A stable owner in the Hamptons has spoken out to lament that she was ‘ousted’ from the business she owned for 20 years to make way for next-door neighbors Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s horse rescue charity.
Jan Warner, 60, told the New York Post in an interview published Saturday that she was forced to shut down ‘Jan’s Barn’ in 2017 after the landlord demanded a year’s rent in advance.
Today, the property is rented by the Baldwins, who stable rescue horses and also rent out stalls to their well-heeled friends for $1,500 a month, and managed by Pat Granfield, a close friend of Hilaria.
Warner lamented that she had lost her longtime business, and suggested that her wealthy neighbors might have engineered her ouster, saying: ‘I think Alec and Hilaria didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have this immaculate, perfect place.’
Jan Warner (front) ran stables next to Alec Baldwin’s Long Island mansion, before a rent dispute led to her outster and Hilaria’s close friend Pat Granfield (rear) took over
Hilaria Baldwin is seen with husband Alec in 2016. A stable owner in the Hamptons has spoken out to lament that she was ‘ousted’ from her business to make way for the Baldwins
Alec Baldwin poses for a photo in 2018 at the stables he rents in the Hamptons
Warner suggested that her wealthy neighbors might have engineered her ouster, saying: ‘I think Alec and Hilaria didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have this immaculate, perfect place.’
Warner said that she had paid rent of $2,000 a month for the stables in Amagansett through a handshake agreement with the landlord, Job Potter. But in 2017 Potter abruptly asked for a year’s rent in advance, Warner said.
‘I couldn’t pay the whole year upfront and he knew that,’ Warner told the Post, saying she believed it was the landlord’s ‘way of getting rid of me.’
A lawyer for the Baldwins told the newspaper that the couple had nothing to do with Warner’s departure from the property.
The attorney claimed Potter had issues with her ability to keep up with the rent and that ‘it was widely known throughout the neighborhood that the property was not maintained in a habitable condition, but rather was run-down and in a condition of squalor, and posed dangerous risks.’
People who boarded their horses at the barn with Warner deny this and say that although the barn wasn’t pristine or Hamptons-chic, it was welcoming and beloved by both rich and poor.
‘There’s no one I’d trust more with my horses than Jan Warner,’ investment banker Kelley Foster told the Post. Warner now lives in an East Hampton trailer park and works for Foster in a private stable.
Jan Warner, 60, said that she was forced to shut down ‘Jan’s Barn’ in 2017 after the landlord demanded a year’s rent in advance. The property is seen above
Pat Granfield, who now manages the stables for Alec and Hilaria, is a well-dressed equestrian who owns a home on the Upper East Side
‘The two of them are real tight and they’re both real hoity toitys,’ Warner said of Granfield (above) and Hilaria
Granfield, who now manages the stables for Alec and Hilaria, is a well-dressed equestrian who owns a home on the Upper East Side.
Warner previously knew Granfield, because Warner had allowed her to stable her horses and give riding lessons there.
‘The two of them are real tight and they’re both real hoity toitys,’ Warner said of Granfield and Hilaria, saying Granfield was a frequent guest of the Baldwins and boasted of having the ‘best rosé’ with the couple.
Warner and her friends call Granfield ‘Equine Barbie,’ and claim her knowledge of horses is inferior to Warner’s.
Granfield told the Post of her work at the Baldwin stables: ‘I’ll say we’re just doing simple and good work for animals and the community.’
The East End stable controversy comes after Alec appeared to leave Twitter last week amid the fall-out from wife Hilaria’s on-going scandal in which she was accused of faking her Spanish heritage and accent.
The East End stable controversy comes after Alec appeared to leave Twitter last week amid the fall-out from wife Hilaria’s on-going Spanish heritage scandal
The 62-year-old SNL actor posted a tweet on January 18 saying: ‘Twitter is like a party where everyone is screaming. Not much of a party. Goodbye for now.’
The Academy Award-nominee’s departure from the social media site is the latest episode in the unfolding scandal around his wife and mother of their five children, Hilaria, who has been accused of faking her Spanish heritage when she was born in Boston, Massachusetts .
The 30-Rock star previously defended his 36-year-old wife saying in a video in December where he called Twitter is ‘a lot of s***’.
Baldwin, who previously won an Emmy for his portrayal of President Donald Trump on SNL, added: ‘You have to kind of hack your way through the debris of Twitter. Twitter is just a vast orchard of cr**.’
On January 3 Hilaria Baldwin’s sister-in-law Chynna Phillips defended her in a YouTube video Tuesday saying: ‘It’s an awkward and embarrassing time for her’.
The online frenzy began on December 21 when a woman tweeted: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.’
In the next few days several videos of Hilaria’s past TV appearances resurfaced showing her commitment to a Spanish accent, including one in 2015 where she seemingly forgot the English word for ‘cucumber’.
A video of Alec on The Late Show in 2013 emerged days after in which he impersonated his wife’s ‘Spanish’ accent, telling David Letterman: ‘My wife is from Spain.’
And Hilaria herself indicated in one 2020 interview that she moved from Spain to the US when she was 19 to attend New York University.
Hilaria’s biography on her agency’s speakers site stated that she was born on the island of Majorca and raised in Boston, without specifying a timeline for her upbringing.
Her agency later removed that reference and simply listed her professional work history after.
While Hilaria has long described her mother as Spanish, records revealed that Hayward is in fact a fourth-generation Massachusetts resident.
She was was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas to Dr Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas, who worked as professors in the US for years before retiring to Majorca in 2011, according to Page Six.
She attended $64,900-a-year The Cambridge School of Weston in Massachusetts.
Several former classmates came forward to confirm that Hilaria was in fact raised in Weston, Massachusetts, by professor parents without a hint of a foreign accent.
Majorcan friends of her parents, who moved to the Spanish island in 2011, said last month that she speaks to them in English.
In January it was revealed that in 2009 she took two attempts to fill out her W9 tax form, dithering between two names, before filling in the name she was born with.