Julia Haart was 43 when she found the courage to leave her husband and the orthodox Jewish community she had lived in all her life as a wig-wearing, modestly dressed housewife and reinvent herself as a fashionista powerhouse with a billionaire husband and matching lifestyle.
“I grew up in a world where all women had to do the exact same thing,” Haart, 50, says. “Women are taught that all women are put on this earth for one purpose, to get married, and have children, to lead obedient lives, to raise righteous men who will become rabbis and righteous daughters who will listen to righteous men who will become rabbis.”
Yet Haart, 50, has gone from this to be the world’s new favourite reality heroine, the star of Netflix’s ultra-trashy My Unorthodox Life, more Keeping Up with the Kardashians as Haart’s four telegenic children make their way in the world, than Unorthodox, the hit drama about a woman escaping her Hasidic Jewish community.
Launched less than three weeks ago, the show is already in Netflix’s Top Ten. Social media has been buzzing with fans #obsessed with Haart, her fabulous Manhattan penthouse, helicopter, holidays in French châteaux and revealing wardrobe. “To me, every low-cut top, every miniskirt, is an emblem of freedom,” she explains.
Mostly, however, viewers have been #inspired by the story of how she broke free from her repressive background. “We’ve heard from over 10,000 people in the last ten days telling us how we’ve inspired them,” says Haart, who is just as much a force off-screen as she is on, speaking from her mansion in the Hamptons, where she’s spending summer with her second (doting) husband, the Italian mogul Silvio Scaglia.
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To her, these messages are justification for her decision to share her story after years when she hid her past from everyone. “I was a fortysomething woman with no education, knowing no one in the outside world, who was literally a time-traveller from a world like Bridgerton, where women go from their father’s home to their husband’s home. I realised I wanted women from every ethnicity, whatever the impediment in their lives, to be able to look and think to themselves, ‘Well, if this crazy woman can do it, so can I.’ ”
Haart’s trajectory, from miserable housewife in a community where television, the internet, radio and newspapers were virtually prohibited to the queen of New York Fashion Week, is so extraordinary that, if it had been a drama, the plot would have been rejected. After her family emigrated from Moscow to the US, she grew up in Monsey, a New York suburb with the largest Jewish population per capita of any US county and where the principal language is Yiddish.
Forbidden from taking a degree, at 19 she entered an arranged marriage. “Marriage was hell,” she says in the show’s first episode. She began reading widely and became increasingly furious about the inequalities she faced. “We were told women shouldn’t study the Talmud [Jewish law book] — all the rules that govern their lives,” she says, sounding furious.
“But I was reading books I wasn’t allowed to.” Once, she politely corrected a male guest who had misquoted the Talmud. “I was told, ‘Go back to the kitchen.’ ” Another time she was asked, “Why do you need to study to be a good wife and mother?”
Haart contemplated suicide, but worried that the shame would prevent her children marrying well. She decided to starve herself to death. “Then people wouldn’t realise I had committed suicide and they would think I just had an eating disorder, which is not as bad of a stigma in my world.” At its lowest her weight dropped to 5st (she’s just over 5ft).
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A turning point came with the wedding of her eldest daughter, Batsheva. “Seeing my 19-year-old child, without a degree, getting married, I couldn’t bear it.” After that Haart began secretly selling insurance and building up a running-away nest egg.
The final straw was watching her daughter Miriam, now 21, begin to question their world. “She was this little rambunctious bundle of unstoppable rebellion and she used to cry and say, ‘Why can’t I be a boy?’ It was then I began to realise that the system was wrong because before then I was 1,000 per cent sure that I was wrong.”
One day, Miriam came home upset that her teacher had accused her of plagiarism because her homework was “too good” to be her own. “She could not stop crying,” Haart told the Second Life podcast. “She said, ‘I’m being punished for doing well,’ and I said to myself, ‘You know what? F*** it. I’m out. I literally picked up my shit and walked out the door.”
Of entering her new life, she has said, “I’d never been to a bar. I’d never been on a date. I’d never slept in a room on my own. I felt like I was a Martian stepping on Earth.” Yet despite having no fashion or business experience (“I didn’t even know what a contract was”), she decided to launch a range of shoes that were ultra-sexy yet comfortable. They were stocked by high-end boutiques worldwide and led to her launching a line with the luxury lingerie brand La Perla. In 2016 she became the brand’s creative director.
