Bernie Made Off With My Wife

AP Photo The husband of Bernie Madoff's mistress talks to Tracy Quan about his wife's "cocky" behavior, the sexual comparisons, whether he'll leave her, and why he'll take half her book's profits.

Ron Weinstein has only one thing in common with Bernie Madoff: Sheryl Weinstein, the woman he’s been married to for 37 years.

Last week she appeared on Good Morning America to discuss her mini-memoir, Madoff's Other Secret, an account of her affair with the Ponzi schemer. She has been accused of selling her soul, but the book is required reading, says Ron, for anyone seeking insight into who Madoff is and “what made this man tick.”

"I’ll wait a few months, let my emotions calm down and then I’ll see if I can forgive. Having an affair is not the end of the world, but writing a book and telling everybody about it is unacceptable."

“Who knows him better in this regard, other than his wife, than my wife? She’s known him for twenty years,” he says. “She slept with him for a year and a half. Don’t be so quick to judge my wife,” he adds, although he tried to talk her out of writing the book.

XTRA INSIGHT:
• Allan Dodds Frank dissects the SEC's Madoff report. Citing the Judeo-Christian principles “this country was built on,” he says he told her, “I think the masses are not going to feel a whole lot of empathy for you. I don’t think they understand. I read blogs, I read the comments, and I get nauseous. As hurtful as [the book] is to me, it was probably necessary or she’d be a basket case. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with her, but I understand it. When people write these things on these blogs, what the hell do they know? They’re looking at the surface.” He describes the cliché-ridden attacks—“She cheated on her husband, she’s a money hungry slut”—stops talking in order to collect his emotions, then explains: “I dislike the choice she made. I am not okay with it, but I try to understand it.”

Ron Weinstein is a lean, youthful-looking salesman in his sixties with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a rather intense manner which he attributes to his ADHD. Now kept in check by medication, it was diagnosed after many years of marriage and discussed in detail in his wife’s memoir. Ron says Sheryl felt she had “the right to go have this affair” because ADHD made him impossible to live with. While complaints about his hot temper and his screaming (prior to his diagnosis and treatment) are “accurate,” he says, “what she doesn’t share is that she pushed the buttons.”

A week after the publication of his wife's tell-all, Ron is defending her authorial motives, even while protesting that he wasn’t given the opportunity to critique a story in which he happens to be a central character. (“She said it was her book and that if I wanted, I could write my own.") He's wondering how Madoff's Other Secret is doing at Borders, and looking for a way to tell his side of the story.

Sheryl and Ronnie dancing in 1988. (Courtesy of Sheryl Weinstein) He finds himself in the bizarre position of being married to a CPA—“4.0 at Wharton, controller of Lincoln Center, we’re not talking small jobs here”—who has morphed into (and acquired all the quirks of) a professional memoirist. It’s an audacious transformation and probably the most unexpected event in their marriage. But crazy circumstances can strengthen a relationship, so I was curious to find out whether the Weinsteins have a secret recipe for staying together through tough times. Last December they discovered they’d been cleaned out after remortgaging their home to invest yet more of their assets in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Hadassah, the Jewish women's organization for which Sheryl served as CFO, also lost millions. In February (according to Ron, though his wife indicates it was January) Sheryl revealed the true nature of her relationship with Madoff to her husband. She was shopping her book.

Although he had joked in the past about the possibility of Sheryl leaving him for Madoff, he was surprised (“With him?!” he exclaimed), but it wasn't the affair itself that bothered him. “I can handle an affair,” he says. “It’s not a big deal. Okay, you jumped in bed with him because he was powerful and he was attentive and you saw a lifestyle that attracted you. And it’s exciting because an illicit love is a hot love.”

Because in many respects, Ron is a quintessentially liberal Manhattan husband. Although Fox is his “network of choice” and he voted for McCain, he’s hardly a social conservative. The Weinsteins move in circles where it’s tacitly understood that some wives play around, too, but they do it discreetly. An extramarital affair isn’t desirable, but Ron doesn’t think it should be the end of a marriage. “Affairs are commonplace and shouldn’t be such a big deal," he says. "However, having an affair with the person who is the biggest crook in the world and stole all my assets is another issue entirely.”