Everything you need to know about Julia Haart, from her Orthodox upbringing to rebuilding her empire
Julia Haart is a woman who wears many hats.
The Russian-born reality TV star rose to fame in the fashion world. However, before rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most beautiful models, she was a member of New York’s Haredi community, where she lived like someone from the 1800s, in her own words.
Haart married when she was barely an adult and later welcomed four children with her first husband. She finally left the island Orthodox community in 2013, at the age of 42.
Read on to learn more about her glamorous life and eventual fall from grace, documented in her Netflix reality series, “My Unorthodox Life.”
Its Orthodox origins
Haart was part of New York’s Haredi community for most of her life, where she went by the name Talia Leibov.
While living in the repressive, ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave just north of New York, she worked as a professor of Judaic studies and sold life insurance on the side.
At the age of 19, she married her first husband, Yosef Hendler, and the couple had four children: Batsheva, Shlomo, Miriam and Aron.
His youngest son, Aron, is still part of the Orthodox community.
Haart later described Hendler as a “sad man” and revealed that their union was an arranged marriage.
When asked what motivated her to leave the community, she said her daughter Miriam, who is bis****l, gave her the final push.
“She just didn’t want to conform,” Haart told the New York Times in 2021. “They were doing to her what they did to me — trying to push her down and turn her into this flat person to so that they can disappear. I couldn’t let this happen. I literally packed my [expletive] and I went out with her.
Upon leaving the community, Haart said she felt like a “Martian walking on Earth.”
“[Before I turned 35,] I had no radio, no television, no newspapers, no magazines. I had never been to a bar. I had never had a date. I had never slept alone in a room,” she explained to the media.
“When I left, I wore the lowest tops I could find, the shortest shorts. Because for me, it was freedom.
She followed her pa*sion for fashion and became a shoe designer, before being chosen by lingerie brand La Perla to be its creative director.
His family dynamic
After leaving the community, her parents and siblings cut off all communication with her. She has also remained fairly secretive about her family’s identity.
Haart opened up about her bizarre family dynamic during a 2023 interview on the “Not Skinny but Not Fat” podcast.
“You want to hear a real mindf-k?” I breastfed my brother,” Haart told Amanda Hirsch, revealing that she breastfed her brother, who is 23 years her junior, at the request of her mother.
“My mother was like, ‘Oh, you’re already breastfeeding your daughter, take this one too’ – and so I ended up breastfeeding my brother and my daughter. Now that’s a mindf-k.
She had recently given birth to her eldest daughter, Batsheva, and her mother welcomed her youngest brother a few months later. Haart compared herself to a nanny.
Although the practice of breastfeeding other people’s children largely died out in the 20th century, she said the Orthodox community was so backward that one would have to travel to another era to “understand the world I lived in.”
After leaving her community, she married Swiss billionaire Silvio Scaglia, CEO of the company that owns La Perla, in 2019.
He named Haart CEO of his modeling agency, Elite World Group, the same year they married.
However, the couple had only been married for two years when she filed for divorce in December 2022 and accused him of threatening to k**l her. (He denied her claims.)
“The man I was forced to marry is a much nicer person than the man I chose,” Haart said on the podcast, referring to her messy split with the businessman .
Julia Haart’s controversial divorce
Not only did Haart file for divorce from her husband of two years, but she also made explosive statements about him, threatening to k**l her.
In a motion for a restraining order, the Netflix star asked a court to prohibit Scaglia from approaching or contacting her, accusing him of hostility toward her youngest son’s Judaism.
“I’m going to k**l you in the public eye,” he allegedly told her.
Haart claimed in the petition, which was seen by Page Six in 2022, that she was “afraid for my safety and that of my children, some of whom live with me.”
She added: “Over recent weeks the respondent has become increasingly unstable, abusive and unbalanced. »
Elsewhere, she alleged that he “regularly berated me, calling me a ‘poisonous snake,’ a ‘monster,’ and a ‘liar,’ in the presence of third parties and sometimes my children.” One of the respondent’s favorite epithets is to tell me to “fuck you.”
However, Haart lost her attempt to prove that Scaglia had mistreated her.
The legal battle surrounding Elite World Group
The same day Haart filed for divorce, she was fired from her position as CEO of modeling agency Elite World Group.
Netflix’s cameras for its show “My Unorthodox Life” were rolling when Haart was struck by the news.
She then sued her ex-husband in an attempt to claim she owned 50 percent of EWG’s holding company.
However, she also lost her fight in the Delaware Supreme Court and also lost an appeal in April 2023.