The ballad of Ellen and Buddy
A union of movers and shakers is ending in mudslinging & acrimony
Buddy Fletcher is so broke he can’t afford his divorce from Ellen Pao, The Post has learned.
The former high-flying hedge fund manager — who once rubbed elbows with Lauren Bacall and Roberta Flack — has no lawyer and is representing himself in a divorce from Pao, the former interim CEO of Reddit. He claims in court papers that the divorce, which is ongoing, left him “homeless” at one point, including a period of living in his car.
The couple — known as much for Pao’s Silicon Valley gender discrimination claims as Fletcher’s financial downfall — have been slowly working toward dissolution of their marriage in San Francisco state court since 2017, but they appear no closer to the end than they did two years ago.
One reason may be that Fletcher keeps making requests for financial assistance, including hard-fought efforts to squash his 2007 pre-nup with Pao, which a judge denied, and repeated requests for spousal support.
And at a court hearing Thursday, the former head of Fletcher Asset Management launched into an impromptu speech about his need for financial support to help a witness get to court to testify — and for a lawyer to finalize the separation.
He told the judge he was seeking “a full and fair outcome” but complained he had “two arms tied behind my back.”
The judge, concerned about the presence of a reporter, took the hearing behind closed doors.
Fletcher, 53, currently lives in a sixbedroom home in Oakland, Calif., that he appears to share with roommates. When approached outside the home while walking a dog, he told a reporter he was not Buddy Fletcher and that it was “a case of mistaken identity” — before scurrying back inside.
Outside of court on Thursday, he declined to answer questions, including about whether he currently has a job or has plans to pay back his burned investors.
It’s a dramatic change in lifestyle for Fletcher, who once palled around with Bacall, Flack, Steve Buscemi and Gabby Sidibe. Sidibe starred in Lee Daniels’ 2009 hit “Precious,” which Fletcher’s brother, Geoffrey Fletcher, wrote based on the novel “Push” by the author Sapphire.
Fletcher was also known to hang around intellectual elites like Anita Hill and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who were the beneficiaries of a Harvard University fellowship that Fletcher funded in his own name.
“You’re also the Alphonse Fletcher university professor,” Charlie Rose asked Gates on PBS’ “Charlie Rose” in January 2007.
“That’s right,” Gates said. “I’m very humbled by that.”
Fletcher, whose worth was once estimated at $150 million, made headlines in 2011 for suing the Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. The Harvard graduate had already been approved to buy four apartments in the Dakota, including one for his mother. At the time he filed suit he claimed he was refused permission to buy a fifth apartment because he’s African-American.
The case was ultimately dismissed — but not before it was reported that the Dakota rejected Fletcher for a fifth apartment because of his investment firm’s “apparent lack of profitability.”
Not long after that, Fletcher started facing questions from investors, including three Louisiana pension funds that had invested with Fletcher Asset Management on promises of double-digit returns. That kicked off a series of legal battles and bankruptcy filings that ended up detonating Fletcher’s reputation as a financial wizard.
After his main fund filed for bankruptcy in 2012, it emerged that he had been insolvent for years and had misspent investors’ money, including $8 million to produce “Violet & Daisy,” a film directed by his Oscarwinning writer brother.
Those details came out in a 2013 report by the Manhattan federal bankruptcy trustee, who likened the case to “a Ponzi scheme.”
Pao, 49, lost her explosive sexual harassment suit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2015.
She stepped down as interim CEO of Reddit that year following controversial decisions to ban threads for fostering harassment. She also banned revenge porn.
When Pao filed for divorce from Fletcher in 2017, they had been married for 10 years.
Days before the filing, she moved out of the luxury apartment they shared in downtown San Francisco into a new place she had just purchased at the Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences on Market Street.
Fletcher blasted Pao’s purchase of a condo in the luxury residential skyscraper. In court papers he described it as a “misappropriation of what are in all likelihood community funds in order to buy herself an exorbitant residence — in spite of her insistence on efforts to ‘downsize’ her apparent legion of cooks, nannies and chauffeurs.”
Fletcher also called the cops on Pao twice leading up to the divorce, he said in filings.
Both times were to complain about the day Pao hired movers to lug her belongings to her new apartment, where she would begin living without Fletcher.
The San Francisco Police Department declined to provide The Post with any records on its handling of Fletcher’s complaints.
Fletcher has also asked the court
to order Pao to keep distance from him, his home and their daughter, alleging Pao “has threatened more than once to flush our daughter’s fish down the toilet as a punishment which led to our daughter crying.”
He asked the court to order Pao to “stop telling our daughter that I am homeless, and to stop screaming at and threatening us.”
A family court judge denied Fletcher’s request to keep Pao away, but not before Pao responded by raising questions about Fletcher’s mental health.
“Ellen continues to have concerns regarding Buddy’s mental stability. His threats of self-harm have been ongoing for years. He is known in the media as the ‘disgraced hedge fund manager,” Pao’s lawyer told the judge.
She also accused him, through her lawyer, of “squatting” in their former apartment after she moved out, court papers show.
Fletcher confirmed in a court filing that he had not been paying rent and had been ordered evicted.
The former hedgie has argued for spousal support on the grounds that he supported Pao for the first few years of the marriage — and now it was her turn to support him.
Pao’s “income has averaged more than $2,000,000 per year for the past three years,” he said. By contrast, he was “homeless and without counsel, at risk of losing my physical health,” he told the court.
Pao has disputed Fletcher’s poverty claims, saying Fletcher couldn’t find a new place to live only because no landlords wanted to rent to the man who sued the Dakota.
“This case is not really about support,” Pao told the judge earlier this year. “Rather, it is about Buddy’s need for money to pay off the judgment against him and his businesses,” she said, referring to a $213 million judgment issued against him by a New York state court, as well as a $1.5 million judgment by the IRS.
“He needs money, and he is now seeking it from Ellen,” her lawyer said.
In February, a family court judge ruled against Fletcher’s efforts to nullify the couple’s prenuptial agreement — but left open the door to Pao paying alimony, court papers show.
A previous request by Fletcher for temporary spousal support was denied in March, filings show.
It’s unclear what other assets Fletcher might have to pay off the claims.
His Connecticut castle failed to sell for years, and was recently sold by the bank for $1.6 million — down from the $6 million it was listed at in 2017, records show.
Lawyers seeking to collect from him said they have no delusions of ever being made whole.
“We are going to be able to collect a very small amount,” said Richard Davis, the trustee of Fletcher’s hedge fund’s bankruptcy, which has otherwise winded down.
Pao, who is now the CEO of her own diversity nonprofit, Project Include, tried to keep all the mudslinging private by asking the court to seal the case, but was denied.
Around this same time — just three months after she filed for divorce — Pao published her memoir, which made no mention of the trouble brewing at home.
A chapter devoted to Fletcher, titled “What a Wonderful World,” details their whirlwind, four-month romance in 2007 in Colorado.
“We were so in love,” she says. “He respected me, and from the first date on he became my greatest advocate and cheerleader.”