the tale. I’m not sure if I remember it or if I just know because it’s come up in the last 10, 15 years.”

Like many Saint Ann’s alumni, this classmate has been trying to piece together the arc Chambers has undertaken in the period since their graduation. It is not a straightforward task, given his facility for shaping the dramatic contours of his autobiography—especially lately as the cartoonish contrasts of his life have become a minor fixation in political media.

His grandmother, it turned out, was the daughter of James M. Cox, the two-time governor of Ohio and 1920 Democratic presidential nominee who founded what would become Cox Enterprises, a global communications, media, and automotive conglomerate based in Atlanta that is estimated to generate $22 billion in annual revenue. Chambers was endowed from birth with a slice of the family-owned business and briefly worked for it, but he has more recently referred to his relatives as the “Cox Klux Klan.”

The Coxes are worth a reported $26.8 billion, putting them a bit below the Waltons and Kochs and just above the Lauders and Hearsts in the rankings of American wealth. Chambers’s cousin Alex Taylor is the fourth family member to serve as Cox Enterprises CEO. His father, Jim Cox Chambers, is part owner of the Atlanta Hawks and chairs the Bard College board of trustees; he and Chambers’s mother, Lauren Hamilton, the daughter of pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, divorced when their son was two. Jim Cox Chambers later married the daughter of billionaire Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Fergie Chambers, 39, was in and out of rehab and mental institutions starting at 11. After Saint Ann’s, he drifted among marriages, businesses, and callings. Money was a through line, though, and so was communism. In middle school, a history teacher gave him Lenin to read, and he was hooked. He eventually decorated his body in Soviet-inspired tattoos, including one on his neck that read “ACAB” until he modified it to create a Russian word amounting to “attaboy.”

In the spring of 2022, shortly after the war in Ukraine broke out, Chambers was in Sicily with Stella Schnabel, then his sometime girlfriend and the mother of his fourth child. Schnabel, the daughter of painter and director Julian, went to school with Chambers growing up, and they reunited a few years ago. Already in Europe and sensing an opportunity, Chambers headed to the Donbas region and to Russia, where he wrote dispatches touting the righteousness of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

When Chambers returned to the US, members of the Cox family and their lawyers asked him, he said, to sign paperwork promising that if he went to Russia again, he would dissociate his holdings as an heir. He could be seen as an unregistered foreign agent, they said, which he understood to be a threat. (A spokesperson for Cox Enterprises said the company doesn’t comment on family matters.)

The following year, Chambers learned Cox Enterprises had invested $10 million to fund the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a planned law enforcement facility known colloquially as Cop City. The new construction has drawn intense protest, in which Chambers participated and which he financially supported when he lived there, and a resulting legal crackdown that has included domestic terrorism and racketeering charges. Taylor, his CEO cousin, led the project’s fundraising as the honorary chair of Atlanta’s police fund, and the editorial board of the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in support of the planned facility.

“ATL is corrupt as hell,” Chambers wrote on X, “and the Cox family are enemies of the people.”

Then, this past July, Chambers made an announcement. “I’ve become the 1st Cox to fully detach from the company,” he wrote in an expansive statement. “In the past, I withheld from aggressively pursuing such a move, bc I maintained some family bonds, & bc I was no more at odds w Cox than w any other tentacle of the American bourgeoisie.” Cop City, he said, changed his thinking. He agreed to trade his shares for lump sums, including a $250 million initial payout.

“I got A-Rod’s Texas Rangers deal in one day,” he told me this fall with a mix of astonishment and pride.

Unshackled and flush, Chambers set out to fund his causes and make what he acknowledges is a spectacle of himself. Amid his jittery streams of social media posts, he homed in on his family and background. As the Israel-Hamas war began last fall, he made a list of relatives or relatives “by proxy”—his father, his stepmother, his cousin, his stepbrother, Schnabel’s father and brother—and the ways each aided Israel or fell short of supporting Palestine.

With his appetite for recognition and mostly unerring projection of certainty, Chambers was a quick stand-in for the larger cultural convulsion unfolding at so many American institutions such as Ivy League schools and art and literary magazines. Egged on, he engaged with many of the tabloid and right-wing media outlets that were more frequently seeking him out. He had moved to New Hampshire for tax advantages but continued to operate a gym and farm on the land he owns in Alford, Massachusetts, where his ostensible affinity for guns prompted concerned local news coverage. Chambers has not become an influential political figure, but he has a tendency to conduct himself as if he has, making for a disorienting micro-celebrity infamy. He had long been a wayward scion, but he was now an emblem of some larger dynastic corrosion. His relationships with his parents had deteriorated beyond repair. Mother Jones and Air Mail interviewed him. A Rolling Stone reporter followed him to a protest at Cop City. In December, a producer for Dr. Phil reached out.

