A Nassau county judge booted the secret wife of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fashion designer, Oleg Cassini, from her position as executor of his $60 million estate — finding that the former model dug her own grave with wacky testimony about investigators killing dogs, allusions to Nazis and questioning the citizenship of an attorney.
Judge Edward McCarty III gave Marianne Nestor Cassini a final opportunity to defend herself in court next month.
But eight years after the famed designer’s death at age 92, his widow has “engaged in numerous activities which require the court to suspend her” position immediately, the judge wrote in the March 13 ruling.
Among Nestor’s misdeeds are claiming that estate paperwork was destroyed in a fire, helping herself to $387,000 that was supposed to go to a stepdaughter, and refusing to identify the whereabouts of $4 million in memorabilia — including letters from Jackie O. and Grace Kelly, according to court papers.
Judge McCarty noted his decision was “a drastic measure.”
Cassini, the son of Russian royalty who also dressed Kelly and Marilyn Monroe, left behind a $42 million fashion and perfume company, a $10 million Gramercy Park mansion and $10 million in antiques, art and furnishings.
Nestor, who is 30 years his junior, purportedly married the designer in a secret London ceremony in 1971, but his 1986 autobiography made no mention of her.
Nestor called her husband “boss” or “chief” in public, according to a Vanity Fair article, but the bedroom in his Oyster Bay summer home had a secret passageway to hers.
In his decision, Judge McCarty noted the bitter battle between Nestor and the designer’s daughter from his marriage to Hollywood starlet Gene Tierney.
Oleg’s will left $500,000 to a disabled child named Daria Cassini, who died in 2010, and $1 million to her sister Christina Cassini. The vast remainder of the multi-million estate went to Nestor.
But Christina, a divorced mom of four children living in Paris, challenged her inheritance in 2007, claiming that a divorce settlement between her parents entitled her to 25 percent of the estate. The court upheld the agreement in a December 2009 ruling.
In a desperate attempt to reverse the decision Nestor, 71, claimed Christina, 65, was not Oleg’s biological daughter. Her mother was rumored to have had affairs with President John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes, among others.
But the ruling stood.
Then Christina challenged her stepmom’s role as executor of the estate after she failed to pay out the bequest, did a sloppy job of keeping tax records and took the $387,000 remaining in Daria’s trust for herself, even though the will stipulated that it should go to Christina.
Nestor’s attorney, Vincent Reppert, declined to comment citing the pending litigation.