Madoff’s Purported Mistress: The Lowest of the Low

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen August 27, 2009

Just when you think the Bernie Madoff story can’t get more disgusting, new revelations from a woman claiming to be his former mistress are dragging it further into the sleaze zone.

Sheryl Weinstein – who was then and now married and was at the time Hadassah’s CFO, and had invested millions of the organization’s money with Madoff — tells Cindy Adams of the New York Post here that Madoff may be endowed with an evil sort of intelligence, but he isn’t endowed with much else.

In their lunch together to promote her newly released book “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” Weinstein told Adams:

Think, said Mrs. Weinstein, of the tiny opening of that small honey jar a hotel’s room service does for breakfast. Not very large, y’know. That’s about its circumference. It was narrow. Tiny in terms of girth, not length.

He knew the art of seduction. As Hadassah’s financial officer I was handling its funds, so we met to talk business. There were innuendoes he’d throw. Then lunches progressed to dinner. And hotels. We’d go to the Palace, Hilton, Lowell, the Willard in D.C.

Even in an age where the common denominator has never seemed lower, where mainstream stores sell girls’ Halloween costumes that look more like prostitutes’ getups than something children should wear, this Sheryl Weinstein – coiffed though she may be like an Upper East Side matron – seems to me to have the character of pond scum.

She slams Ruth Madoff for whom, as I wrote here I feel sorry, when she tells Adams:

He was a player. He had women before me. He didn’t find his wife sexual. Ruth’s actually quite mannish. The way she walks and moves. He’d say she kept him on a short leash, indicating she didn’t think he could be trusted, and he said when he’d travel she’d always go along to keep an eye on him.

But she shows her true character when she freely says that she had this affair with Madoff during the 18 months or so that her husband was suffering a neurological illness.

And she claims to have suffered?

She tells Smith:

People have not been kind to me. But until you walk in somebody else’s shoes, you cannot know what they’ve gone through. My year-and-a-half affair with Bernie was at a vulnerable time in my life. My husband had been suffering neurological issues. He’s now fine, on medication, and my affair only lasted during that year and a half.

Her former lover is now serving a 150-year-sentence in federal prison for his crimes. Ruth Madoff is also serving a kind of life sentence, having recently lost her home as well as the vacation houses and the rest of the fortune she and her husband amassed with his ill-gotten gains.

Sheryl Weinstein says that she’s lost everything that she and her husband had saved, and invested with Madoff.

She may have had money and some status, but one thing she hasn’t lost – because she clearly never had it to begin with – is character.