Chambers grew up in his mother’s brownstone in Brooklyn. During one of our first conversations, he described the environment at school as “the fallout of the sort of ’80s bohemian bourgeoisie.” His father was in Los Angeles for a large chunk of his childhood but had an apartment on the floor above Yoko Ono at the Dakota.

At six, Chambers began seeing a psychiatrist because he was still wetting his bed, and he said that he was medicated before age 10. “The amount of focus and attention and pathologization from an early age was pretty intense,” he said. He was having tantrums and went to a psych ward in the eighth grade, where he said he was put in a straitjacket and injected with Thorazine. Chambers said a 16-year-old patient there raped him.

Chambers started smoking cigarettes and weed. He switched to LSD when he left the ward and his parents began having him tested for drugs. In high school, he struggled with heroin and crack and was institutionalized more regularly. A friend saw him shoot up at CBGB and called his parents. They staged an intervention. When he and his father took a chartered jet to Utah for him to attend a wilderness rehab program, he said, a doorman from the Dakota came with them as security. He snuck heroin on board and took it into the bathroom. The elder Chambers broke down the door; his son punched him in the face. (His father didn’t return requests for comment.)

In the view of some classmates, Chambers was reasonably well-liked and socially integrated at Saint Ann’s, though not entirely esteemed. They recalled him shifting identities in a manner that went beyond workaday teenage phases. He said he was gay at one time and claimed membership in the Bloods at another. As one peer put it, “He was all these other things before ‘rich kid.’”

“No one thought that he was going anywhere,” another said, “and neither did he.”

Chambers remembered himself as more of an outsider. “I mostly hung out with the kids who came around Saint Ann’s to sell drugs and smoke cigarettes outside,” he said. Chambers has claimed that his classmate Lena Dunham got him kicked out of school by informing the administration that he was selling drugs; he had been dating her friend, who attended another private school in the neighborhood. Some classmates remembered the sequence of events differently, and attributed his dismissal to a wider range of misbehavior. (Dunham didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“She didn’t fucking like me,” he recalled. “And I didn’t like fucking Lena Dunham either.”

Other classmates, he said, were better known than him but not as wealthy, and he rattled off some names—Jemima Kirke, Eva Amurri, Francesco Clemente’s daughter—in his default free-associative manner before letting out a snicker. Chambers can speak more or less uninterrupted for hours, with a sense of awe at his own intrepidness. He’s fond of Huey Newton’s notion that “anything can be revolutionary at a particular point in time,” often locating world-historical valences in his personal trajectory. His nearly three years in psych wards, rehabs, and “a little bit of jail but not a ton of jail” were, he said, a “big part of how I ended up where I ended up, coming up against the state in that way, or coming up against the discipline of the ruling class in that way.”

When we talked on this occasion, Chambers was dealing with a blood clot from a jujitsu tournament. He has also boxed and practiced Muay Thai. He had recently returned from Atlanta, where three of his children live with his first wife and where he attended a conference organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly, a network of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist groups.

Chambers returned to Saint Ann’s in time to graduate. He figured somebody’s donation helped his cause. He attended noon AA meetings at a church next to the school throughout his senior year. He was upset after breaking up with his high school girlfriend and took his first of several gap years. He worked on his father’s organic vegetable farm in Columbia County for cash and, obsessed with Henry Miller, drove his dog to California in his mother’s old Volvo. “I’m sleeping with women,” he remembered, “and writing about it like some total fucking dilettante little piece of shit.” He protested the Iraq War, got swept up in a few catch-and-release arrests, and canvassed for Ralph Nader in Washington, DC. His interest in Lenin had by then extended to a broader Russophilia. While visiting a friend at Bard, he saw a blond Russian girl named Anya Vostrova and declared his intent to marry her.

He began attending the college the next year. He’d been staying sober, but after seeing the liberal arts students excited about their first experiments with weed, he felt a competitive streak kick in. He cooked crack in the dorms and nodded out in someone’s room, and Bard asked him to leave.

