Wife Says She and Madoff Tried Suicide
The wife of the financial swindler Bernard Madoff says in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday that the couple attempted suicide by taking pills on Christmas Eve 2008 after his estimated $65 billion Ponzi scheme was exposed.
Mr. Madoff, 73, is serving a 150-year prison sentence after confessing to running a decades-long Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of billions of dollars, considered the biggest financial fraud in history. He was arrested on Dec. 11, 2008.
“I don’t know whose idea it was, but we decided to kill ourselves because it was so horrendous what was happening,” Ruth Madoff told the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”
The couple’s elder son, Mark, 46, hanged himself in his New York apartment last Dec. 11, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. Mark and Andrew Madoff turned in their father to authorities a day after he confessed to them.
Ruth Madoff said she and her husband took Ambien sleeping pills and possibly some Klonopin anti-anxiety pills in their suicide attempt.
“We had terrible phone calls. Hate mail, just beyond anything and I said … ‘I just can’t go on anymore,’ ” she said. Christmas “added to the whole depression.”
“We took pills and woke up the next day,” she said. “It was very impulsive and I am glad we woke up.”
Excerpts from the interview were released on Wednesday…
