“My Unorthodox Life” star Julia Haart has filed a lawsuit against ex Silvio Scaglia in the latest legal salvo in the pair’s bitter business and romantic break-up, new court papers show.
The former “ultra Orthodox” Jew-turned-businesswoman claims that Scaglia — with whom she is embroiled in a bombshell divorce — owes her hundreds of millions of dollars for helming modeling company Elite World Group and for her shares of the company, which she says she helped grow at least 10-fold, according to her Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed Friday.
The 51-year-old Netflix reality star claims that her estranged Italian businessman husband is a “liar and a fraud” and isn’t a really a billionaire, her suit alleges.
“Scaglia’s so-called wealth is nothing more than smoke and mirrors,” the filing charges.
In fact, Haart claims that when she married him in 2019 he “had lost” all of the roughly $711 million he made from his investment in Italian telecom company Fastweb, the suit claims. And “all of his other companies since 2011 have failed,” the court documents allege.
Then before they married, “Scaglia begged Haart” to become the CEO of EWG, which she steered toward success increasing its value from $70 million to between $700 million to $1.1 billion, the court papers say.
Scaglia, 63, was struggling financially while trying to keep up his lavish lifestyle so he took out a second mortgage on their $65 million Manhattan pad for $10 million — on top of the original mortgage for $30 million, the suit claims.
And Scaglia asked Haart to give up a pay check in her role as CEO and instead he would make her 50% owner of EWG’s parent company Freedom Holding, Inc. and she would be paid a 2% fee for her work, the filing claims.
Haart claims she discovered this agreement “was a pack of lies,” and she was never paid for her work as CEO — which now totals $7.3 million – and Scaglia created a backdoor in their 50% partnership cutting her out of it, according to the suit.
Amid their divorce, Scaglia ousted Haart as CEO and then sued her claiming she stole $850,000 from EWG, and also accusing her of charging hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses to the company — including on a boob job.
Haart’s suit says all of his allegations against her are “smear tactics” and he’s the one who stole from her and pilfered company money.
“In a transparent ploy to deflect attention from his own fraudulent conduct, Scaglia has painted a false and highly defamatory portrait of Haart in the media as a woman who has looted the company to pay for her personal expenses and then finally misappropriated $850,000 in cash on her way out,” the suit charges. “The true facts are, however, that it was Scaglia, not Haart, who was directing that EWG funds be used to pay for personal expenses and to prop up Scaglia’s other failing ventures.”
Haart says she discovered on Feb. 3 that Scaglia took $1.5 million out of an FHI account without her permission and he transferred another company’s ownership out of their joint FHI partnership, the suit claims.
Haart says that Scaglia’s alleged fraud against her is playing out in a Delaware lawsuit between the pair.
In May, a Delaware judge found in an interim decision that Haart doesn’t own 50% of the preferred shares of FHI.
“If the Delaware decision is rendered as expected, Scaglia’s fraud will be perfected,” Haart’s suit claims.
Haart says she is owed for her management fee and for her 50% share of the company – the worth of which must be determined at trial. She is also suing Scaglia’s business partners for another $257 million.
Lawyer Lanny Davis, who represents Scaglia, EWG and FHI, fired back that, “Ms. Haart’s motto is ‘fake it until you make it’ which she promotes in her own book.”
“So now she is ignoring the Delaware court decision that has already been decided against her allegations in this latest lawsuit. Fake it ’til you make it won’t make it in a court of law – as she has discovered.”
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