Bryant Simmons’s Frenemies Call Him a Scammer. He Says They’re Just Jealous.

Bryant Simmons had spent the biting December afternoon horseback riding with a girlfriend, taking his mind off the online tumult mounting against him. “I literally told a friend of mine who’s a really big influencer [that] I thought I was a hidden gem,” the 36-year-old Simmons says from a New Jersey stable. He recalls her response: “Bryant, everybody knows you.”

Simmons seemed to live the ultimate SoHo fantasy. Up until October, he worked the floor at the urban cool-girl label Khaite, which dresses everyone from actors like Katie Holmes (never forget the viral cashmere bra) and Annabelle Dexter-Jones to models Laura Harrier and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley; socialites Olivia Palermo and Ivy Getty; and fashion royalty Talita von Furstenberg and Isabella Massenet. He dressed in luxury fashion brands like Bottega Veneta and YSL.

“I need to look like my clients so I can generate sales,” he says—his $700 red rubber The Row sandals became minor Substack lore last year, when Max Berlinger partially credited Simmons with the “summer of the flip-flop.” Fashion bloggers like Laura Reilly, models like Jasmine Sanders, celebrity stylists like Aldo Rendon, influencers like Coco Schiffer, and beauty personalities like Barbara Sturm all followed Simmons on Instagram.

Then, on Thanksgiving, the style set began to send one another a new and mysterious Instagram account: @bryantsimmonsisascammer. “Bryant Christopher Simmons is a SERIAL SCAMMER,” read the bio. “Beware of him.”

Run by Simmons’s former roommate Arya Toufanian, the account dumped dozens of screenshots—Instagram DMs, text threads, Reddit posts, emails, photos, and videos—allegedly drawn from a bicoastal chorus of Simmons’s ex-bosses and colleagues at Khaite, Kirna Zabête, James Perse, Curve Los Angeles, and H. Lorenzo, as well as a group of fed-up landlords and sublessors who’d rented him apartments throughout the years.

One woman, a former colleague of Simmons’s who asked to remain anonymous, told Toufanian: “He’s been scamming for years. All the fashion girls know.”

“They all want to be famous,” Simmons says of the disgruntled associates when I ask him about the scamming allegations. “And the only person who doesn’t care about the fame is me.”

This is a downtown New York story—an if-you-know-you-know tale, legible only to those fluent in the city’s rarified circuits: the people who shop at The Row and Khaite, eat at Jean’s, disappear into The Box, and drop their clothes at Kingbridge the next morning, as if nothing happened. It’s also a hyper-online story, one adjudicated in the court of social media, where relevance is currency and proximity to luxury is everything. In that sense, the fascination with Simmons has less to do with the facts themselves and more to do with what it signals to understand them—to know what’s being referenced and why it matters. But it’s also a story about what happens when the veil gets pulled back on a downtown figure. “Every New Yorker is running some kind of scam,” Simmons says, describing a world in which influencers and other members of the glitterati project lives of effortless luxury online that don’t quite align with reality. The clothes, the rooms, the access—the optics suggest abundance, but behind the screen is a far more precarious existence: living paycheck to paycheck, reselling gifted items after the photo is posted, hustling to keep the illusion intact.

The saga began as roommate dramas often do, with the rent.

Simmons first met Toufanian in January, when Simmons messaged about an available room in Toufanian’s rented SoHo townhome. Simmons moved in the following month, sleeping on an air mattress surrounded by piles of Kingbridge dry cleaning packaging, Printemps shopping bags, and a steamer, according to Toufanian.

Toufanian, a serial entrepreneur whose portfolio includes the controversial 2010s college-media company I’m Shmacked—which posted viral videos of students drinking, partying, and attempting insane stunts—isn’t afraid of conflict. So in November, after Simmons failed to make on-time rent payments for months and then refused to pay his October rent, Toufanian came up with a plan B: good old-fashioned shame. And @bryantsimmonsisascammer was born.

This winter, the page is closely, though quietly, monitored by New York’s young fashion set—a world of fashion writers, retailers, and influencers. “The page started with roughly 30 followers,” Toufanian says, claiming that, by contrast, even his first video earned nearly 300 views and was reshared more than 100 times. Simmons responded a couple of days later with his own video, saying, “You may either want to fuck me or want to be me…. I’m going to be at [the SoHo loft],” and “I have the keys.”

