Julia Haart is celebrating a victory in her courtroom war with former business partner and husband Silvio Scaglia — one that could end up costing him a quarter of a billion dollars.
It’s a bit of a legal brain-twister. Ready?
When Haart told Scaglia she was divorcing him in 2022, he fired her from Elite World Group, the top modeling agency they ran together, which has represented Kendall Jenner, Adriana Lima, Irina Shayk, Winnie Harlow and Behati Prinsloo, among many others.
Haart sued him, claiming he couldn’t fire her since she owned half the business — so she’d have to agree to fire herself.
But when a judge said that company documents showed that she did not, in fact, own half the business, she sued Scaglia — plus his business partner, his accountant and his accountant’s firm — for fraud.
She alleged in that suit that the group had led her to believe that she’d been given half the company instead of a salary — even though, she alleged, they knew that Scaglia had squirreled away some secret shares that meant that he still secretly owned a controlling majority of the firm.
A judge tossed her suit in 2023.
But now — after reviewing a trove of paperwork — an appeals court judge has overturned the dismissal, and the case is finally going to court, according to documents seen by Page Six.
Haart — a former ultra-orthodox Jew who took the fashion world by storm after leaving the small orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, and has since starred in Netflix show “My Unorthodox Life” — is jubilant, telling Page Six that she feels that a court has finally “looked at the facts.”
“For the last two years and eight months these men have made a mockery of our court system,” she said, “These men with their fancy suits and fancy degrees sold the world a fiction so large you could drive a squadron of tanks through them and yet people believed them. In the world’s eyes, I was a no one from nowhere, with no degree and no pedigree.”
She said she was, “One woman with a mountain full of evidence against [men] without a shred of evidence, and they kept winning.”
She’s seeking $250,000,000 each from Scaglia, business partner Paolo Barbieri, Scaglia’s accountant Jeffrey Feinman and Feinman’s firm, the accountancy giant DDK and Company.
So if she wins the now-reinstated court case, she could walk away a billionaire.
Meanwhile, Scaglia has other legal woes. As Page Six previously reported, a judge in their divorce case has issued a warrant for his arrest and imprisonment for 20 days because he has failed to show up in court and failed to pay her $300,000 as he was ordered.
