Reclusive socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, known as the “Catwoman” due to her extensive plastic surgery, talked about how she is broke ahead of an upcoming HBO documentary about her life and a reality TV show.
Wildenstein claims she has not had any income at all for the last eight years, after her late ex-husband’s former family cut her off from her $100 million annual divorce settlement payment.
The Swiss-born socialite decided to make two-part docuseries and potential TV show produced by the team behind “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” because all of her money is gone.
“I have a huge problem with my settlement,” she told The Telegraph at the the luxurious Maybourne hotel in Los Angeles. “Since eight years, they have completely cut me off.”
Wildenstein, 82, rose to fame in the 1990s during her high-profile divorce from her art-dealing husband, Alec Wildenstein, from which she received a whopping $2.5 billion in the settlement and $100 million each year afterwards.
Wildenstein said that the family of her late husband, who died from prostate cancer in 2008, ended the annual payments in 2015.
In May 2018, she filed for bankruptcy.
At the time she listed her checking account balance as “$0” but still had millions of dollars in assets — mostly property.
Her three luxury apartments in Trump Towers were subsequently repossessed.
She told the Telegraph that today she still has no income at all.
“Zero — nothing in eight years,” she said.
Her longtime fiancé, 56-year-old French-Canadian designer Lloyd Klein, told the paper that the documentary “is her reply” to the public, who have scrutinized Wildenstein’s up and down life — as well as her infamous plastic surgeries.
“Jocelyn wants to tell the story with her own voice,” he said.
“I’ve never been public. It’s not my nature,” Wildenstein said.
Klein has even larger media ambitions for Wildenstein:
“I want to have a movie series on Jocelyn’s life, and I would like to have Jennifer Lawrence as a young Jocelyn,” he says, adding that he would choose Remi Malik to play Alec Wildenstein.
Throughout her career in the public eye, rumors abounded that Alec Wildenstein, who loved cats, encouraged his wife to get surgeries to make her appear more feline, according to The Telegraph.
In an interview with Vanity Fair during their tumultuous split, Alec denied that he made her change her face.
“She was crazy. I would always find out last. She was thinking that she could fix her face like a piece of furniture. Skin does not work that way. But she wouldn’t listen.”
Weinstein said she called for an end to her 20-year marriage with Alec when he started flaunting his extramarital affairs in public.
“It was getting too obvious. It was young girls and going to the same restaurants we went to. It was no discretion, nothing,” she says.
Wildenstein told The Telegraph that Alec had planted the stories about her surgeries to “win the divorce,” and even “hired a publicist and paid a plastic surgeon to certify that I completely changed my face.”
“He couldn’t say I betrayed him; I never betrayed him,” she said.
Her husband, she said, insisted that “ ‘She became a monster…I don’t recognise her.’ He put all the blame on my face.”
Wildenstein ultimately won the settlement and the right to keep her ex-husband’s last name.
