A month into his 17-year marriage to his current wife, ultra-secretive hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen spilled his guts to a TV talk-show host about his fractious, on-again-off-again relationship with his first wife, and how she loomed large over the newlyweds.
“Before we got engaged, we broke up and he was still sleeping with her,” Cohen’s current wife, Alex, said during the show, provoking audible sympathy from the audience.
An unapologetic Cohen defended his actions, saying that he was still emotionally attached to his first wife, Patricia, at the time he started dating Alex. He added that he stopped sleeping with Patricia after he got engaged to Alex.
“A lot of these things occurred in the first year when I still wasn’t committed to Alex and maybe I used the ex as a wedge,” said Cohen, who looked thinner and had a full head of brown hair.
“I had gone through a pretty messy divorce and wasn’t ready,” he added. “It wasn’t a clean separation. . .We went back and forth for a while.”
He added he and his first wife had “some financial difficulties,” but he never provided details of those challenges.
Cohen’s comments were made in 1992, the year Cohen launched his hedge fund SAC Capital, on an episode of the short-lived, English version of talk show “Cristina,” titled “He Acts Like Her Husband, Too,” during which second wives complain their husbands won’t break free of their exes. The Post recently obtained a tape of the show.
The host, Cristina Saralegui, introduces Cohen and his pretty, petite wife Alex nearly halfway through the hourlong show, saying Alex “feels her battle with [Cohen’s] ex-wife will never end.”
Saralegui also said Alex and Patricia, whom Cohen divorced 20 years ago, “despise each other so much” that Alex only agreed to come on the show if they “guaranteed that the ex-wife was not invited.”
Saralegui has a hugely popular Spanish-language talk show, and tried her hand at doing an English version before it was canceled after half a season.
When asked to provide examples of Patricia’s alleged behavior, Alex said, “Every time we come together in the same room, she starts screaming obscenities at me in public. She likes doing that.”
But Alex also laid some of the blame at the feet of her husband, who would talk to his ex for three hours at a time while Cohen and Alex were dating — sometimes behind closed doors.
The TV show provides a rare glimpse of Cohen, who is worth an estimated $5.5 billion, and is surfacing a week after Patricia filed a shocking federal lawsuit against her ex-husband, accusing him of cheating her out of millions and alleging he confessed to insider-trading activities.
Cohen’s reps declined to comment on his TV appearance, and again denied Patricia’s allegations.
Paul Batista, Patricia’s lawyer, said, “Patricia Cohen has always been disturbed by the embarrassing performance of Steve Cohen on the ‘Cristina’ show. The allegations made by him and his second wife were and are hurtful and humiliating to Patricia and her children and they remain so. The allegations were also false.”
Though he appeared on “Cristina” and his financial success is widely known, Cohen, 53, is notoriously private and secretive, making his chatty appearance on the TV show all the more intriguing.
Cohen rarely appears in public, doesn’t speak with the press and is surrounded by security at all times. He’s notorious for forcing his employees to sign ironclad confidentiality agreements, and his mansion on a 14-acre compound in Greenwich, Conn., is hidden from view by a stone wall.
Meanwhile, there were reports out yesterday that Cohen managed to get a Reuters story killed about alleged insider trading at SAC Capital after Cohen complained to Devin Wenig, CEO of Thomson Reuters’ market division.
In response to the allegations, a Reuters spokeswoman told Talking Biz News, a University of North Carolina Journalism School Web site, “We make decisions on whether or not to run stories purely on journalistic grounds.” kaja.whitehouse@nypost.com