For nearly two years after Bernard L. Madoff confessed to running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, Ruth Madoff — who fell in love with him at 13 and married him at 18 — stood by her husband, a man the rest of the world saw as a cold-blooded monster.
She stayed despite doubts about his fidelity, hostility from friends who became his victims, and a deepening rift with her two sons, who insisted she cut herself off from him.
She finally cut the knot last fall, Mrs. Madoff said in a recent interview. “You’re going to have to leave me alone and not call,” she bluntly told her husband. When he persisted, she changed her number.
After years of silence and seclusion, Mrs. Madoff agreed to talk with a reporter for The New York Times because her surviving son, Andrew, asked her to help promote “Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family,” an authorized family biography by Laurie Sandell to be released Monday by Little Brown.
Tiny and slightly stooped, Mrs. Madoff arrived at the interview, held at her sister’s home in Boca Raton, Fla., dressed in cropped white canvas pants and a gray knit top. She spoke in a soft throaty voice, frequently on the edge of tears, about the devastation of her family — and thousands more around the world.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “Everything that I think about the victims — it’s hard to face, because there’s nothing I can do about any of it.”
Like so many of those victims, she now has just a thin slice of the life she once had. Turned down by several Manhattan landlords, she lives in a borrowed town house in a gated community in southeast Florida. She is facing litigation and is “afraid to spend a penny.” The damage her husband inflicted on his victims still shocks her, she said — “it was beyond anything imaginable.”
But she has slowly rebuilt a life. She worked with children who needed extra emotional support, and now spends up to four days a week as a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, where she has a small network of new friends.
A few things have not changed. Some Madoff victims still accuse her of complicity in the crime — which she denies — and attack her on the Internet or in the media whenever she is mentioned in the news. It has been that way since the day her husband, a respected Wall Street statesman, was arrested for stealing at least $17 billion in cash and $64.8 billion in paper wealth from victims around the world, including many in his extended family.
The billions taken from investors largely covered payments to other investors. But some uncounted millions helped support the lavish Madoff lifestyle — yachts, a town house in the south of France, a designer wardrobe, a 10.5-carat diamond, a private jet. Those are all gone, seized to help compensate victims.
Those treasures don’t figure in Mrs. Madoff’s best memories from “before,” she said. Instead, she spoke about being the mother of two bright, busy boys in suburban Roslyn, N.Y., and spending summers on a small boat with the boys doing chores around the docks. She added, “Those were the years that I cherish more than any others.”
Mrs. Madoff struggled to explain why she had stood by her husband, a decision that seemed to catalyze the public hostility toward her that persists to this day. Indeed, she and her husband felt so hopeless and embattled in the weeks after his arrest that they tried to commit suicide by swallowing large handfuls of Ambien, she said.
In an e-mail from prison, Mr. Madoff confirmed that he and his wife “made a feeble attempt” at suicide “while in a severe state of depression. Fortunately, we woke the next morning very sick but alive.” He concluded, “Please understand this is very difficult to admit.”
She stayed with her husband, she said, because “I come from a generation where marriage meant staying put, for better or for worse. This was agonizing, but I couldn’t abandon the man with whom I spent essentially my entire life.”
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