Jocelyn Wildenstein’s face has been seen by you, even though you don’t know her name. The New York socialite is used to being in the spotlight. She was accused of using scissors to cut her then-boyfriend’s hair in her Trump World Tower apartment in New York City in 2016.
Though she was supposedly worth billions, she filed for bankruptcy two years later in 2018. However, Wildenstein is also known for other things. For starters, Wildenstein’s face, which has undergone so many plastic edits that it now looks catlike, is perhaps most visible to those unfamiliar with her personal life.
As a result, Wildenstein is sometimes derided as “Catwoman” in certain circles. In the first year of her marriage to Alec Wildenstein, a French-born, American-raised art dealer, racehorse owner, businessman and heir to a billion-dollar fortune, Wildenstein underwent an eye lift.
They both had facelifts after she told him his eyes looked puffy, he recalled Vanity Fair in 1998. That was the beginning; a friend later said, “I don’t think I ever knew her when she didn’t recover from anything.”
Some of Jocelyn’s friends, including Alec, who passed away in 2008, thought she was trying to dress like a lynx (she has one as a pet). She claimed in an interview with Vanity Fair that “the lynx has great eyes,” but added that “when I show you pictures of my grandmother, what you see are these eyes — cat eyes — and high cheekbones.”
In 1977 Wildenstein and Alec met. Wildenstein was born into a lower-middle-class family in Switzerland, then moved to Paris and Africa. Jocelyn continued her plastic surgery journey as the couple had two children, and life was very routine for the family until the late 1990s.
She expected them to spend an average of $1 million a month in 1998, the year they eloped, and their extravagance became legendary. According to an old friend, “They were a secret couple,” PEOPLE said in 1998.
“They were extremely quiet individuals with a tight network of friends. Jocelyn managed the sprawling Ol Jogi ranch [in Africa]flats in Paris and Lausanne, a French chateau and a Caribbean retreat rather than blending into New York society.
Alec filed for divorce in April 1997 after the couple’s marriage broke down in the mid-1990s. On September 3 of that year, Jocelyn claimed to have discovered Alec in bed with Yelena Jarikova, a 21-year-old Russian model.
Alec was accused of threatening his estranged wife with a gun because he believed a gun was involved The New York Times. The couple rose to prominence after their divorce in 1999. Jocelyn’s performance and other scandalous stories about her personal life during the proceedings naturally attracted a lot of interest.
One such story said that she had worked as a prostitute for the famous Parisian bordello owner Miss Claude. According to Reuters, Jocelyn received a staggering $2.5 billion settlement over the course of the two-year proceedings, along with $100 million every 13 years thereafter. (The judge agreed she couldn’t use any of the money to pay for additional cosmetic surgery.)
Three years later, Alec received half of his father’s vast business interests, a $10 billion estate that included one of the largest private art collections in history. Of course, part of it was used to pay Jocelyn’s alimony.
After the divorce, Jocelyn largely avoided the limelight, despite the fact that she has since been embroiled in a number of court disputes, mainly with landlords. She avoided being evicted from a unit at the United Nations Plaza over unpaid rent thanks to a plea deal, and American Express sued her for $70,000 credit card debt in 2015.
Another 2015 case centered on a Beverly Hills home that cost $15,000 a month to rent, which Wildenstein allegedly destroyed and abandoned, leaving $165.00 in unpaid rent and nearly $15,000 in other fees.
According to The New York Post, Wildenstein used a fake cellphone in court to straighten her hair and put on cosmetics while appearing in court in 2016 for the assault charges. She was robbed of her phone by a court official. Wildenstein left the courthouse with the help of her lawyer, a pashmina scarf that almost completely obscured her familiar face.
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