Around this time Chambers temporarily dropped “Fergie,” a nickname his parents had decided on while he was in the womb. He worked for his godfather, Chris Goode—an occasional film producer who opened the ’80s nightclub Area—studied acting, and played baseball. After Aaron Boone knocked his beloved Red Sox out of the 2003 American League Championship Series, he blacked out in Brooklyn and started a few fights. He woke up yelling at his mother and Vostrova, now his girlfriend. He headed back upstate to AA meetings near Bard, where he fell in with a group of older Christian men. Chambers declared himself Catholic, preferring its “pathway for pretension” to his new friends’ Protestantism, and railed against contraception. He disavowed punk rock and all the rest of his old identity and said he was just a conservative American guy named Jim.

Chambers proposed to Vostrova, a child of middle-class immigrants who grew up on Long Island, when he was 21 years old. She was pregnant two weeks later. When they married at Le Petit Fontanille, his grandmother’s estate in Provence, the ceremonies stretched over several days.

Humbled and newly moored to tradition, Chambers decided to go to work for the family business. “We’ve made something of ourselves in this country,” he thought, “or something.” Chambers went to the Manheim auto auction on the west side of Atlanta. He was in a management training program but emphasized to me that he related better to “both the redneck white people and the cats from the hood” who dealt with the actual cars and the layoffs that arrived with the Great Recession. Vostrova became pregnant again, and Chambers showed up to events with his family in the tony Buckhead area. But he was miserable, chain-smoking Parliaments and watching his weight balloon from a diet of Chick-fil-A and sweet tea.

His grandmother was on Bard’s board at this point, before his father eventually took her seat, and the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center is one of the first buildings you see driving onto campus. Chambers got a call from Leon Botstein, the college’s president of nearly 50 years who has received some scrutiny recently for the donations Bard received from Jeffrey Epstein. “We’re a family to you,” Chambers remembered him saying. “You should come back here.” The idea was that he could study economics, but in about a month he was in Russian and writing classes and starting a baseball team.

Chambers had by now gotten his first trust fund payout of around $1 million, and a bit of income through an investment. As he saw it, though, he was still in the dark: “I don’t know if I have to work for money. No one’s told me anything.”

James M. Cox was born in a log cabin on an Ohio farm in 1870. While working as a young reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, he found a mentor in a local businessman who had won a seat in Congress. At 28, with the help of the congressman and money borrowed from friends and family, Cox acquired the Dayton Daily News. He bought the Springfield Daily News several years later; both papers are still owned by Cox Enterprises.

Over the next decade, Cox won his own seat in Congress, was elected governor of Ohio, and built a five-bedroom French Renaissance home in a Dayton suburb. In 1920, he ran for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate, but the ticket lost in a rout to Warren G. Harding. Cox returned to the media business. He bought the Miami Metropolis newspaper and aired the first television broadcast in Atlanta, where he owned the paper that would become the Journal-Constitution as well as its affiliated AM station. WSB radio operated for a period out of a Colonial Revival–style mansion known as White Columns, and WSB-TV adopted the tagline “Eyes of the South.”

When Cox died in 1957, his son Jim Jr. took over the company as CEO and nearly one-third owner. He expanded into cable and automotive and had a late-in-life conservative turn, ordering his newspaper editors in 1972 to get behind Richard Nixon. Today, the family is for all intents exclusively aligned with Democrats, and the business revolves primarily around cable, internet, and the automotive sector, though its media holdings have the more visible profile. The company acquired the news site Axios in 2022 after selling a majority stake in its broadcast stations a few years prior.

When Jim Jr. died, his two half sisters came into 95 percent ownership of Cox Enterprises. Barbara chaired the newspapers in Dayton, and Anne, Fergie’s grandmother, in Atlanta. They expanded the family’s social and philanthropic stature. Anne had been an early supporter of Jimmy Carter—the Georgia governor’s mansion had no pool, so he swam across the road at hers—and became ambassador to Belgium once he was elected president.

As with so many American dynasties, the Cox heirs eventually strayed further afield. The third generation includes Fergie’s father, Jim, the most devoutly eccentric of his siblings and cousins, an alternative medicine enthusiast who amassed stacks of aging newspapers in his Manhattan apartment. According to his son, he was Anne’s favorite child.

