‘Catwoman’ Socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein Dead at 84

Jocelyn Wildenstein, the Swiss-American socialite and fashion figure otherwise known as “Catwoman” and/or “the bride of Wildenstein” due to her much-augmented lionesque appearance, died on Tuesday in Paris from a pulmonary embolism. She was 84—or perhaps 79, as she was coy to the point of misleading regarding her age.

An “icon is gone,” her long-time partner, the fashion designer Lloyd Klein, told AFP on Wednesday.

Born Jocelyne Périsset in Switzerland, Wildenstein was infamous for her extravagant lifestyle and extreme wealth, which she used to fund her dramatic surgeries. (It was rumored she modeled her procedures after a pet lynx, though on occasion, she would deny having gone under the knife entirely.)

Her love of plastic surgery reportedly started when she and her art dealer husband Alec Wildenstein got matching eye lifts.

“She was crazy... She was thinking that she could fix her face like a piece of furniture,” her ex-husband told Vanity Fair in 1998. “Skin does not work that way. But she wouldn’t listen.”

Wildenstein filed for divorce in 1997 when she walked in on her husband in bed with a 21-year-old Russian model. He allegedly pulled a gun on her and had to spend the night in jail.

Her initial divorce settlement was $2.5 billion, with an additional $100 million paid out per year for more than a decade afterwards, making her one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

But by 2018, her billions were gone and she filed for bankruptcy in New York. “I often turn to friends and family in order to pay my ongoing expenses,” she wrote in an affidavit at the time.

These financial struggles were a source of strife in her relationship with Klein; Wildenstein was twice arrested after fights between the couple, and both took out restraining orders against the other in 2016. They later reconciled.

In recent years, Wildenstein amassed over a million-strong cult following on social media—and more broadly as a campy, mostly-in-on-the-joke fashion plate—with throwback pictures and edgy magazine photoshoots.