Estranged wife of ‘impoverished’ private equity tycoon complains strongly about $10 grand monthly allowance

The estranged wife of an elderly financier complained in a Manhattan court on Tuesday that he gave her a paltry $10,000 a month in child support and then cut it in half when she asked him to start planning her estate.

Stephanie Foster, 57, added that her husband, John H. Foster, is an 82-year-old private equity professional. now claiming dire financial hardship in their years-long divorce proceedings — eventually cut her benefits to nothing, forcing her to submit expense reports to his management company in order to be reimbursed.

She complained on the stand that even his initial substantial monthly payment to her “was less than what I was getting in commission,” referring to what she earned as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank before leaving her career six months later after marrying Foster. 2009 year.

Stephanie says her husband, who made his fortune in the medical device world as managing partner of $800 million private equity firm HealthPointCapital, cut her in half about five years ago when she asked for “just a little bit” of estate planning.

He then canceled on her altogether and forced her to submit detailed expense reports to his family’s management company to receive reimbursement, she said.

Her testimony was an attempt to refute her husband’s claims that because of her extravagant spending on clothes and other items, he now has a net worth that his lawyers described as “barely a positive net worth, if at all.”

“My husband accuses me of spending all of his $45 million fortune,” 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. said

Stephanie noted that while her husband was crying about poverty, he was still traveling back and forth from Florida to New York for botox, hair color and nail treatments.

She said she only had access to her personal checking account at Chase Bank during their marriage.

According to Stephanie, shortly before her wedding in 2009, she was given a prenuptial agreement, which she refused to sign because it would have left her “with nothing”.

She claimed it had a balance sheet that showed John had a net worth of $80 million — and she had no reason to doubt that.

“Why would I?” she said on the podium. “We dated for a year, he had a very active lifestyle, he had a Gulfstream jet, he had a private equity firm, a big ranch in Texas, a very nice house on Fisher Island (in New York), and he worked for 50 years on Wall Street, so no, I would have no reason not to believe him.’

“Except for the fact that I was about to become his third wife,” she added. “But it didn’t matter.”

Stephanie estimated her husband’s spending on just the properties he owned and rented in Manhattan, Fisher Island and Palm Beach, as well as a sprawling Texas hunting ranch filled with exotic, imported African animals, at $3.4 million a year.

She claimed that when she once asked him about life insurance, he told her it was “too expensive to insure” and that retirement accounts were for “stupid people.”

Meanwhile, her husband’s team said they are looking into possible criminality surrounding her release of a photo she took of a text message conversation on her husband’s phone, showing him celebrating a “net worth strategy” that left Stephanie with an impression. that he is bankrupt. .

In the message, Foster thanks the family attorney, noting, “Your net worth strategy worked. Steph is stunned,” adding that his wife thinks he’s “bankrupt.”

His attorneys on Tuesday accused Stephanie of improperly accessing his phone and violating her husband’s privacy and attorney-client privilege.

“Mr. Foster did not give Ms. Foster access to his private messages,” John’s attorney, Linda Rosenthal, told the court.

In doing so, she may have just authenticated not only the text message, but the “net worth strategy” as a legal maneuver that could raise ethical concerns about John’s affidavit of net worth, Stephanie’s attorney said. , BreAnn Kopp, in court.

“We are confident that the allegations made today by Mr. Foster against Mrs. Foster will be found by the court to have no basis in law or fact,” said Lenny Davis, Stephanie’s legal counsel. “They distract from the key issues.”

Davis added that he hopes John can “provide transparency in his text message that highlights what he called his ‘net worth strategy.’

“In particular, we hope that he will explain the word ‘strategy’ in the context of what should be a standard mandatory form of statement that discloses his accurate and complete financial information not only to Mrs. Foster but also to the court,” Davis said in a statement to The Post.

The consequences of the content of the message did not escape Judge Ta-Tanisha James.

“If this is indeed confirmed, and if the gist of it is accurate, there is an indication that there has been a misrepresentation … as to Mr. Foster’s statement of his own funds, and, moreover, implicit in that is the question whether or not there were some ethical violations,” James said.

After the hearing, the Fosters sat in the hallway outside the courthouse waiting for their attorneys, Stephanie flipping through her phone and John yards away, obviously deep in thought, staring off into space.