“Some of that had to do with him kind of being a real person” who loved punk rock, Chambers said. Jim met Chambers’s mother, Lauren Hamilton, at Bard. Hamilton grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her mother, Margaret, worked on NASA projects at MIT and coined the term “software engineering” as she programmed the flight operating systems for the Apollo 11 mission. (Chambers has had strong relationships with both of his grandmothers. After Anne’s death in 2020, Margaret is the only blood relative with whom he remains close.) Jim and Lauren married shortly after graduation and both soon had small parts in Amos Poe’s 1984 Mafia noir Alphabet City. Fergie was born in 1985. Lauren left acting behind and after their divorce, Jim moved to Los Angeles where he made documentaries, pursued dancing, and wore his hair in dreadlocks. He saw Fergie every other Christmas in Provence and when he took his son to the Super Bowl in Atlanta in 1994.

Jim moved back to New York when Fergie began to struggle more severely as a teenager. During the 2000 World Series between the Mets and Yankees, he called Fergie and told him he was thinking of going to a game. He picked his son and a friend up in a limo and they sat next to Rudy Giuliani.

At Yankee Stadium, Fergie said he saw more clearly that “something is really going on, something a little bit more than Grandma has a nice car.” Later, reading the German sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he had a theoretical basis for his family’s relationship to its wealth. “Put your head down, you’re one of God’s chosen,” he said. “My family’s particularly hush-hush. I think WASPs tend to be that way. Maybe a family of Italian shipping billionaires are a little more open about it.”

“That’s one of the really easy ways for me to counter their agenda,” he supposed, remembering a lesson he learned at a young age. “Just to take my pants off. Here we are. This is what’s going on. Heyyy.”

After Bard, Chambers, still Catholic and sober, spent a few years living part-time in Russia with Vostrova. The couple planned to unite under the same church with their two children. Chambers thought he would convert his wife, but after taking in the “guys with deep operatic voices and beards” and cathedrals built by Catherine the Great, “I’m like, Okay, I was wrong. You’re right. And I think I’m Russian Orthodox.”

He and Vostrova had their third child and decided to move. With his trust fund maturing, Chambers had “a couple million more dollars,” and when he went to Atlanta for his grandmother’s 90th birthday party, he heard about a few gyms for sale.

“So that’s how I met this totally apolitical lady who was unhappy with her marriage,” Chambers said.

One of Chambers’s more notable registers on the national radar came in 2020 during Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy-fueled campaign for Congress. Chambers, it emerged, had employed the future US representative at his Alpharetta gym in 2012.

As Greene sought her district’s Republican nomination, she often invoked her Christian faith, and Chambers aired some of the gym’s gossip on X. “The extramarital affairs you had with Justin and Craig,” he wrote, “those were Jesus-approved, right?”

The allegation didn’t get any press until after Greene won her primary a few months later. The Daily Mail ultimately enshrined it under the headline, “Embattled QAnon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘openly cheated’ on her husband of 25 years with a polyamorous tantric sex guru and then moved on to another affair with the manager at her gym.” (Greene called the story “ridiculous tabloid garbage spread by an avowed Communist” and “another attempt to smear my name because I’m the biggest threat to the Democrats’ Socialist agenda.” Neither man denied an affair to the Mail.)

Chambers found himself once again restless.

“I’m starting to have this feeling,” he said, “of just like, Where have I been for these last years?” He took a painting class and went to the Prado in Madrid, revisiting the prospect of an artistic future. He went with friends to Amsterdam—he had recently begun smoking weed again and was drinking “with no real trouble.” They headed to his grandmother’s in France, where Vostrova had gone with the kids, and saw them for a few days before flying to Morocco and Iceland. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he recalled, “I’m being super manic.”

A woman at a bar in Reykjavik asked him for a cigarette, and he spent five days with her. When he came back, Vostrova read his Facebook messages.

“I don’t want to be married anymore,” he told his wife. “I don’t know who the fuck I am.”

He couch surfed in Atlanta and read political theory. One of his father’s ex-girlfriends came to town; Chambers met her for drinks and said they spent the night together. When he woke up hungover, he went to a café and saw André 3000 sitting at the counter as well as “an incredibly beautiful girl.” He declared his intent to marry Cameron Park.

On some occasions when he provokes backlash online, Chambers’s detractors resurface his mug shot. His relationship with Park spanned one of the most volatile periods of his adult life thus far, starting from its earliest days. He was arrested in 2013 on battery and false imprisonment charges, and amid his retelling of his life story, he brought the episode up before I could ask about it. He claimed, though, that because he had been on a weeklong bender, “I don’t even know the details, man.”

