Diane Passage | |
---|---|
Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
Nationality | United States |
Other names | Chase |
Occupation | exotic dancer |
Known for | married a wealthy Wall Street funds manager |
Diane Passage is an American woman from New York City who has been described as a "socialite". [1] [2] Her former husband met her when she worked as an exotic dancer at Scores, one of the New York City strip clubs profiled in the movie Hustlers. [3] [4] [5]
Passage was born in Detroit, and moved to New York when she was 17 years old. Exotic dancing was just one of her jobs. [6] At the time she met her second husband Kenneth I. Starr, a Wall Street hedge fund manager, her day job was at an ad agency. Passage quit dancing after marrying Starr, in 2007, and three years later Starr's investors learned he had been running a ponzi scheme. [1]
When her judge pronounced her husband's guilty verdict she proclaimed that “He seemed to have lost his moral compass, partly as a result of infatuation with his young fourth wife.” [1]
After she separated from Starr, Passage was cast in a reality TV show that would have been called Wall Street Wives. [3] [7] The series did not end up being produced.
After her husband's arrest she says she befriended her neighbor, Catherine Hopper, the fiancée of the son of another ponzi schemer, Bernie Madoff. [8]
In 2011 Passage started writing a dating advice column that Gawker mocked for its cynicism. [9]
Passage is a proponent of pole dancing. [10] She has organized charity events focussed around pole dancing and worked to get it recognized as a sport, even suggesting it had a place at the Olympic Games. [5]
A stripper or exotic dancer is a person whose occupation involves performing striptease in a public adult entertainment venue such as a strip club. At times, a stripper may be hired to perform at private events.
Blaze Starr was an American stripper and burlesque star. Her vivacious presence and inventive use of stage props earned her the nickname "The Hottest Blaze in Burlesque". She was also known for her affair with Louisiana Governor Earl Kemp Long. Based on her memoir Blaze Starr! My Life as Told to Huey Perry, the 1989 film Blaze told the story of that affair starring Paul Newman as Long and Lolita Davidovich as Starr, with Starr herself acting in a cameo role and as a consultant.
Far Rockaway High School was a public high school in New York City, at 821 Bay 25th Street in Far Rockaway in the borough of Queens. It operated from 1897 to 2011. Its alumni include three Nobel Prize laureates and convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American financial criminal and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
Andrew Madoff was an American financier, best known for exposing alongside his brother the financial crimes of his father, Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme has been widely described as the most successful in history.
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Ruth Madoff is an American former bookkeeper and the widow of Bernie Madoff, the convicted American financial fraudster who served a prison sentence for a criminal financial scheme until his death in April 2021. After her husband's arrest for his fraud, she and her husband attempted suicide in 2008. While she had $70 million in assets in her name, after her husband was imprisoned she was stripped of all of her money other than $1–2 million by the government, and by the trustee for her husband's firm, Irving Picard.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.
The recovery of funds from the Madoff investment scandal has been underway since the scandal broke in December 2008. That month, recovery trustee Irving Picard received funds from the Bank of New York account where Bernard Madoff held new investments into his Ponzi scheme. As it has been concluded that no legitimate investments were made on the investors' behalf for at least the last 12 years of operation, recovery has proceeded on a "money in/money out" basis. Investors are entitled to receive no more than the nominal cash amounts that they paid in and did not subsequently withdraw, without regard to inflation, interest, opportunity cost or the false statements that Madoff provided them. Those statements combined to a total balance of approximately $64 billion, while the admitted claims amount to $19.5 billion. As of March 2024, the trustee had recovered $14.7 billion toward these claims through legal action against Madoff associates, feeder funds and beneficiaries of the scheme, and had made fifteen distributions to investors. Action by the Department of Justice has recovered an additional $4 billion.
Jeffry M. Picower was an American investor involved in the Madoff investment scandal. He was the largest beneficiary of Madoff's Ponzi scheme, and his widow agreed to have his estate settle the claims against it by Madoff trustee Irving Picard for $7.2 billion, the largest single forfeiture in American judicial history.
Kenneth Ira Starr is an American accountant and former money manager convicted of running a $35 million Ponzi scheme with the money of numerous wealthy and celebrity clients. Sentenced in March 2011, Starr has been released from the Otisville, New York Federal Correctional Institution under the supervision of the Residential Reentry Management (RRM) field office in Brooklyn, New York. Starr served the remainder of his 7.5-year sentence in a halfway house, and his term ended in December 2016.
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Jessica Pressler is an American journalist and contributing editor at New York magazine. Her 2015 article "The Hustlers at Scores", was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and was later made into a feature film called Hustlers in 2019. She also wrote a story about Anna Sorokin that was later developed into the mini-series Inventing Anna released by Netflix in 2022.
Samantha Barbash is an American entrepreneur and former adult entertainment host whose real life story with Roselyn Keo formed the basis for the movie Hustlers, starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu. The film was adapted from Jessica Pressler's 2015 article in New York magazine, "The Hustlers at Scores". Barbash has written her own memoirs, entitled Underscore.
Roselyn Keo is a former exotic dancer who, along with a number of co-workers and peers, manipulated and drugged her clients into overspending in strip clubs.
This March, Passage, now 35, sat in a courtroom and listened as a judge with glasses and Janet Reno hair pronounced her husband guilty. "He seemed to have lost his moral compass," the judge said, "partly as a result of infatuation with his young fourth wife." Passage, sitting in the front row, was startled. Starr had said she was his third wife. Maybe she had misheard?
She's the kind of woman who is able, through physical charms, nifty tricks of persuasion, and sheer gall, to inspire men to pay for … well, everything.
Ms. Passage, a former exotic dancer, met Mr. Starr, whose Hollywood clients included Martin Scorsese and Uma Thurman, when he visited her workplace, the Scores nightclub in Manhattan. They married in 2007. Three years later, Mr. Starr was indicted and charged with siphoning more than $30 million from clients. He pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering, and is currently serving seven and a half years in federal prison.
He and ex-wife Marisa hired her several times for "dates," until Ken divorced Marisa and put a $32,000 wedding band on Diane's finger, instead. As the criminal case against Ken took shape, Diane became a symbol of Ken Starr's greed.
Diane Passage, 34, was wearing a black Gucci dress with a scoop neck that kept slipping to expose more of her Brobdingnagian breasts than the designer had intended—only when she got home would she realize she had it on backward—but Starr, 66, was proud of his fourth wife's provocative figure.
Just a few years ago, Diane Passage was working at an advertising agency by day and dancing for dollars by night - trying to support her son as a single mom.
Apparently the cast now includes Diane Passage, the former Scores dancer, pole dancing champion, and insanely awesome crazy lady, who is currently divorcing Kenneth Starr. No, not the Clinton lawyer, the money manager who is in jail for stealing money from his famous clients.
Passage said she isn't planning on returning to her former profession as a stripper at Scores, but instead spends her time hanging out with Andrew Madoff's fiancee, Catherine Hopper, who lives in her building, she told Page Six.
Excerpts from Diane Passage's "basic rules" on how to "get the most from men," i.e., maximize the monetary value of your vagina...
Diane Passage kick starts the 'Pole Superstar' Pole Dance Competition at the Highline last night.