When Your Husband Is in a Hamptons Scandal

Sasckya Slothower was born in northeastern Brazil and competed in beauty pageants from the age of 13, eventually coming in fifth in the Miss Brazil World pageant. In her late teens, she traveled to Boston to attend college, modeling in the Saks showroom and appearing in a fashion show headed up by basketball Hall of Famer Paul Pierce. She soon became bored with Massachusetts, she says, and moved to New York, finding a room in a model apartment on East 49th Street. She posed in Stella McCartney’s showroom, modeled products for Pantene and MAC Cosmetics. “Some of the models I lived with would not even eat, but just pick up a cotton ball, soak it in some liquid, and eat that to mess up their stomachs,” says Slothower, in heavily accented English and with a confident, confiding tone. “I was curvier, and I did lingerie, so I didn’t have to be as skinny. I ate little, but I could not starve myself.”

One day in the mid-2000s, a former Elite model with a special events agency asked Sasckya if she had time to pop by Wall Street at the afternoon hour of 4:30 p.m. Some Goldman Sachs traders were holding a private card game, and she needed hostesses. At the space on Pearl Street, she perhaps floated between tables with a soft smile, a young blond trader nearby. When the game broke up, he ran after her, asking for her number. She said she’d rather take his number; he countered by asking if he could take her to dinner, and when. “Well, right now,” she said. Why not?

Sasckya married Jeffrey Slothower months later. She was 21, felt young for marriage, and even kept the news from those she worked with professionally. “I didn’t want them to know I was married because I thought it made me seem like I was old,” she says. “And if they thought I was old, I wouldn’t get the job.”

About a decade later, Sasckya wasn’t old by any stretch, but the couple’s lives were beginning to shift. Jeffrey was now striking out on his own, with a financial firm he named Battery Private. And after enjoying the city for years, Sasckya had fallen in love with the beach in the Hamptons on a modeling shoot. They decided to try living in Southampton full-time.

Sasckya and Jeffrey started a family, and she took up hobbies like researching local history, figuring out exactly when the settlers came to Conscience Point. “I had been wild before, but now I connected with being a mom,” she says. How wild? She was a Playboy Playmate in 2007, appearing as a Christmastime centerfold under a different last name, and even lived in the Playboy Mansion for a few weeks.

“Every night was either dinner, or we’d take the limousine to a restaurant or the movies,” she says. “There was always something going on. So it was a nice experience. And definitely very, very naked. Girls would just get painted with spray tattoos and walk around naked. I never saw that before.”

There was talk of Sasckya dying her hair blond, which she disdained. “I told everyone, ‘I’m not dying my hair,’ and Hef was fine with that,” she says. Back then, “Kim Kardashian was on the cover, and she’s also brunette.”

Post-Playboy, Sasckya enjoyed married life for a while, then became a mom and lived in Southampton. She embraced some of the social trappings of the East End and has many party shots to her name, her wide-set eyes gazing out from photos captured at a veterinarian charity bash in East Hampton, or the Parrish Art Museum’s Midsummer Gala. The Slothowers were minor summer fixtures at beach barbecues; he with the slicked-back blond Gordon Gekko haircut, she with tight summer pastel pants. They were the type of couple who could have their anniversary celebrated in The Southampton Press, as it was several years ago. (He was in a trim tuxedo and she wore a ruched white gown, her hair falling down her back like a bolt of midnight silk.)

“The parties in the summers were nice,” says Sasckya.

The couple was now surrounded by the extreme wealth of the Hamptons, where oceanfront homes with a spread are now going for upward of $25 million. How did it feel to patronize the gourmet stores alongside private-equity moms in their clingy black Alo getups, jostling one another as they purchased tubs of lobster salad for $100 each? The Hamptons are less a location that’s a beach than a beach that forgot it was a beach. The place has become the rictus grin of the nouveau riche. It’s the Upper East Side’s revenge against urban humidity and decay, a spiritual center of sorts devoted to musing smugly upon your life and how it’s gone so right.

But off-season, the Hamptons change. When it was cold, Sasckya and Jeffrey had a much more mundane life, bringing Citarella takeout to Coopers Beach and walking Main Street. “It was nice in the summer, but then when it wasn’t the summer, the Hamptons got kind of quiet,” says Sasckya. She modeled only rarely, and it seems possible that Jeffrey’s new business was not going well. And this is when the trouble began.