“We go fucking apeshit,” he said. “I’m trying to throw myself out the window. I definitely hit her. She definitely hit me.” (Park declined to comment.)

The admission seemed to function as a gesture of self-awareness, a kind of inoculation. “I understand people who don’t want to fuck with me,” Chambers added.

An incident report from the arrest said that, according to Park, Chambers broke her laptop and phone and that when she tried to leave the apartment, he slammed the door closed on her leg and forced her back in. When she tried to leave again, she stated, he pulled her by her hair down a concrete hall and banged her head on the floor. There was no mention of Park hitting him, but she stated that she pushed him to get him off of her before going to a nearby friend’s house and waiting for the police. The report said that Chambers initially told an officer that the argument did not turn physical before acknowledging that he shut Park’s leg in the door and asked her not to leave.

According to Chambers, while he was in jail, the Coxes sent the Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ed Garland, a sixth-generation lawyer who had previously represented T.I., Ben Roethlisberger, and Ray Lewis. Chambers claimed that Park told authorities that they were both strung out and didn’t know what happened.

According to a person familiar with the night’s circumstances, Park didn’t know at the time that Chambers was wealthy. She ultimately did not pursue charges.

Chambers was expanding his activist ambitions—he wanted to become “a political person in a meaningful way.” He met housing and Occupy Wall Street organizers and donated some money; he protested when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. He went back to rehab, but it didn’t stick. Personal inventories and making amends didn’t improve his outlook. “I feel so guilty about what I’ve done to this woman,” he said, “what I did to Anya, what I’ve done with my whole life as a rich kid who’s a waste.”

He and Park left AA and opened a café boutique that stocked Rachel Comey and Henrik Vibskov. They married in 2014. In a Facebook post in 2016, he wrote about what a recent night in jail said about his whiteness and wealth. He had been sleepwalking nude and high when a neighbor called the cops.

When Barbara Cox died in 2007, most of the rest of the company was wrapped up in Anne’s estate. As Anne entered her 90s, Chambers said, his family started “to get freaked out about estate planning.” In 2013, she won approval from a Georgia court to dissolve the trust, established by her father in 1941, that held her company shares, splitting it between family members and charities. A Cox spokesperson described this at the time as a maneuver “related solely to the Cox family’s goal of maintaining future ownership and control of Cox Enterprises.”

One upshot, Chambers said, was that he started to get more money faster, and through a grantor retained annuity trust—a financial instrument used to minimize estate taxes. His assets accumulated to more than $5 million, and he ramped up his political funding and held organizing meetings at his gym. In the coming years, he brought supplies and trucks to the protests at the Standing Rock reservation, where he said he saw “everything that we recognize in America, what it was built on and who we took it from, and how we did it, and how we do everything as a nation.” In 2017 he bought 90 acres of land in Georgia. He and Park were joined by a man from the reservation, as well as another couple they met there. The Georgia group eventually came to include 14 people trying to grow food and hold retreats on 350 acres, but the project never took full flight.

“Too many anarchists,” Chambers said. “No party leadership.”

By then, he had come to see that income wouldn’t be an issue. His media profile began to rise. He made the local news in August 2017 when one of his gyms banned police and active military members. Chambers told an NBC affiliate that he didn’t want a “hetero-jock space.” When tabloids picked up the story, they usually described him as a “lifelong activist.” It took Bearing Arms, a news site for Second Amendment enthusiasts, to make the Cox connection by following a trail of Reddit comments.

Park was pulled over for drunk driving and resisted arrest. When she received a 40-day sentence in a courtroom in February 2019, Chambers said, the “entire” Morgan County sheriff’s department was there to stand up and stare him down. According to another person in the room, the police presence was unremarkable and Chambers began yelling at the judge.

Chambers and Park were already thinking about leaving Georgia, and Massachusetts had legalized marijuana in 2016. They wanted a fresh start. Chambers bought a house in the Berkshires and resolved that when he started over with a land project, he would do so in a more principled way.

Chambers grew weed and got into martial arts “very seriously.” One day, he said, five years after they married, he got back from the gym and Park was gone.

Chambers was 35 and panicking. While he was in Las Vegas in early 2020 for his birthday and a Conor McGregor UFC bout, his dad called. His grandmother was 100 years old and dying. He flew to Atlanta to sit at her feet. Anne’s death briefly brought him closer to Jim. They smoked weed together for the first time and went to the NBA All-Star Game in Chicago.

