IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Be Ruth Madoff These Days
The New York Times calls her “the loneliest woman in New York” – which is kind, compared to what University of Chicago cultural anthropologist Richard A. Shweder describes her as - “the succubus to Bernie’s incubus”:
She used to get foil highlights every six weeks - her shade is Soft Baby Blonde, and she was religious about color - but the last time she called her Manhattan salon, Pierre Michel on East 57th Street, she was told not to return. “I understand,” she said, according to the salon’s co-owner.
The Amagansett florist who decorated her husband’s annual corporate party in Montauk with lismachia, Queen Anne’s lace and thistles has banned her as a client, saying she will not associate with the wife of one of history’s most notorious financial scoundrels.
Even her sons, Mark and Andrew, who have not been charged by prosecutors but are banned by their lawyers from contact with their parents, have begun to refer to “Mom” and “Dad” as “Ruth” and “Bernie,” according to family friends.
Ruth Madoff, 68, has not been charged with any crime or even questioned by prosecutors. But she has become perhaps the most vilified spouse of a financial rogue in history. … Although no evidence has emerged to date that she conspired or even knew about her husband’s crimes, her plight has evoked no apparent public sympathy. She has been pilloried and turned into a pariah. …
Rightly or wrongly, she is viewed as an unrepentant beneficiary of ill-gotten wealth, a petite and well-dressed embodiment of the collective, bloated greed that helped topple the stock market and the housing industry.
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