On the buzzy Netflix reality series “My Unorthodox Life,” sexy, glamorous Julia Haart has quite a story to tell. It’s a fairy tale of how she fled her Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, NY, to make her way in the fashion world: launching her own own shoe line, becoming creative director at the luxury fashion brand La Perla and, now, serving as the CEO of Elite World Group — a talent agency which includes Elite Model Management and represents the likes of Kendall Jenner, Iman and Helena Christensen.
But insiders say that she is painting an ugly, unfair picture of life in her former community — as uneducated and so restrictive it left her suicidal.
“Julia’s hanging on to this word ‘fundamentalism’ — and sensationalism sells,” said a former friend of Haart’s from Monsey. “She says she was held captive, but that’s not true.”
The show follows Haart, 50, her four kids and her second husband, Elite owner Silvio Scaglia, and includes lots of scenes of her railing against her past life in an “extreme” community” — a characterization that another old friend, Roselyn Feinsod, disputes.
(Haart did not wish to comment.)
Meanwhile, style insiders say Haart’s role in the fashion world is also distorted on the series.
“The show is so misleading. It is a house of mirrors,” said an Elite source. “When she came in, it was all about her self-promotion … She is really good at making it seem like she is an agent of change and she is good at pretending to be all about empowerment. But it’s all publicity for her.”
Julia Haart freely admits that she changed both her name and her persona — more than once.
Born Julia Leibov, she moved as a child from Russia to Texas and, eventually, to Monsey, NY — a center for Orthodox Jews. That’s where Feinsod first met her, at yeshiva.
“Julia and her family were welcomed by the community,” Feinsod, 50, recalled. “We’ve been friends since elementary school.”
She disagreed with Haart’s claims on the show that women were oppressed in the community.
“Far from being fundamentalists, we have all been brought up in a very open Orthodox type of life: We watched TV and movies, we traveled, — and we were all educated.”
Feinsod, now a principal at the global accounting firm of Ernst & Young, recalled how Haart wanted to fit into the community even more: “Julia wanted a more Jewish name and she changed it to Talia when she was in high school. We even made a naming ceremony for her.”
Haart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in July: “What I would love to see is that [Orthodox] women have an opportunity to have a real education, can go to college, to not get married off at 19 on [an arranged match].”
Haart herself attended the Beth Jacob Jerusalem girls seminary, described as a “Harvard of Jerusalem” and one of the top seminaries in the world, after high school. She did not have any secular education.
She married Wharton grad Yosef Hendler — in an arranged union — at age 19, moving with him to Atlanta, Ga., before returning to Monsey.
The couple raised their four children — daughters Batsheva, now 28, and Miriam, 21, and sons Shlomo, 25, and Aron, 15. Far from uneducated, Miriam is now a student at Stanford University, while Shlomo studied law at Columbia.
“We did so many fun trips with the kids. Went biking. We spent the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving together,” Feinsod said. “Far from this repressed fundamentalist person, Julia was a fun person.”
Haart has said that she was miserable in Monsey — but has not publicly discussed the financial woes that befell her.
Between 1997 and 2017, according to public records, Talia Hendler (as Haart was then known) and her then husband racked up $425,510 in debt, accruing 13 tax liens and judgments.
Haart has been more forthcoming about the physical and emotional strain of her unhappiness. One old friend said Haart told her she wanted to starve herself to death because she didn’t think that anybody loved her. Haart has revealed that she weighed just 73 pounds on the day she left her Orthodox life.
But even how and when she left the community is murky. On her show, Haart dramatically recounts how she left Monsey the day after Batsheva, then 19, wed — fleeing with daughter Miriam in tow to set up her own shoe line.
“They were doing to her what they had done to me — trying to push her down and mold her into that flat person that they could disappear,” Haart told the New York Times of Miriam.
The “day after” timeline has become a touchstone in Haart’s mythology. “Here’s the crazy thing — the way that Julia portrays it, she just left after Batsheva’s wedding and disappeared,” said a Haart pal from Monsey, who insists at least seven months passed before Haart officially left, and that she still came back for visits. “There was no immediate dramatic thing that happened.”
Haart’s old Monsey friends have been disheartened by her new narrative. “We were shocked as we read interview after interview … with Julia ‘taking a stand against fundamentalism’ and describing a fictitious transition from a life with no radio, television, newspapers, magazines or bars,’” Feinsod wrote in a LinkedIn essay.
“Between Julia’s eating issues and the financial strain, I think something snapped and she somehow blames religion for everything,” the unnamed Haart pal told The Post.
Despite having no fashion training and having previously worked as a religious-school teacher, in 2013 Haart launched her own shoe line under her newly adopted name of Julia Haart.
“She started her shoe line with this Orthodox financier who was [also] Ivanka Trump’s funder,” the pal said.
Haart and Yosef divorced in 2019, but have remained friends and he has appeared on the show.
Her shoe line took off and she collaborated with the luxury fashion house La Perla in 2016 — quickly being named the brand’s creative director. It was the ultimate outsider move and one that shocked the industry.
A former La Perla employee told The Post that Haart was “in over her head” when she started and said that many people gossiped about her relationship with then-owner Silvio Scaglia. A Haart insider said the two met after she started her job.
Scaglia, who has since changed his name to Silvio Scaglia Haart, divorced his first wife Monica Aschei in 2018, marrying Haart in 2019 — the same year he appointed her CEO of Elite, which he owns. (He sold La Perla in 2018.) The couple now live in a $55 million apartment in Tribeca.
In 2019, Haart was caught up in a lawsuit between Women Management, which is owned by Elite World Group, and rival model agency Elite USA. The suit claimed that Elite USA poached stars, including Behati Prinsloo, from Women.
Elite USA, however, said the models were desperate to flee Women, which they claim was racked by “gross mismanagement” — alleging that Scaglia had put his “dangerously incompetent” then-girlfriend, Haart, in charge, the filing said. The Haart insider said that the situation in question took place before Haart arrived at Elite World Group. The case is still ongoing.
Meanwhile, according to a former Elite employee, “Haart was obsessed with having a show and wanted to be the Jewish Kardashian.” The former employee added that it didn’t look good when the company was also “laying [people] off during the pandemic.”
The Haart insider said that more of her business backstory will be revealed in her memoir “Brazen,” to be published by Penguin in March 2022.
Haart’s former Monsey friend said that she was “in awe” of the designer when she was younger but now is just confused.
“I last saw Julia at Yosef’s engagement party, I had not seen her for years,” the former friend recalled. “She called me in the car on the way home and said, ‘You don’t need to be in the community anymore, you don’t need to be in a box.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I went to college, I worked!’
“I do believe that she believes her own hype,” said the former friend. “She has to do everything to perfection, there’s something ingrained in her. She had to be the best Jew until she left the community.”
Additional reporting by Kirsten Fleming