Jocelyn Wildenstein will never have known the year 2025! Made famous for her divorce from one of the richest art dealers in the world but also her numerous failed surgeries, the 79-year-old socialite (she was born September 7, 1945) died in Paris in the night of December 31, 2024. It was then his partner Lloyd Klein, twenty-seven years his junior, who announced the sad news: “Ms. Wildenstein died peacefully in her sleep (…) in her apartment in Paris, where the couple had taken up temporary residence since August 2024.”, could we read in an official press release. Information to which were then added some details about the death: “Because of his phlebitis, his legs were very, very swollen, the blood was blocked, and there was no oxygen to the brain.”. As previously reported by AFP, Wildenstein may have died of a pulmonary embolism, a condition in which a blood clot blocks blood flow to the lungs. As the Daily Mail points out, “This deadly condition is often caused by blood clots in the legs that travel to the lungs”.
This Thursday, January 23, there were a small handful of people who gathered to honor the memory of Jocelyn Wildenstein. For this sad occasion, it was at the Père Lachaise crematorium in the 20th arrondissement of Paris that Jordan De Luxe (with whom she did an interview for C8 a few weeks ago), Lloyd Klein, her long-time companion, and others anonymous, had all gathered for a final mass before the cremation. In particular, we were able to see the coffin, made of extremely simple wood, chosen by the relatives of the deceased. The two children of the famous divorcee, Diane and Alec Jr, do not appear in the photos revealed by the press. Particularly known because of her cosmetic surgery operations earning her the nickname “cat woman”, the ashes of Jocelyn Wildenstein should, according to the media TMZ, be scattered in Kenya, where the rich family of the deceased owns a huge ranch of several hundreds of hectares.
Jocelyn Wildenstein leaves behind huge debts
We thought she was a billionaire, she would have died penniless! In any case, this is what our colleagues from the Daily Mail revealed a few weeks ago about the end of life of the one nicknamed the “cat woman”. Indeed, according to the British media, Jocelyn Wildenstein was summoned to court in Miami, in the American state of Florida, on October 23 for a debt matter. Having failed to appear, she would have been subject to an arrest warrant. ““An American company, Regal Jewelry and Gift Shop, reportedly filed a complaint against Jocelyn Wildenstein in 2018, accusing her of having stolen $268,000 worth of precious stones from them. The socialite was reportedly ordered to reimburse them for this sum, to which she allegedly added $75,928 in interest, for a debt of $344,000.”, wrote the magazine Paris Match in particular about the affair. Having never paid this debt, the ex-wife of billionaire Alec Wildenstein would have been targeted by eviction proceedings from her Miami Beach apartment. According to the indictment order, obtained by our colleagues, the judge would have required that Jocelyn Wildenstein be placed in pre-trial detention in the event of arrest. A scenario that is now unthinkable…
