It’s a riches-to-rags story.
Christine Jensen, 39, knew G. Bruce Leib, 83, was too old for her when they married in 2007.
But she was taken by the former Wall Street exec’s apparently deep pockets. They rode horses together, and he wined and dined her at top Manhattan restaurants, including the Park Avenue Union Club.
Six years later — and a year into a bitter divorce — she’s on food stamps and popping pills to deal with anxiety and depression.
“He’s a multimillionaire, and I’m on welfare,” Jensen said, showing her benefits card.
Jensen claims she filed for divorce in 2012 because Leib had become an aloof miser.
“When I first met him, he was very nice, very charming,” she recalled. “He’d give me money to go shopping. He bought me a Mercedes-Benz. After we got married, he flipped.”
Now the former medical receptionist is living on the $1,000 a month the retired Morgan Stanley vice president sends her. But she’s convinced she’s owed more from their five-year union.
“When we married, he said, ‘Quit your job. You don’t need to work. You’re with me now,’ ” she recalled.
But Leib has pleaded poverty to Manhattan Judge Matthew Cooper, claiming that after a 52-year career on Wall Street, his net worth is only $26,000.
In a deposition, Leib said his two-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on East 79th Street is his daughter’s, given to her after his wife died in 2006.
With Jensen broke, she is representing herself in the divorce proceedings after her first lawyer blew through her $6,000 in savings and failed to show up for court dates. His license has since been suspended.
“I’m stuck,” she said. “I can’t afford another attorney. I’m sick, unable to work, and he has me trapped.”
Leib made $100,000 in 2010, court filings show, and is working as an independent financial adviser.
The couple doesn’t have children, and there was no prenup. He has argued in legal papers that Jensen doesn’t deserve a dime.
“She left me,” Leib said in a telephone interview.
Leib said he lost it all in the 2008 market crash.
“She thinks I have money hidden away, but I don’t,” he said. “It’s been a very rough time for me also.”