NYU Economics Professor Arrested for Stalking Citigroup’s Chief Economist

Heleen Mees had been in a relationship with Citigroup’s Willem Buiter, but when things soured, the Dutch-born economist  began sending him a barrage of messages through emails, which ranged from racy, to X-rated, to demented, reports the NY Daily News.  Mees,44, was arrested on Monday night.

Mees sent Buiter more than a thousand emails over a two-year period, authorities said, according to  NYDN. She also sent photos of herself masturbating and images of other naked women.

NYDN goes on:

“What can I do to make it right? Shall I lick your b---s?” Mees allegedly wrote in one email. 

“Shall we adopt a child?” she wrote in another.[...]

“Hope your plane falls out of the sky,” Mees wrote to Buiter, court papers say.[...]

 In addition to sending him X-rated images of herself, she sent him a photo of dead birds on May 3. 

Mees also targeted Buiter’s economist wife, Anne, and children, sending them unwanted messages as well, court papers say.

Mees was arraigned Tuesday on stalking, harassment and aggravated harassment charges. She was ordered held on $5,000 bail.

Mees’ Legal Aid lawyer, Vaneshka Hyacinthe, said her client “had a long-standing relationship” with Buiter and “the emails go in both directions.”

According to NYU's web site, Mees is Adjunct Associate Professor in Economics at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is also a contributor to Foreign Policy and the Financial Times' Economists Forum. Mees has worked at Ernst & Young’s headquarters in New York, the European Commission in Brussels and the Dutch Treasury in The Hague.

A Keynesian, Mees in April of this year called for a Keynesian contortionist policy:

An increase in corporate income tax to skim off the rents that businesses extract due to the unlimited supply of labor is entirely appropriate. The government can use the tax revenues to redistribute income in favor of workers, boosting consumer demand, or invest in education, bolstering human capital.

In a 2012 column for the Financial Times, Mees called for Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to go beyond Treasury bond buying and to start buying stocks:

 In that case Bernanke would be wise, if he were to employ the printing presses following the FOMC’s September meeting, to buy stocks instead.

In the below clip she is discussing the sex scandal surrounding former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn .



Mees is fluent in English and Dutch and speaks Chinese (Mandarin), French and Italian.

She is founder of a female-empowerment organization called Women on Top.