Ruth Madoff Says Couple Tried Suicide in 2008

                                                                         
                                                                               Ruth Madoff granted an interview.

On Christmas Eve 2008, two weeks after Bernard L. Madoff confessed to running history’s largest Ponzi  scheme, he and his wife, Ruth, attempted suicide in their Manhattan penthouse.

Mrs. Madoff said in an interview with The New York Times: “I don’t know whose idea it was, but we were both so saddened by everything that had happened. It was unthinkable to me: hate mail, phone calls, lawyers.”

The situation was “just horrific,” she continued. “And I thought, ‘I just can’t, I can’t take this. I don’t know how I’ll ever get through this, nor do I want to.’ So we decided to do it.”

According to Mrs. Madoff, who has been living in seclusion in Florida, she and her husband “were both in agreement — we were both sort of relieved to leave this place. It was very, very impulsive.”

Mrs. Madoff came under a fierce media spotlight after her husband’s arrest, unable to leave her apartment without being followed by photographers and being shunned by lifelong friends who had been her husband’s victims.

His victims stretched around the world, with paper losses in the vast Ponzi scheme totaling $64.8 billion and cash losses nearing $18 billion. Those who lost money in his long-running fraud included major charities, university endowments, offshore hedge funds and thousands of middle-income investors. Many of those investors were members of the Madoffs’ extended family.

More important to both of them than the media firestorm they faced, she said, was that she had become instantly estranged from her two sons, Mark and Andrew, who had turned in their father to law enforcement officials and precipitated his arrest on Dec. 11, 2008. He pleaded guilty three months later and is serving a 150-year sentence at a federal prison in Butner, N.C.

Christmas Eve had been a sorrowful evening, she said. She and her husband had spent it gathering together and wrapping some treasured jewelry and a few gift items they wanted to send to loved ones before they died.

Guessing at the required postage, Ruth Madoff covered the packages with stamps and mailed them to a few relatives and friends, enclosing short notes of affection and apology.

Mrs. Madoff said in the interview that she and her husband had discussed how many pills each should take — she weighed barely 100 pounds, he was heftier and taller — and then they both swallowed handfuls of what she thought was Ambien before climbing into their chintz-draped canopy bed.

Although she recalled the emotional pain she and her husband felt that evening, she also said she was “glad to wake up” from a long drug-induced slumber the next day. “I’m not sure how I felt about him waking up,” she added.

Mrs. Madoff said the couple never discussed suicide again, nor was she aware of her husband ever making another attempt. “But I have no idea why he didn’t — I don’t know how he lives with it all.”

In an e-mail from prison, her husband acknowledged that suicide “crossed my mind” after his arrest. Two factors deterred him, he said. He felt he could help in the effort to recover assets for his victims, and he “could not abandon my family.”

His family was shattered by his crime, cut off from one another by legal concerns and under constant suspicion in the media. Burdened by anger and grief, Mark Madoff committed suicide in his downtown Manhattan loft on Dec. 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.

In recent media interviews, Mark’s widow, Stephanie Madoff Mack, disclosed that it was her husband’s second suicide attempt. In October 2009, he checked into a hotel near their home and took a large number of sedatives. He survived and underwent therapy, according to his widow’s account.

After years of silence and seclusion, Ruth Madoff agreed to talk with a Times reporter about the worst years of her life because her son Andrew had asked her to help promote a new authorized biography, “Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family,” to be published Monday by Little, Brown.

The information about the suicide attempt was first reported Wednesday evening by CBS News. An article based on Mrs. Madoff’s entire interview with The Times will appear on nytimes.com on Sunday evening. The interview was granted in exchange for an agreement not to publish the full report until then.