Chambers went to New York. He hadn’t wanted to be there much since he was a teenager, but he intended to make music with a cousin and “slay Tinder to cope.” One day he met Park at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village for lunch. During their meal, Chambers looked across the restaurant and spotted his old classmate Stella Schnabel.

“It’s Fergie from Saint Ann’s,” Chambers reminded her.

Schnabel came over to his table and looked him and Park over. This was his wife, he explained, because they weren’t yet legally divorced. Schnabel had heard he had “lots of kids.”

Schnabel’s father was nominated for an Oscar and her mother opened an Azzedine Alaïa boutique in SoHo. “There is no downside to being a Schnabel,” her brother Vito, an art dealer, once told the New York Observer. In her senior year of high school, Stella began dating Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, and Julian made the art for the band’s next album—a portrait of his daughter. She had been an actor and poet in the past; now she had a store at her house in Brooklyn. She invited Chambers to see it and they exchanged numbers.

“I hope you like those truffles,” Chambers remembered her texting after she left. “Find me someone to have a baby with.”

“Immediately my thought is, Well, that’s gonna be me,” he said.

A little while later they had dinner and slept together. He needed to go plant weed the next day, so she joined him in Massachusetts, where they had dinner with his mother.

The coronavirus pandemic loomed, ending Chambers’s plan to go to Thailand for a Muay Thai training camp. He and Schnabel quarantined together. He wanted a real Marxist-Leninist organization on the land, which he would call the Berkshire Communists, and a place where like-minded people from New York and Boston could gather, study, eat, and garden. Chambers inherited around $7 million when Anne died, and between that and his investment dividends, he placed his assets at the time near $10 million. He started a gym program in his garage and paid a top-tier UFC coach to teach free classes for those who were “down to tolerate communist politics.”

Chambers and Schnabel were on and off from the beginning. “We are such bratty kids,” he said. “We love each other so much, but it’s been really fiery sometimes.” They had been apart a few months when he returned to New York to join the protests following the murder of George Floyd, but she drove in from the Hamptons to pick him up when he was arrested. They headed back to Massachusetts, and he said they took San Pedro cactus as they sat by a bonfire. They decided to have a child.

One Thursday night last fall, I met Chambers during one of his occasional trips back to New York. We walked a few blocks from the Bowery Hotel in the East Village, where he and Schnabel usually stay—it’s owned by Eric Goode, a friend of Schnabel’s and the brother of Chambers’s godfather, from whom Chambers has been estranged. The streets were crowded with bar hoppers and bankers returning home from work. We passed a group of cops standing on the sidewalk, and Chambers began oinking and spit on the ground in their direction.

“Yeah, you too,” one of the officers said.

“Ay, fuck you,” Chambers replied as we continued to walk. “Fuck you, motherfucker.”

“Come back, dumbass.”

Chambers turned around and the two men brought their faces within inches. A few outdoor diners were starting to look on.

“You spat at me almost.”

“I didn’t spit at you,” Chambers countered.

“Keep on walking,” the cop said.

Chambers called him “fat boy” and said he wasn’t afraid. Another officer encouraged me to remove my friend from the situation. Chambers walked away on his own.

“The whole fucking city hates all of you motherfuckers,” he shouted as he backpedaled. “Your day is coming. Your day is coming.”

“I’m not stupid,” he said as we continued down the street. “That’s the thing, I’ll play within the boundaries of what you can fuck around with.” But he also felt some sense of duty to make use of his impunity, since there are “a lot of people that wish they could do that.” He looked up at the football game playing on a television inside a bar we were passing. “Man, they’re getting smoked. I’m a Giants fan.”

Wearing a Fila polo, a flat-brimmed trucker hat, and a dangling boxing glove charm from his ear, he seemed a bit haggard but comfortable. Chambers didn’t like the city anymore—“same fucking played-out story as everybody else, it ain’t what it used to be”—and usually came to town only because of Schnabel, though he didn’t mind having her mother watch their two-and-a-half-year-old son. On this occasion, he was eager to be here.

Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, and Chambers planned to see him speak at an anti-imperialist summit at Cooper Union. A few of Chambers’s comrades, as he referred to them, had also told him about a reception later. Schnabel, like her grandparents and her stepmother and all her siblings and half siblings, had a small part in her father’s 2000 movie Before Night Falls, an adaption of the Fidel Castro critic Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir, which made Chambers all the more excited to bring her to meet the delegation.

