Ellen Jaffe's Revenge

I had a meeting at the Kravis Center Wednesday about my talk there on March 16. I knew that they had received all kinds of pressure to cancel the event, and I had been told that they had caved in. That wasn't true, and I left the meeting with great admiration for the administration of the Kravis Center and their commitment to intellectual liberty. It had nothing to do with me or my book, it was liberty and freedom of expression they were defending.

I assumed that the meeting was confidential and when the following day I received a phone call from Page Six at the New York Post, I figured someone at the meeting had leaked the story. It turned out, as I just learned from an email a few minutes ago, that the two events had nothing to do with one another. The person who alerted Page Six had learned the information from members of the Palm Beach Country Club. Alas, the gossip item makes it look as if I am the primary source. Nothing to be done and it's a healthy thing to have Ellen Jaffe's behavior exposed. Here's the piece:

THE wife of Bob Jaffe - the Palm Beach bon vivant in the doghouse for getting the tony island's millionaires to invest with Bernard Madoff - is fighting for her beleaguered husband's honor.
Author Laurence Leamer says Ellen Shapiro Jaffe is waging a fierce campaign to get his upcoming lecture at the Kravis Center axed because of unflattering cracks he made about her hubby in Boston magazine. "She is especially pissed and she's pressuring them," Leamer told Page Six. "You would think she'd be in social hibernation and have better things to do."
In the article, Leamer called Jaffe "a 60-something peacock in a black dinner jacket . . . [with] an aging gigolo's looks, with sleek black hair and a face that if not lifted by plastic surgery . . . looked not youthful so much as the caricature of youth."
Jaffe, originally a Boston shoe salesman, "was looking for a rich wife and Ellen was the best he could do," said one source, who describes him as a Madoff "middleman . . . steering eager clients his way and collecting easy fees in return."
Leamer - set to discuss his book, "Madness Under the Royal Palms," at the Kravis Center on March 16 - said, "The phone has been ringing off the hook for weeks asking them to cancel me - and the name behind it I keep hearing is Ellen Jaffe . . . She's not letting up. Luckily, they have the courage to stand up to it."
Jaffe's rep, Elliot Sloan, said that Ellen, a Kravis Center board member, made only two calls to officials there about Leamer's book because "all it does is open up hurtful wounds in the community." Sloan also slammed the article as "full of inaccuracies," insisting Jaffe has not had plastic surgery, noting he's been married to Ellen for 40 years and they "are very much in love."
Jaffe's name has been mud since the Madoff scandal broke. In December, he was called a "dirty bastard" and nearly pummeled at Mar-a-Lago by Nine West founder Jerome Fisher, who lost $150 million.