Socialite, Reality Star—or Thief?

by Peter Davis Info

Peter Davis is the editor at large of Paper, his articles on style and celebrities have been published in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The New York Observer.

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Patrick McMullan Nightlife fixture Kashmir Snowdon-Jones is a self-styled socialite who brags of modeling gigs and MTV shows. Now prosecutors say they believe that she is a credit-card grifter. Peter Davis on the club scene's enigma.

Donning her signature second-skin black leggings and blinking her deep blue eyes, sometime model and aspiring socialite Kashmir Snowdon-Jones stood up at her table at the exclusive New York nightclub 1Oak last Friday night. She had an important, life-changing announcement.

"She wanted the whole table to know she was getting a reality show [on MTV]," says a woman who was at the table. "She was drunk as a skunk. She was dancing and laughing."

“She sleeps every day until 8 p.m., then goes out all night and just goes crazy.”

My sources at MTV aren't aware of any such show (an MTV PR executive did not return a call for comment), but Snowdon-Jones was sitting on another momentous personal update, one the 22-year-old chose not to share: She had just been charged with for grand larceny and identity theft. On February 10, Snowdon-Jones turned herself in to authorities after her former best friend Jennifer Hirsch filed a complaint with the New York Police Department alleging that Snowdon-Jones, her classmate at Oldfields, an all-girls boarding school in Maryland, had stolen and used her mother's credit-card number to the tune of almost $4,000. ("I made the credit-card charges to get back at my friend," Kashmir told police, according to a New York Post report about the complaint.)

These dueling personas—the aspiring model with the long blond hair and the fancy name versus the alleged grifter who bilked her best friend—has Manhattan's privileged club-hopping set buzzing.

The child of Peggy-Sue Honeyman Scott, who lives in Los Angeles, and Manhattan interior designer David Snowdon-Jones, who claims to be the grandson of renowned photographer Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret's husband, Kashmir Snowdon-Jones boasts that her godfather is Eric Clapton and that she's named after the famous Led Zeppelin song.

At Oldfields, Snowdon-Jones had a reputation as a real-life mean girl. She eventually left to attend the Professional Children's School in New York, a private high school for children actors or models that counts Mischa Barton and Jordana Brewster as alums. Now represented by the Los Angeles-based modeling agency Nous, Snowdon-Jones boasts often about upcoming modeling gigs, though she doesn't seem to have gotten much work (an acquaintance remembers seeing her in a Champion ad).

Snowdon-Jones hits the town almost seven nights a week, numerous contemporaries say, a regular at spots like Southside, Butter, 1Oak and The Eldridge, though she counts a scant three photographs on patrickmcmullan.com, a New York bellwether of social status. "I don't really count going to 1Oak as being a socialite," sniffs a woman who refers to Snowdon-Jones as her "frenemy." "She likes to be the center of attention. She's a pretty hard partier. She keeps up with the best of them." Says another 1Oak regular says, "She sleeps every day until 8 p.m., then goes out all night and just goes crazy."