BEFORE THE DOWNFALL
Stephanie and Mark Madoff.
Stephanie Madoff Mack vowed to “never step foot” again in the SoHo home where her husband, Mark Madoff, tragically killed himself.
But weeks after his December 2010 death, she decided to return in a bid to bring her kids some “normalcy.”
“When I got home and walked in the door, I threw up,” Mack, the daughter-in-law of Ponzi monster Bernie Madoff told Harper’s Bazaar magazine.
She hired a contractor to cover up the exposed beam where Mark strung himself up with their dog’s leash, but it didn’t conceal the “scuff marks on the ceiling.”
“I guess from hanging the dog leash over the [beam]. I don’t know. And then the floor, from a certain area was really scratched up,” she told the magazine.
Now, Mack, looking stunning and emotionally healed, has started a new life with her two kids in a TriBeCa rental, where she posed for the mag’s photographer.
Neither Audrey, 5, nor Nicholas, 3, remembers “Granpa Bernie,” she said. Like her, they no longer have the name Madoff — she and Mark chose a new last name together, “M” for Madoff and “ACK” for the code for the airport in Nantucket, where the couple married in 2004.
But the kids do remember their father. Mack is trying to figure out how and when to tell them the truth. For now, she just says, “Daddy got a boo-boo on his brain that made his heart stop.”
She is relieved to be out of their former neighborhood, she said. “I don’t feel ashamed anymore but I don’t want to hear it.”
And she is working hard to put the crimes of her father-in-law behind her.
Inspiration came recently from a teacher at a gym who “was talking about forgiveness, saying that if you don’t have forgiveness, you’re stuck. I’m not going to be stuck. I’m going to move forward.”
“I’m not going to let Bernie Madoff ruin my life anymore.”