A former executive assistant to fashion modelling exec Silvio Scaglia became so disgusted by his attempts to smear his wife, reality star and executive Julia Haart, in court that she testified against him, according to court papers.
Whistleblower Tania Cohen has said in a sworn statement that Scaglia was bent on “destroying [an] innocent woman,” and that he had Cohen scour company accounts to find any trace of shady dealings by the “My Unorthodox Life” star — but she found none.
In fact, Cohen says in the court filing, all she uncovered was evidence that Scaglia himself was using company accounts to buy expensive gifts for his new fiancée and pay for lavish vacations.
Scaglia and Haart married in 2019, and he appointed her as CEO of his model management business Elite World Group. But he allegedly “blindsided” her by firing her on the same day in February 2022 that she filed for a divorce.
The businessman has since claimed in court docs that Haart abused company money, and even that she “stole” a Bentley.
But Cohen says in the papers that the luxe car was Haart’s fair and square, and that Scaglia knew it when he made his shocking claims.
She even says that Scaglia only tried to wrench the car away from her because he knew she loved it and “wanted to.”
In an affidavit filed this month in New York Supreme court by Haart’s power lawyer Lanny Davis, Cohen says, “I am coming forward because after realizing that Mr. Scaglia was not being honest, while attempting to destroy an innocent woman (Ms. Haart), I felt it was the right thing to come forward and tell the truth.”
Cohen — who worked for the modelling firm, Elite World Group, from January 2022, a month after Haart filed for divorce, until last month — further said that Scaglia had been “engaging in excessive spending of EWG money for his personal use,” and he “constantly tried to paint a picture of Ms. Haart as being a villain who had abused company funds and caused financial turmoil at EWG.”
She said that Scaglia gave her the task of sifting through company records to “try and find any money that Ms. Haart had taken illicitly.”
“I spent several months searching through emails, documents, bank and credit card statements, only to find that not a single dollar had been taken improperly by Ms. Haart,” she said, adding, “All of Ms. Haart’s expenditures were transparent and readily available for me to summarize.”
She said in the affidavit that even though Scaglia was largely uninvolved in the running the company and was an “empty suit,” he nonetheless used company funds to buy a $342,000 engagement ring for his new fiancée, spent $132,000 on the rental of a luxury yacht in Tahiti, plus $16,000 for business class flights to the Polynesian island for the couple. She also said he dropped $400,000 for a lavish yacht trip in Italy.
Meanwhile, she said that while Scaglia publicly accused Haart, a former ultra-Orthodox Jew who left the community and became a high-flying business executive, of stealing the Bentley, he knew the car belonged to her all along.
She said that the car was leased from a dealership, SW Vestry Cars, which is jointly owned by Haart and Scaglia and that she “discovered documentation showing that… the down payment for the lease of Ms. Haart’s Bentley was paid for by trading in Ms. Haart’s personal Range Rover SV Autobiography” which was worth $112,000.
“I also learned that after Mr. Scaglia terminated Ms. Haart as CEO of EWG, Ms. Haart attempted to continue making the lease payments on the Bentley on her own,” she said in the filing. “It was only because the lease was in the name of SW Vestry Cars, LLC and not Ms. Haart’s name personally that Mr. Scaglia was able to terminate the lease and return the vehicle to the Bentley dealership notwithstanding Ms. Haart’s attempt to continue to personally make the lease payments.”
She said that he had SW Vestry Cars cancel the lease “solely out of spite because he knew and had expressed to me that Ms. Haart had a strong personal attachment to the Bentley and wanted to punish/hurt her by having the car taken away from her.”
