Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
She explained that her late husband had been a breeder of champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein, gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors. Daniel, 16 years Sylvia’s senior, already had two grown sons when they met, and he didn’t want more children. So over the next 40 years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in 2001, he left her a small stable.
Then, one morning about a year later, Sylvia’s phone rang. It was her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of Sylvia’s stable were no longer listed under her name. The French journalist Magali Serre’s 2013 book “Les Wildenstein” recounts the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and flipped to the page. Sure enough, the stable of “Madame Wildenstein” had been replaced by “Dayton Limited,” an Irish company owned by her stepsons.
This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
Trump's Abortion Dilemma
How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall
The Eclipse Chaser
The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’
An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth
Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
Kids Are Missing School at an Alarming Rate
Ronna McDaniel, TV News and the Trump Problem
From Serial: Season 4 - Guantánamo
Hamas Took Her, and Still Has Her Husband
The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump
Democrats’ Plan to Save the Republican House Speaker
The United States vs. the iPhone
A Terrorist Attack in Russia
The Sunday Read: ‘My Goldendoodle Spent a Week at Some Luxury Dog ‘Hotels.’ I Tagged Along.’
Chuck Schumer on His Campaign to Oust Israel’s Leader
The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Up First
Today, Explained
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Post Reports
Outside Podcast