Jeanine Pepler, Sag Harbor Publicist, Dies in Apparent Suicide

According to Richard Johnson, the New York Post journalist who pens “Page Six,” Jeanine Pepler hanged herself on Sunday night at her home in Sag Harbor.

The publicist, who had represented novelists Jay McInerney — whom she also dated for a time — and Candace Bushnell, along with Sag Harbor’s Baron’s Cove, was found by her boyfriend, the artist Steve Miller. According to sources, Pepler was 50 years old.

When she moved to Sag Harbor in 2005, Pepler opened AKA Life, a boutique PR agency.

According to the company’s website, Pepler moved to New York in 1996 from her birthplace of South Africa and then Washington. D.C., working with HBO, The New Yorker, and other companies. “She started her own company, Acetylene Entertainment, where she developed prestigious properties for film adaptation and nationally distributed indie films, coordinating theater bookings and planning and executing marketing campaigns,” the site reads.

Other successful companies followed, but after 9/11, she decided to switch industries and took a job as the Director of Publicity & Marketing at a publishing company, Ruggedland, before moving on to found AKA in 2005.

Jay McInerney dedicated his novel, The Good Life, to her. It reads, “For Jeanine: Who rescued me that day and many days thereafter.”

Apparently, Pepler had surgery for thyroid cancer 14 years ago, but had fully recovered and had been in good health.
A full obit will appear in a future edition of The Independent.