In 2019 she married Scaglia, a 62-year-old tech tycoon and La Perla’s owner, and the couple set up Elite World Group, a company encompassing a fashion line and a talent and modelling agency with clients including Kendall Jenner. Haart encourages models to build a brand for themselves, the aim being to “create an army of financially independent women’’.
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Haart knows that some have questioned her career path. “People will say, ‘What’s the big deal? She just married a rich guy,’ ” she told Forbes. “The truth is, this [success] was before I met my husband.” Certainly, EWG was valued at $90 million when Haart took over as chief executive officer; today it’s worth an estimated $1 billion.
In fact, Scaglia, who has three children from a previous marriage, comes across less as a sugar daddy and more as an adoring foil to Haart, for ever feebly reprimanding her when she’s late for date nights because she’s been so busy preparing the company for flotation.
When she is not working, her priority seems to be her children and their various decisions — personal, career-wise and religious. Shlomo, a 25-year-old student, keeps Shabbat, but is conflicted about aspects of Judaism, while Aron, 15, who still lives with his father and attends school in Monsey, is still committed to his beliefs, refusing to talk to girls, a decision that Haart calls “super-loony”.
The oldest, Batsheva, 28, endured possibly the hardest struggle of all after her mother left the family. “It was a very, very confusing time for me when the person you look up to the most says, ‘Sorry, the way I raised you was wrong.’ I was just upset and angry,” Batsheva tells me.
Today, however, the women have a good relationship, with Batsheva working as a fashion influencer (she has 1.3 million followers on TikTok). She keeps Shabbat and kosher, but has encouraged her husband, Benjamin, to accept her “modern” practices such as not wearing skirts and delaying having babies. “The stuff we’ve done has been so gradual, we’ve talked about it so much and he didn’t come from the ultra, ultra-religious background that I came from, so it was a different playing field.”
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Of the four children, Miriam, 21, is the most “contemporary”; she is an atheist and much of the show focuses on her very active dating life (she’s bisexual, and has a girlfriend). After Haart moved out, Miriam attended school in Monsey for three years. People would say, ‘I’m so sorry about your mom, it’s so terrible and I’d say, ‘No, it’s OK.’ Something inside me knew that’s what she had to do.”
When Miriam was 16 she moved to San Francisco to attend a computing summer school. “Nobody knew I was super-religious. And I didn’t tell anybody. I had pepperoni pizza for the first time. If people referred to memes or movies, I did not get it at all. I’d be frantically googling. I’d only ever met Orthodox Jews; now I became friends with people from Kazakhstan and South Carolina.”
She decided to return to San Francisco to finish her education and the night before she left sat down with her father, Yosef. “I said, ‘Dad, I’m not religious.’ I was so, so scared he’d be upset. But he said, ‘I’m going to accept you,’ and hugged me.”
In fact, one of the most refreshing aspects of My Unorthodox Life is how — far from being depicted as a monster — Yosef comes across as thoughtful and kind with a great relationship with Haart, who says her problem was not with him, but how marriage trapped her. “My parents are the best divorced parents ever,” Miriam says. “If anything, they’re much better together now, because they used to fight and now we go out to dinner and everyone’s very happy.”
Less cordial are relations with other family members. Haart’s parents no longer talk to her and nor do six of her seven siblings. In the wider community there’s been outrage at scenes of her returning to shop in its huge, kosher supermarket in a tiny playsuit, laughing as she says, “Let them stare!” Some have claimed that her portrayal of Monsey as oppressive and backward could incite antisemitic violence.
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Haart insists that her issue isn’t with Judaism, but with “fundamentalism” and attempts to control women’s lives. “I’m so happy [the show’s] engendering conversations,” she says. “One very religious woman from my past reached out and told me how she and her friends met for book club, but instead of talking about the book, they talked about the show. They looked at each other and said, ‘Is she right? Why are we covering ourselves so guys won’t look at us?’ ”
Her relish is palpable. “It’s been very frightening and uncomfortable to open yourself to the extent that I have — real warts and all. But if I don’t do it that way, then we all stay silent. So many women have messaged me: ‘We can’t talk. You need to keep talking.’ So I do.”
My Unorthodox Life is on Netflix
