Ruth Madoff: The Loneliest Woman in New York

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.

AP Ruth Madoff

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. When her husband, Bernard Madoff, divulged his Ponzi scheme, a $65-billion fraud for which he awaits sentencing later this month, Mrs. Madoff’s life was also ruined. 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.

The wives of other notorious criminals, like Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Nicholas Leeson, endured rough social sledding but eventually emerged with new careers and new friends. It’s not as if they couldn’t still go out and have their hair done. There wasn’t quite the same pack of gleeful tabloid photographers as there was, say, when Mrs. Madoff bought cheese in the supermarket a few months ago.

By contrast, the public reaction to Mrs. Madoff has been white hot and vitriolic. 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.

• See Madoff's Victims' Statements here

“She’s perceived as the succubus to Bernie’s incubus,” said Prof. Richard A. Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. “She was inside a circle of people whose wealth has been sucked out of the system.”

Even Seema Boesky, whose ex-husband’s name became synonymous with insider trading and the excesses of the 1980s, feels conflicted.

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“My immediate reaction was utter sympathy for this woman,” Mrs. Boesky said in a telephone interview, adding that she does not know Mrs. Madoff. “I wanted to write her a letter, reach out to her, take her out to lunch. But my lawyer said, ‘No.’ ”

Ever since prosecutors accused Mr. Madoff, 71, in December of orchestrating a scheme that fleeced thousands of investors and foundations — including beloved charities, universities and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel — Mrs. Madoff has been taking it on the chin. The reaction has been so negative compared with other wives in the same position partly, it seems, because her husband’s crimes grievously harmed individuals rather than a bank or faceless institution.

Her unusual closeness to her husband, too, in a world where wives are often on the sidelines is among the things working against her. Mrs. Madoff had been a director at her husband’s firm and had stood inseparably beside him through 49 years of marriage.

Then there is the lack of public contrition by Mrs. Madoff, and her move days before the scandal to shift $15.5 million out of an investment account and to transfer watches, cuff links and other jewelry to her children. One day after she left the Manhattan jail where her husband has been held, an ABC camera crew asked her what her message was to the victims. She said, “I have no response to you.”

By contrast, neither Mrs. Boesky nor Lisa Leeson (the ex-wife of the guy who brought down Barings Bank) nor Lori Milken (spouse of the once-disgraced junk-bond king) was viewed as complicit in their husbands’ crimes. Nor was Denise Rich, the former wife of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton (and who himself lost money to Mr. Madoff).

Mrs. Rich has thrived in recent years as a socialite, philanthropist and songwriter. Mrs. Milken threw herself into fund-raising for prostate cancer, which her husband suffered from while in prison. Mrs. Leeson was in her 20s when her husband’s crimes came to light; while in prison, he wrote an autobiography, “Rogue Trader,” which she promoted even as she apologized for his actions. None of these three women would comment for this article.

Mrs. Boesky said she fought hard to preserve her reputation. “I knew that I had to be an ambassador for my name,” she said. “That I had to forge ahead, be proud and do good deeds. I was determined to convert all who had prejudged me.” She writes “Seema Says ...,” a column for The Wag, a giveaway fashion and party magazine in Westchester County.

CONTINUED : Unpaid dinner bill

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