Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. While we inch ever closer to season two,

we are continuing with our series of monthly bonus episodes in exploration of our theme.

And when it comes to Significant Others, it's hard to think of one who is more notorious

in recent history, at least, than the wife of the disgraced financier who perpetrated the

largest Ponzi scheme in history. Ruth Madoff is kind of a personal fascination of mine.

And today, I am lucky enough to be talking about her with a woman who knows her quite well,

as she literally wrote the book on the Madoff family. Author Laurie Sandel. Laurie, thank you so

much for being here. Thank you for having me, Liza. I'm curious about what drew you to the subject matter.

Researching and writing a book is such a huge investment of time. And I'm wondering why you would

choose to make that investment in telling the story of these particular people?

Well, aside from the fact that I was living in New York, you know, in 2008 when the scandal erupted,

and I think pretty much everybody was fascinated by and curious about this scandal. It dominated

the headlines when I was living in New York. I had written a memoir about my own father who's kind

of a mini Bernie Madoff. If Bernie Madoff weren't famous, rich or successful.

And I sort of came to this story very organically, you know, reading from my memoir,

in a reading series on stage, it just so happened that Catherine Hooper, who was then engaged

to Andrew Madoff, was in the audience. And my memoir came out in September of 2009, and this

all imploded, exploded in the news in December of 2008. So it had been less than a year.

I was also working as a journalist at the time at Glamour Magazine doing celebrity interviews.

I don't, even though I wasn't an investigative reporter, I don't think there was a journalist on

earth that would not have junded the chance to spend time, you know, speaking to these people and

sort of seeing what this was all about. So did they approach you? So Catherine approached me backstage

...