The estranged wife of an elderly financier griped in Manhattan court Tuesday that he gave her a measly allowance of $10,000 a month — then slashed it in half when she asked him to start his estate planning.
Stephanie Foster, 57, added that hubby John H. Foster — an 82-year-old private-equity bigshot now claiming dire financial straits in their multiyear divorce proceeding — eventually dwindled her allowance to nothing, forcing her to submit expense reports to his management company to get reimbursed.
She complained on the stand that even his initial hefty monthly payout to her “was less than what I was making on commission,” referring to what she raked in as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank before giving up her career six months after marrying Foster in 2009.
Stephanie claims that her husband — who made his fortune in the medical-device world as managing partner of the $800 million private equity firm HealthPointCapital — cut her allowance in half about five years ago, when she asked for a “modicum” of estate planning.
He then eliminated it altogether and made her submit detailed expense reports to his family management company in order to be reimbursed, she said.
Her testimony was an effort to offer a rebuttal to her husband’s claims that, because of her profligate spending on clothes and other items, he now has a net worth his lawyers have described “barely a positive net worth, if at all.”
“My husband is accusing me of spending down his entire $45 million net worth,” plus the tens of millions more he earned during their 15-year marriage, “which means I was spending $1.5 million a month on myself, on clothes,” she said.
Stephanie has noted that while her husband was crying poverty, he still was jetting back and forth from Florida to New York City for Botox, hair-dyeing and nail care appointments.
She said she only had access to her personal Chase Bank checking account during their marriage.
Shortly before the pair wed in 2009, Stephanie said, she was presented with a pre-nup — which she declined to sign, since it would have left her “with nothing.”
She claimed it included a balance sheet showing John had a net worth of $80 million — and she had no reason to doubt it.
“Why would I?” she said on the stand. “We were dating for a year, he had a very big lifestyle, he had a Gulfstream jet, he had a private-equity firm, a big ranch in Texas, a very nice house on Fishers Island [in New York], and he had been involved on Wall Street for 50 years, so no, I would have no reason not to believe him.”
“Except for the fact that I was going to be his third wife,” she added. “But that wasn’t a concern.”
Stephanie pegged her husband’s expenses related just to the properties he owned and rented in Manhattan, Fishers Island and Palm Beach — plus a sprawling Texas hunting ranch filled with exotic, imported African animals — at $3.4 million annually.
She claimed that when she once asked him about life insurance, he told her he was “too expensive to insure” and that retirement accounts were for “suckers.”
Meanwhile, her husband’s team said it is looking into possible criminality around her supplying a photo she snapped of a text message conversation on her husband’s phone, which shows him celebrating a “net-worth strategy” that left Stephanie with the impression that he was bankrupt.
In the message, Foster thanks a family lawyer, stating “Your net-worth strategy worked. Steph is stunned,” adding that his wife believes him to be “bankrupt.”
His lawyers Tuesday accused Stephanie of improperly accessing his phone and of violating her husband’s privacy and attorney-client privilege.
“Mr. Foster did not consent to Mrs. Foster accessing his private communications,” said John’s lawyer, Linda Rosenthal, in court.
In doing so, she may have just proven the authenticity of not just the text message but also of the “net-worth strategy” as a legal maneuver, which could raise ethical concerns about John’s net-worth statements given under oath, said Stephanie’s lawyer, BriAnne Copp.
The implications of the message’s content did not escape Judge Ta-Tanisha James.
“If that is indeed authenticated, and if the substance thereof is accurate, there’s an indication that there has been a misdirection … as to Mr. Foster’s statement of net worth and furthermore, implicit in that are issues as to whether or not there have been some sort of ethical violations,” James said.
After the hearing, the Fosters sat in the hallway outside court waiting for their lawyers — Stephanie scrolling through her phone and John yards away, apparently deep in thought staring into space.