On Battery Private’s website, some typed text explains that the firm was “a principal investor” in various asset classes and opportunities. And it seems that Jeffrey did try wheeling and dealing as this type of investor, buying some homes out east. But in practice, according to legal documents, it seems he also served clients, and in particular a couple from California, Michael and Cynthia Day. Michael alleges in legal documents that, in 2017, Jeffrey told him he was investing their money in HOA bonds, or bonds secured by homeowners association fees. Jeffrey said these bonds would earn an enticing 8% return without risk. The only catch? If the Days suddenly wanted to get liquid, Jeffrey needed a quarter to raise the cash.

When the Days sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jeffrey, he put the money in a bank account (they eventually became divorced and invested separately). According to legal documents, he seems to have bought a Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV in metallic black for $125,367.68. He also paid approximately $19,000 in fees to the Long Island National Golf Club, located in Aquebogue. He bought a Rolex, as well as more than $11,000 in clothing at Ralph Lauren. And he bought Sasckya a white agneau chevron Flap Bag from Chanel for $6,423.63.

All told, the government, in its criminal case, said Jeffrey took more than $1 million, a paltry sum in a geographical area where a spot in the Montauk mobile home park on the ocean goes for more than $1 million. Which begs the question: Why engage in this alleged scheme in the first place? Was it to please his demanding wife? Or to keep up appearances with a Hamptons set he wasn’t really a part of in the first place?

When I ask Sasckya about this, she says, “He can buy me whatever he wants.” She maintains that Jeffrey was indeed a “principal investor” at this point, meaning he invested his own capital with a cohort, rather than managing or investing money on behalf of others, as a fund manager does. She says the Days were aware that they were merely loaning money to Jeffrey, not investing it—contrary to what the prosecution would successfully argue—with the understanding that they’d be paid back with 8% interest. (Jeffrey Slothower declined to comment for this article.)

Additionally, part of Jeffrey’s defense hinged on the fact that he did not send a prospectus, or even a detailed email explaining the HOA bond product, to the Days. (The Days did not return a request for comment lodged at emails associated with their names.)

But also, people don’t generally buy personal items with business funds, even if Jeffrey was, in fact, only an investor taking a loan from the Days. And a golf membership and Chanel purse are personal items—or are they? This is the Hamptons, after all, where public and private life constantly commingle, the beach day is really a networking opportunity, and the cocktail party is less about drinks and relaxation than advancement.

As time went on, Jeffrey sent the Days investment statements demonstrating that their wealth was increasing, but court records show he was actually drawing it down and quickly becoming illiquid. And then, frustrated after they stopped receiving interest payments and by Jeffrey’s delaying, the Days decided to pull their cash. Michael, according to court documents, had done badly when he’d invested earlier with his stepbrother (the stepbrother was managing Michael’s funds at Oppenheimer at the time). Perhaps Michael didn’t want to get burned again. Sasckya says that, to pay Michael back, Jeffrey offered him one of the homes he had bought on Southampton’s Sandy Hollow Road. And even though Sasckya imagined that anything that might be amiss here was at best a civil manner, law enforcement felt differently. “The police rushed into the house in the early morning, with our babies there, like he was a drug dealer,” says Sasckya. “It was a tough scene.”

During Jeffrey’s federal trial in Islip in 2024, after he was charged with wire fraud, investment adviser fraud, and money laundering, the prosecutor began by telling the jury, “This is a case about lies and greed.” He continued: “Lying to investors to steal money from them is a crime, and that is where we are here today.” Jeffrey’s attorney argued that the trial should last only five minutes, claiming there was no fraud and that the prosecutors were trying to confuse the jury by listing out all of Jeffrey’s purchases.

Jeffrey was found guilty of all three counts. Sentencing, which could result in up to 30 years in prison, has been postponed. When I ask Sasckya if their marriage will remain intact, she says that “it’s complicated.” She is frustrated and upset with the outcome of the case. She thinks it’s possible that law enforcement was somewhat jealous of Jeffrey, with his angelic blond hair, Brazilian model wife on his arm, and Hamptons life. She actually thinks that if they had not moved out of the city to Southampton, he wouldn’t have been prosecuted. “Jeff could’ve lived in a way bigger house, a mansion, in New Jersey,” she says. She feels they were made an example of, a symbol of something. She says “it’s just the whole picture people have in their minds” of the Hamptons.