We passed through a small area of the neighborhood sometimes known as Ukrainian Village, and Chambers muttered to himself after seeing a sign objecting to Russia’s invasion. Between slices at a nearby pizzeria, he slapped a sticker saying “Let Cuba Live!” onto the collection on the wall.

As Chambers ate, he continued tracing through his line of thinking on this and related issues, stopping only to get cash from an ATM after we left to go to a bar. Cuba, he said, is struggling in some of the same ways the US induced Venezuela and Iraq to struggle; it’s “immaterial” to distinguish between any member of NATO and affiliated countries, “all vassals of the United States in some way”; with so many people having nothing to lose, some of the conditions for revolution are in place to “advance the interests of the global working class,” but it would require an organized and centralized party formation, a cadre of professionals, to develop the strategy. He could fund some of the necessary political education. He didn’t want to fall into the trope of a rich kid searching for his voice, and he had to let go of notions of personal redemption, but he did come to realize that “the only way that I can sort of save my soul was through a focus on collective struggle.”

“Look, there’s probably a lot of fucking rich people that do nothing redeeming whatsoever, but they’re very happy,” Chambers said, drinking a rum and Coke he thought was too weak, but this contradicted his experience. “I’ve been around some of my family and people in their circle and some people in Stella’s circle. A lot of these people are not very happy.”

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.

Chambers’s citizen journalism stint comprised a series of Substack dispatches and a few pieces for left-wing outlets. “I got the story I wanted to get,” he said. “I understood what I needed to understand and it was time to go home.”

Chambers said he had already told Cox that he would consider being bought out of the company. When the call came, he had been bashing his family members by name for about a month. The negotiations took nearly a year. Under the terms of agreement, he said he couldn’t get into all the specifics, but he noted that the $250 million was only a portion of what he’ll receive in the next 15 years.

The windfall presented a certain predicament. “Well, why didn’t you cut yourself off,” Chambers said, mocking the most obvious criticism he’s faced. He saw it as a matter of strategy. By holding onto money, his thinking went, you can easily make more money, all the while gathering more information about how to spend it. And the money could be useful soon. Chambers thought “our political crisis could develop overnight here.”

On the advice of a communist friend, Chambers hired a staff. “You need someone to handle your emails,” he was told. “And like, hire a motherfucker to watch your dogs when you need to leave town.” He was now mostly living in New Hampshire, but the land project continued in Massachusetts, where he had bought a marble quarry. He erected a communist library and a “state of the art” MMA gym.

The rubbernecking was getting underway. He didn’t want to be “put in the zoo as an absurdity,” Chambers said, but he thought he had some media savvy and could generate bad press around Cop City. He gave an interview to the New York Post, which pointed out that he had secured “an alleged payout more befitting an oligarch than a proletariat.” He continued to pop up on social media, mostly as an oddity—until Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.

Great Barrington is one of the posher weekend destinations in western Massachusetts, a town of roughly 7,000 that Vogue has described as “quietly cool” and home of the Bard-affiliated liberal arts college Simon’s Rock. Chambers’s land in Alford was a few minutes away. The Berkshire Communists marched down Main Street on October 10, chanting “from the river to the sea.” Chambers told The Berkshire Edge that “the Al-Aqsa Flood was a powerful statement of resistance to genocide.” The paper pulled real estate records showing the properties belonging to an LLC he owns: about 50 acres for over $5 million, spread among six purchases.

“We need to start making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public,” Chambers wrote on Instagram. In November, The Berkshire Eagle published a profile—“Young. Communist. Gun-owner. Multimillionaire.”—describing his social media utterances as “a threat to anyone who supports Israel” and noting that, with Great Barrington residents starting to become frightened, the district attorney’s office and police detective unit were on alert. Chambers explained to the Eagle that he didn’t personally keep any firearms in Alford, only shotguns on a mountain in New Hampshire “like everybody else,” and had no plans to raise a militia or harm anyone. He wrote online that there weren’t any guns on his Massachusetts land beyond “a shotgun or two” with lawfully permitted owners.

The Free Beacon described Chambers as “using daddy’s money to harass Jews,” noting that he had been paying legal fees for members of the US branch of Palestine Action, a loose social media–based protest network that has sought to disrupt the work of Israeli weapons suppliers. The Free Press, the online media company founded by Bari Weiss, sent a reporter—her sister, Suzy—to New Hampshire to profile Chambers. “There are very liberal colleges with very liberal students who want to take the theories they learn in the classroom into the streets,” the writer surmised. “And then there’s Fergie, with hundreds of millions of dollars, eager to make it all go boom.” The notion bore little resemblance to the colleges of the Berkshires, but it did faithfully convey the literal content of Chambers’s social media output.

