Modeling boss Silvio Scaglia tells court he’s so broke he needs a free lawyer — yet seems to have spent the summer on yachts and private jets around Europe
Silvio Scaglia really must be a financial genius: the model agency owner somehow manages to be both a globetrotting billionaire and helplessly destitute at the same time! They don’t teach that at Wharton!
Characteristically, Scaglia — who is locked in a vicious legal battle with his soon-to-be-ex wife and former business partner, Julia Haart — appears to have spent the summer hopping private jets and yachts around all the usual Euro enclaves with his new partner Michelle Marie Heinemann.
What’s confusing, however, is that — according to court documents leaked to Page Six — back in May, the Italian businessman wrote to a New York judge pleading poverty.
Haart and Scaglia met in 2015 through a business deal. She later took a job at his modeling agency, Elite World Group, which has repped Kendall Jenner, Adriana Lima, Irina Shayk, Winnie Harlow and Behati Prinsloo, among many others. They married shortly after, in 2019.
But when Haart told Scaglia in 2022 that she planned to divorce him, he fired her from EWG — setting in motion a series of brutal court cases over both the marriage and the company.
We’re told that in May, Scaglia notified the court that the he was tapped out.
“I am currently unable to bear the financial burden of the ongoing litigation against [Haart], nor can I afford to sustain the fees for my own legal counsel,” he wrote.
Scaglia has been trying unsuccessfully to get permission from the court to sell the Tribeca triplex where he and Haart had lived during their marriage, and where Haart still resides.
“Following the latest judicial decision concerning [the apartment] and the dismissed hope of obtaining permission to sell it, I have dramatically curtailed my expenditures to a bare minimum,” he wrote.
He says he also moved back to Italy because the cost of living is lower there, and asked for a freebie court-appointed lawyer to represent him in the case.
But an insider told us they were surprised — after his claim to be in dire financial straights — to see Heinemann posting scenes from their opulent life on her Instagram feed.
According to the account, she and Scaglia have been in Tuscany, Zurich (where she posted a shot of herself on a private jet with a bottle of Ruinart champagne), Madrid, Sicily, Sardinia (where they appear to have got around by convertible, a yacht and, again a private jet) and Ireland.
Asked to explain how he’s both broke and living an apparently ultra-luxe lifestyle, Scaglia told us: “The parasitic vulture, Julia Haart, continues to try and destroy the happiness and love that my beautiful and kind wife and I share.”
Her threw some other barbs at Haart, but didn’t address the financial schizophrenia.
After we asked him about the luxe travel, Heinemann appeared to have removed the shots featuring jets and yachts from her account.
