Bullock hosts jail fund-raiser

JANNA Bullock, the wealthy New York socialite who, according to Russian reports, has just been sentenced by a Moscow court to 11 years in jail for allegedly embezzling 11 billion rubles (nearly $200 million) of taxpayer money with her ex-husband, former Moscow region finance minister Alexey Kuznetsov, has been keeping herself busy by hosting a charity event for the children of women who are imprisoned. Shortly after her Jan. 23 sentencing in Moscow — which Bullock apparently didn’t attend — she sent out a Paperless Post invite for a preValentine’s Day pop-up shop at her Upper East Side mansion on Feb. 12 that benefited Hour Children, which she describes as a “wonderful organization that helps incarcerated women and their children.” Russian-born Bullock — who made a fortune flipping homes on the Upper East Side and the Hamptons — strongly denies the embezzlement allegations, and claims they are part of a Russian smear campaign against her. “My name was covered in dirt,” she said in a 2012 interview. “Just because I did better than others, somebody had the appetite to take it all away from me?” She distanced herself from ex-husband Kuznetsov, who, after one of his political associates was killed, fled Russia and was then arrested in France in 2013; he spent years fighting extradition to Russia. Meanwhile, US authorities are reported to have dismissed a request to extradite Bullock, who moved to New York in 1990 and is now a US citizen — but it is nice to know she might still be thinking about the conditions of those not so fortunate.