The husband of US publishing executive who was killed in a boating accident off Italy’s Amalfi Coast has said their skipper was distracted by his phone in the lead up to the fatal crash.
The Daily Beast quoting Italy’s Il Messaggero newspaper said that Elio Persico—the 30-year-old skipper of the boat, who was injured in the crash and found to have consumed alcohol and cocaine sometime before the incident—now faces several charges including negligent injury and culpable manslaughter. “He was always on the phone,” Mike White, Vaughan’s husband, told authorities.
White needed surgery to his collarbone after the crash, while the couple’s children escaped the ordeal physically unharmed. In a statement Sunday, Bloomsbury CEO Nigel Newton called Vaughan’s death “a terrible blow.”
Adrienne Vaughan, 45, was president of Bloomsbury Publishing’s US branch, which counts writers ranging from bestselling novelists Sarah J. Maas and Susanna Clarke to historian Mark Kurlansky among its roster of authors.
A Bloomsbury book, “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South,” by the late Winfred Rembert (as told to Erin I. Kelly), won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2022.
Vaughan, who had a master’s degree in business from New York University, had worked at the Disney Book Group and Oxford University Press among other companies before joining Bloomsbury in 2020 as executive editor and COO. She was promoted to president a year later and also served on the board of the industry trade group the Association of American Publishers.
(With inputs from Associated Press)