A Manhattan hedge-fund honcho accused of trying to bully his wife into a cheapo divorce settlement by threatening to make their sex tapes public says the allegations are a lie – and he’s considering suing his wife for defamation.
“The allegations are completely false,” David Glenn Rucker told The Post. “I have no idea why she would make that up.”
“She” is Lily Shang, Rucker’s wife of 20 months – and she says Rucker’s a liar.
“David always says what’s in his best interest,” she told the Toronto Star.
Rucker filed for divorce against Shang in October, and says he thought their early settlement talks had been amicable – until he found out she’d filed papers earlier this week accusing him of threatening to post two private “intimate” tapes on the internet if she didn’t bow to his financial demands.
Rucker, 26, said Tuesday’s filing “caught me completely off guard.”
“I went through all our old e-mails, and there’s nothing that can be construed as me trying to release a sex tape. It doesn’t make sense. I’m just really confused,” he said, adding that he’s consulting his attorney about bringing a possible defamation case.
Court records show that Shang’s lawyers quietly returned to court on Wednesday, and filed a motion for Shang to get spousal support – a move that also caught the Golden Archer Investments big off-guard.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. He said he’d been paying for her living expenses since their split.
Shang maintains that she’s telling the truth.
“Would anyone admit to blackmail if you asked them on the record?” she told the Star in an article that was posted online today.
As for the tape, Shang said, “A girl doesn’t marry a man without absolutely trusting him – at least most girls don’t. Whatever was done between us was when we were married, when there was that trust. No one could imagine that such a thing could be broken.”
She also said she was “devastated” by the media attention to her petition, which was filed publicly and separately from her sealed divorce case. “It’s sad that a private matter has become public in this way,” she said.
The couple tied the knot in a civil ceremony in Toronto in April 2009, and Shang’s filing said they twice made raunchy videos in their Battery Park City pad.
After they split, Shang’s filing said, Rucker ignored her pleas to either give her the “certain video of intimate moments of a sexual and private nature” or destroy it.
Instead, he “threatened to release video of the plaintiff, especially onto the Internet, if she does not agree to a low financial settlement in [the] divorce proceedings,” the filing says.
He also told her she’d be the lone star, making “it clear that he will . . . edit himself out and/or use video that already consists only of plaintiff.”
The still-pending action seeks a court order blocking the video’s release, on the grounds that Shang “is a co-owner of the copyrights of the videos as a joint author under federal and state copyright laws,” and that Rucker doesn’t have the required written authorization to release it.
The money man started up Golden Archer in 2007 and soon crossed paths with Shang, an economics whiz and jet-setting Toronto native.
The cute Canadian had just made good on her long-term plan to move to New York — in a 2005 blog posting, she wrote, “I went to NYC last week and totally love it. I had such a power trip walking down Wall Street. With some luck and hard work, I know I can get there.”