“I ended up watching Worst Roommate Ever on Netflix and started to realize, I need to file [a police report] immediately,” Toufanian says. He filed one for aggravated harassment and posted a photo of it to @bryantsimmonsisascammer, because in Simmons’s response video, he had revealed the address of their shared loft.

Three days later, police knocked on Toufanian’s door and forced him out of the apartment, telling him that Simmons had filed a petition for an order of protection in family court, which alleged that the two were in an intimate relationship and levied a list of complaints against him, including stalking, harassment of work colleagues, and threats of violence with a knife.

Simmons was arrested later that night on charges of aggravated harassment in connection to the video and his subsequently telling officers that he was going to “punch” Toufanian. He was released within hours, and his arraignment was scheduled for later that month. In family court on December 9, in a hearing about Simmons’s petition for a protective order against Toufanian, he told the judge that the duo had been dating for almost a year—a claim Toufanian vehemently denies, saying that the two were never romantically involved. (When I ask Simmons about this, he says that he told the judge that the pair had an “intimate relationship”—because, for example, the roommates would watch The White Lotus on the couch—but acknowledged to the judge that it had not been a sexual one.)

Toufanian says the judge dismissed the petition for an order of protection within minutes, and he was finally allowed to return home, where he promptly rolled a joint, sat at his desk, and returned to fighting with Simmons on Instagram.

On December 23, Simmons pleaded not guilty to the harassment charges during his arraignment and was released on his own recognizance. His next court date is scheduled for January 20.

“I thought he was the coolest thing,” Chelsea Buettner, a former coworker, says. “He really did have cool style.”

Buettner met Simmons in 2021, when she was working at Isabel Marant and he had a job at the nearby Intermix. At the time, Buettner’s mother, Jenny, shopped with Simmons regularly. “Me and Jenny were really tight,” Simmons says, reflecting. “But I think because I’m so personable, things got mixed up.”

Problems began the following year, when both he and Buettner were working at Kirna Zabête. Buettner says that one day her mother phoned her and said, “Bryant called me last night crying and freaking out that he really needed money for rent.” Buettner recalls being confused; Simmons had always bragged about his upbringing—how he came from a “good family with money.” She believed his need for $3,500 in rent money was a red flag. According to Buettner, Simmons began inquiring about Jenny’s shopping habits. “Does she check her credit card statement,” she recalls him asking, “or does your dad just [pay it]?” Simmons says he doesn’t remember that conversation. “It was three years ago, and we used to drink so many espresso martinis, so I’m gonna go with no, I never asked about her mother’s finances,” he tells me.

When Jenny saw a $5,000 charge from The Row pop up on her Apple Wallet, Buettner immediately accused Simmons. “Mom, absolutely not,” she recalls telling Jenny, claiming that Simmons must have used her mother’s card to buy himself a suit he had been talking about. “I know,” Jenny replied. “I’m fucking pissed.”

When Jenny confronted Simmons, he apologized, she says, for using the wrong customer’s card, claiming that he was buying a suit for another person he was styling. Simmons, meanwhile, claims he told Jenny that he had an upcoming wedding, and that once Jenny learned he had been the one to charge her card, she told him it was all fine and that he could keep the suit (a claim Jenny vehemently denies). He kept the suit, as evidenced by multiple downtown street fashion shoots in the sleek outfit.

“Listen, I’m an honest guy,” Simmons tells me. “I would not want you to put that [story] in the article, with The Row like that, because it’s not true,” he says. “I still shop there.”

Buettner relayed the incident to her manager at Kirna Zabête, who by that point was already investigating Simmons. “I noticed patterns of returns,” the manager tells me, alleging “that he was putting things back onto his own card.” Simmons denies that this was a pattern, saying, “That was only with Jenny.”

In several interviews with Simmons’s former employers or colleagues, the issue of missing merchandise continually comes up. In connection to one such instance, the police were called to the Kirna Zabête location owned by Beth Buccini, who alleges that Simmons was stealing from the store.

On June 9, 2022, police arrived at Kirna Zabête and brought him into the station for questioning about the inventory missing from the store. When I ask him about his interaction with the police, including whether he’d been handcuffed, he responds with a credits list for the outfit he had on that day: “I was never put in handcuffs. I had on black pants and a black Bottega Jodie bag,” he tells me, vividly recalling that afternoon, and adding that he was also wearing fisherman sandals from The Row. He left the station that same day. In a recent Instagram story, Simmons said that “shit did hit the fan at Kirna because I got in trouble with a boss that was jealous of me.”

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.”