Ed Scheetz is hardly innocent. But the hotelier did not impregnate a young woman last year.
Sources told me the woman hired divorce lawyer Raoul Lionel Felder to extract as much child support as he could from Scheetz, 48, who is hoping to reopen the Chelsea Hotel soon after two years of renovations.
Hard-partying Scheetz — he also owns three King & Grove hotels in the city and Ruschmeyer’s in Montauk — countered with his lawyer Stanley Arkin. And the case has gone away.
“It’s all over,” Scheetz e-mailed me. “Not my child. She made it up.”
Arkin told me DNA proved that the child wasn’t Scheetz’s.
“Ed is very smart, very articulate, a decent guy. This was a Russian girl who got pregnant [by someone else] and had visions of making a lot of money.”
Scheetz — a wunderkind who worked with Texas developer Trammell Crow, Apollo financier Leon Black and hotelier Ian Schrager — hasn’t always been so lucky.
In 2007, Scheetz returned one evening to his Turnberry Towers condo in Las Vegas to find his 23-year-old girlfriend dead from what police later determined was an overdose of cocaine and oxycodone.
Plenty of sordid details came out when the woman’s family sued, involving another woman, S&M and X-rated photos.
Scheetz, who has a wife and two kids in Connecticut, settled that case for an undisclosed amount.
Felder didn’t return calls.