Kevin Bacon says he lost most of his and his wife Kyra Sedgwick’s money in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Key Details
- The Footloose actor opened up about losing the majority of his and his wife’s money in the infamous investment scheme.
- He appeared on a podcast episode of Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes’ Smartless podcast this week to explain the unfortunate mishap.
- Bacon explained that he was among 40,000 others that were majorly ripped off in this scheme. The fraud as a whole is estimated to have taken around $65 billion from those who invested.
Why it’s news
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal was a big investment scheme of stock and securities fraud that happened around 2008. The scandal affected around 40,000 people including actor Kevin Bacon and his wife.
The scheme worked by Madoff attracting investors by claiming to give them significant returns on their investments. The thing is, Madoff was putting the money into a bank account and he would use the new funds to give to previous investors who were ready to cash out.
Some investors were seeing big returns, which made it look like a success bringing in other people to invest, but in all reality it was a scam.
Kevin Bacon was one of the many who got scammed by Madoff and recently opened up about it in a podcast episode.
Bacon said he was drawn in by the big amount of money Madoff was promising, but looking back that should have been a major red flag.
“There’s obvious life lessons there,” he says. “If something is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”
Bacon revealed that his finances took a huge hit, but he didn’t expect any sympathy given the fact that he was still better off than some people who lost everything including their retirement funds.
“There were a lot of people who were much worse off than we were—old people, people whose retirement funds were completely decimated,” he says. “There’s always going to be somebody that’s going to have it a lot worse than you.”
Bacon went on to say that he has regenerated a lot of the money he lost, but still isn’t at the point he was before he took the big hit, but instead of letting it take him down he got back to work.
“When something like that happens, you look at each other and you go, ‘Well, that sucks,’” he says. ”Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.”