In October, he and other protesters locked themselves to the door of Israeli defense company Elbit Systems’s office in Cambridge. He sent me a voice message explaining how he evaded arrest by hiding in his grandmother’s backyard. On a Monday morning the next month, Palestine Action protesters blocked the entrance to Elbit’s New Hampshire campus. Some of them went to the roof of the building, where they poured red paint down the façade and set off flares. They smashed windows and locked a lobby door with a bicycle anti-theft device. No one was hurt, and the most immediate reverberation from the day was the arrest of three women between the ages of 19 and 27. They were charged with riot, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief, burglary, and conspiracy to commit falsifying physical evidence—felony charges that are each punishable by three and a half to seven years in state prison. New Hampshire’s Republican attorney general, John Formella, announced that he was investigating potential Civil Rights Act violations. Chambers paid $50,000 to bail the women out.

A building inspector told the Alford select board in December that the facility housing the Berkshire People’s Gym was not permitted for commercial use, only agricultural storage and farm equipment, and began sending cease-and-desist notices. On New Year’s Day, the barn was cleared out. “The gym is gone,” the board chair said at the next meeting.

Toward the end of the year, I thought I might not speak with Chambers again. There was a rumor among friends of Schnabel’s that the FBI was looking for him, and over text, he seemed tentative about the increasingly suggestive press and social media attention he was receiving. He switched to using an encrypted messaging app.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, he video called me. He was in Tunisia—though he asked to keep that quiet—wearing a brown kufi and rolling a cigarette in a sleek but not opulent apartment. Between bites of a sandwich, he explained his intentions in his new locale, where Schnabel would arrive the next day. In the first place, they would take shahada.

“I realized that I was definitely being too cavalier in some ways,” Chambers said. “Definitely too self-obsessed.” He thought that in the last couple of years, he had been productive on a political level but generally scattered, relying too much on weed and training as his personal turmoil mounted. “I’m looking over my shoulder everywhere,” he said. He was panicking as he left the US but calmed down when he sat on the plane reading the Quran. He began studying Arabic and going to the mosque five times a day.

“That’s another thing I know people will want to caricature,” Chambers said. “I don’t really care.”

In the aftermath of the New Hampshire arrests, he said he generally wanted to keep a lower profile. “It feels like my existence is part of why these women are facing years in prison,” Chambers said. “And I hate that.”

Tunisia has no extradition treaty with the US, and Chambers seemed to play with the idea. Federal agents showed up at Schnabel’s home in Long Island, he said, and police called a friend of his in Vermont. (“No agents showed up at my house in LI at all ever at anytime,” Schnabel said, but later texted to say that someone did arrive, possibly PSEG or a plumber.) “There are people that are facing a lot of really severe stuff right now,” he continued. “Including maybe me, we don’t know.” A few tweets noting the age and gender dynamics of the Berkshire Communists had surfaced following the arrests. “People want to make this connection and they want to fucking skewer me,” he said. “They probably think I’m like a crazy Charles Manson terrorist.”

By January, Chambers was open about his whereabouts. His profile on X listed his location as “(Tunis) تونس.” He and Schnabel married the following month. In March, Chambers was upset about how he had been depicted in a cluster of interviews. Not enough was made, he said, of his distance from drinking and drugs, or the need to connect movements to the Global South. People from his past have often seemed conflicted about how interesting or important he is, or how dangerous. The general consensus among Saint Ann’s classmates was that, while they did not specifically expect anything violent to happen with Chambers, they would not be shocked if it did.

Chambers said that at times he has contemplated simply disappearing. He ultimately ruled it out. “Is that what’s gonna happen to me?” he asked himself. “They’re gonna shut me up?”

“I can’t have that,” he said in Tunisia, leaning back in his chair.

When he was a kid, he became accustomed to seeing his father intermittently. He was starting to worry about the same pattern developing with his three older children in Atlanta, and he could see how his relationship to his family had informed his oppositional stance. “Of course if my father is shitty in a number of ways, then my daddy issues influenced what I do politically,” he said. “I guess I just expected they were gonna steadily become more pleased with me.”

People in his position often liked attention, he understood, and perhaps even more than attention, disillusionment—it was unavoidable. “This is what I came from,” Chambers said. “There’s nothing we can do about that.”

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