Who was Bernie Madoff's wife? Fraudster married Ruth when she was just 18 in love affair steeped in crime
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Netflix dropped a new docu-series called ‘Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street!’ on Wednesday, January 4, which revolves around Bernie Madoff, the fraudster and financier who was the mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme worth $64 billion in history. Madoff was arrested on December 11, 2008, for duping several investors of Wall Street.
Narrated in four-parts, there are unseen video depositions of Bernie himself with an interviewee calling him “a financial sociopath, a serial financial killer," states The Guardian. Madoff said during one deposition, “The prosecutor wanted me to plea-bargain with them to make some sort of a deal by providing information as to who else was involved with this fraud. The belief was that I couldn’t be doing this all by myself, that there had to be other people involved." Madoff duped banks or firms in Spain, Scotland, Austria, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Portugal, Singapore. This included a pension fund for teachers in Korea, the founder of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, the owner of the New York Mets, the International Olympic Committee, among others.
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Describing Madoff, the director of the docu-series, Joe Berlinger, said, “Over time the aura of this story, and how the story was originally reported, and how most people think about the story, is one evil genius who was so charming and manipulative he did all this terrible stuff. The reality, which is underreported and a cautionary tale for everybody who has any kind of financial assets in the market, is he got away with it because of a whole cadre of literal co-conspirators or people who should have known better.” Joe, an Academy Award nominee who also produced 'Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,' told New York Post, “People feel like one of the reasons he [Bernie] was so willing to immediately acknowledge his guilt, say it was all him, and go to jail wasn’t an act of courage. Instead of trying to obfuscate or find a legal way out or to delay [a verdict], I do think part of that was self-protection to avoid a mob hit."
Jailed for 150 years
Madoff was sent to jail for 150 years in 2009, according to The New York Times. When he was sentenced, he stated, as quoted by New York Post, "I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. This was something I will live in for the rest of my life. I'm sorry."
It was Madoff's two sons, Mark and Andrew, who confronted their father about their concerns related to the company's finances in 2008, and then alerted the authorities when their father admitted to his Ponzi scheme. Both sons are now deceased. Mark, the oldest, committed suicide in 2010 at the age of 46. And Andrew died of a rare form of cancer called mantle-cell lymphoma in 2014 at the age of 48. Bernie died in 2021 from end-stage renal disease and other chronic medical conditions, Associated Press reported.
Who and where is Bernie Madoff’s wife?
Bernie met Ruth Madoff in high school and got married to her in 1959, states NBC News. She was just 18. After her husband's arrest for his fraud, she and her husband attempted suicide in 2008. "I don't know whose idea it was, but we decided to kill ourselves because it was so horrendous what was happening," said Ruth, as quoted by NBC New York. After Bernie got convicted, she moved to Connecticut. In 2011, Ruth said during an interview with NBC's TODAY show that she did not miss Bernie, adding that "the villain of all this is behind bars."