Socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein claims she is broke and has had no income for eight years after her ex-husband’s family cut her off from her $100 million annual divorce settlement.
“I have a huge problem with my settlement,” she said The Sunday times as she and her longtime fiancé film a new HBO docuseries about her life. “For eight years they have completely closed me off.”
The reclusive 82-year-old won a $2.5 billion settlement with $100 million allocated for each year thereafter in her divorce settlement, claiming her husband had been unfaithful.
She now says that Alec tried to put the blame for their failed marriage on her saying that he no longer recognized his wife due to her extensive plastic surgeries which earned her the nickname ‘Catwoman’.
Jocelyn Wildenstein, 82, first met Alec Wildenstein while on safari in Africa. She is pictured here at the age of 15, before undergoing extensive plastic surgery
Jocelyn rose to international prominence during her divorce from Alec, a renowned art dealer, in the 1990s. She claims his infidelity led her to file for divorce
Jocelyn won a $2.5 billion settlement from the divorce with a $100 million payment each year thereafter. But the payments stopped in 2015 when his family cut her off, she says
Jocelyn first met Alec in 1977 at his family’s Ol Jogi farm, north of Nairobi, when she was on safari with friends.
The two had two children, Diane and Alec Jr., and lived comfortably in their Manhattan penthouse with a separate family residence in the British Virgin Islands and the family’s estate in Africa.
But after 20 years of marriage, Jocelyn says, she called it quits, citing her husband’s extramarital affairs.
“It became too obvious,” she told The Sunday Times. “They were young girls who went to the same restaurants we went to. It was no discretion, nothing.’
During the divorce proceedings, Jocelyn claims, Alec began spreading stories about her plastic surgeries to “win the divorce” and even “hired a publicist and paid a plastic surgeon to confirm that I had completely changed my face.”
‘He couldn’t say I betrayed him; I never betrayed him,” Jocelyn said, claiming her ex-husband once insisted “she became a monster… I don’t recognize her.”
“He put all the blame on my face,” Jocelyn said.
However, it was rumored that Alec, a well-known cat lover, encouraged his wife to have the surgeries to make her appear more feminine.
He denied those claims in an interview with Vanity Fair at the time.
“She was crazy,” Alec insisted. “I was always the last to find out.
“She thought she could fix her face like a piece of furniture,” he claimed. “Skin doesn’t work that way. But she wouldn’t listen.’
Still, Jocelyn won the suit, taking home a $2.5 billion settlement with $100 million guaranteed afterward “to follow the lifestyle and work of the 20 years.”
She was also allowed to keep her ex-husband’s surname.
Rumors circulated for years that Alec had encouraged her to have plastic surgery to make her look more feline
Jocelyn and her longtime fiancé, French Canadian designer Lloyd Klein, are now filming an HBO documentary about her life. The two are pictured here in New York City in September
But her luck apparently ended in 2015 – when Alec’s family decided to stop her settlement payments.
Three years later, she filed for bankruptcy.
At the time, The Sunday Times reports, Jocelyn listed her checking account balance as “$0,” despite still having millions of dollars in assets — most of which were owned.
Her three luxury apartments at Trump Tower were then repossessed and now she says she has no money at all.
“Zero — nothing in eight years,” she told the Times.
Jocelyn’s longtime fiancé, 56-year-old French-Canadian designer Lloyd Klein, said she’s now making a docuseries to tell her side of the story and potentially earn some money back.
He called the HBO project “her answer” to the public, which has scrutinized her life and her infamous plastic surgeries.
She is also planning a reality TV series produced by the team behind Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
“Jocelyn wants to tell the story in her own voice,” he said, and Wildenstein added, “I’ve never been out in public before.” It’s not my nature.’
But Klein says he has bigger plans for his fiancé: “I want a movie series about Jocelyn’s life, and I would love to have Jennifer Lawrence as young Jocelyn,” he said, adding that he would choose Rami Malek to play Alec . .