Interview: Molly Bloom
Molly Bloom’s explosive career running the most exclusive poker club in America – with A-list and billionaire clientele – has been made into a film starring Jessica Chastain. Polly Dunbar meets the ‘Poker Princess’
Molly bloom has stories about some of the world’s most powerful men that she’s never told anyone. Stories so incriminating they could destroy marriages and end careers. ‘ They could ruin lives,’ she says, her huge green eyes widening for emphasis.
For eight years, Molly ran secret, highstakes poker games in Hollywood, then New York, in which millions of dollars could be won or lost with the flip of a card. The players were a roll-call of property magnates, lawyers, producers and A-list celebrities, including Leonardo Dicaprio, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Tobey Maguire – then at the height of his career after starring in Spider-man. It wasn’t uncommon for Molly, as a 20-something, to walk away with $150,000 in tips.
It all came crashing down in 2013 when the FBI arrested her. She was charged with profiting from hosting illegal gambling, fined $125,000 and sentenced to a year’s probation. The story of how a girl from small-town Colorado became the so-called ‘Poker Princess’ – a moniker bestowed on her by the US tabloids, for whom she was a fascination – is now the basis of Molly’s Game, a new film starring Jessica Chastain as Molly and Idris Elba as her lawyer.
In fact, her life has been packed with enough drama to sustain multiple films. The daughter of a psychiatrist and a ski instructor, Molly, now 39, trained as a skier and was tipped for the Olympics before her career was ruined by a terrible accident that shattered her back. Her brothers, Jeremy and Jordan, were ‘a prodigy athlete and an off-the-charts genius’ who went on to become a surgeon and a double Olympian. ‘It was a combination of innately being a person who just wants to win, combined with a hard-driving father and an impossible set of standards to live up to – that was the recipe for what happened,’ she says.
After moving to LA, she became a cocktail waitress and met real estate investor Darin Feinstein, who employed her as his PA. One night, he asked her to organise a poker game at The Viper Room for his friends, including Maguire, Dicaprio and Todd Phillips, director of The Hangover movies. She was soon running regular games.
‘I stumbled into that world,’ she says.
‘It was such a boys’ club and I was a fly on the wall. It felt as though everyone in Hollywood other than me had connections. I was a waitress and an assistant, getting screamed at; I felt incredibly powerless. When I walked into this room and saw people who were all at the top of their game, I thought it was an incredible opportunity to build a network, to be impressive.’
The vast tips she received were intoxicating, as was the way she was treated by the men. With her jet-black hair, striking features and model figure, as a waitress she’d grown used to fending off unwanted male attention. Suddenly, in this testosteronesoaked world, she had a different kind of power. ‘Running the games, I was the bank, which meant they saw me as more money, less money, potential debt – I wasn’t a sexual object, which was very refreshing,’ she says. ‘I could have walked around in body paint and nobody would have cared.’ Of course, there were sexist comments– ‘eye-rolling moments’ – but no serious harassment.
Ultimately, though, she was ejected from the boys’ club. The film (adapted from Molly’s memoir and directed by Oscarwinning writer Aaron Sorkin) depicts her being dumped abruptly from the games in 2009 by Player X, a celebrity she insists is a ‘composite character’, who calls her at 2am to shout, gleefully, ‘ You’re fucked.’ Another player had taken over the game and her services were no longer required. ‘It felt like someone set me on fire,’ she says.
Devastated, she packed up and went to New York, where she started again with a clientele of Wall Street bankers and billionaires. ‘I wanted to prove I couldn’t be discarded like that,’ she says. Her life was one of holidays in the Hamptons and travelling by private jet and chauffeur-driven limos. Now, she acknowledges, ‘Everything was this grasping for validation. Because I had so much to prove, I was always chasing the next prize. It was exhausting.’
During her second year in New York, her life spiralled out of control. ‘I was making more reckless choices,’ she says. ‘Even though I wasn’t playing the cards, I was gambling with life.’ She developed a serious drug problem, which began with pills and cocaine to keep her awake during the games, but became ‘something that I did by myself all the time’. In 2010, the Mafia approached her demanding protection money. When she refused, they broke into her home, beat her and put a gun in her mouth. ‘I thought I was going to die. One of the most terrifying parts is that, after it happened, I still didn’t want to walk away. It was an addiction.’
Eventually, she was forced out. When players refused to pay their debts, she’d write cheques – for as much as $250,000 – to cover them, to keep the games going. ‘Instead of scaling the game back, which would have been the smart thing to do, I started taking money out of the pots the players had paid into,’ she says. Known as a ‘rake’, this constituted profiting from gambling. In 2011, the FBI raided one of her games and seized her assets, declaring her bank accounts an intimidating $9,999,999 in the red to ensure there was no way she could get back in business.
‘My life fell apart. I’d lost the game and all my money, I was in the tabloids, I was heavily into drugs and had to go to a really crappy rehab. I didn’t know who or what I was going to be or what was going to happen to me.’ Two years later, after she’d written Molly’s Game, she was arrested by the FBI. ‘I didn’t see it coming. It was like, why now?’ That’s when, after a high-profile court case, she was charged with profiting from hosting illegal gambling, fined $125,000 and sentenced to a year’s probation.
Aaron Sorkin has hailed her as a ‘hero’ for resisting the temptation to dish the dirt on celebrities involved in the games, beyond those whose names had already made it into the public domain. She did reveal that Maguire once told her to ‘ bark like a seal who wants a fish’ for a poker chip – she declined – and that he was a stingy tipper. Affleck is described as ‘polite, nice’, while Dicaprio didn’t seem bothered about poker, playing while listening to music on his earphones. She says she’ll never divulge the rest of what she witnessed.
‘I have an education on men that probably no one wants,’ she says. ‘A lot of people ask me, “Why were you protecting them?” It wasn’t that. I was protecting what I believed was right. I made the choices and made so much money based on these people’s involvement, so I didn’t think it was right to turn around when I got in trouble and throw them all under the bus. Also, there are a lot of innocents here – kids, wives. It’s not going to make the world a better place to hear those stories. If I’d known about a Harvey Weinstein, if I’d known stuff like that was going on and harming people, it would have been a more complicated moral issue.’
Today, she lives a quiet life surrounded by family back home in Colorado. She’s working on a way to use her gift for networking to help female entrepreneurs build communities. ‘I realised that, yes, I was successful, but what was I actually building? Nothing. Now I want to build something.’
‘Molly’s Game’ is out 1 January
I WASN’T PLAYING THE CARDS, I WAS GAMBLING WITH LIFE