BOB’S MISTRESS BARES SECRETS
Ex says she saw wads of pol's cash in 2007
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez showed his married lover a safe stuffed with cash 15 years before the FBI raided his home, an explosive dossier shared with The Post alleges.
The lover bragged to her friends that she had seen “bundles of cash” in “hidden places” in 2007, according to the document.
It also claimed that he boasted about “kickbacks from contractors and influence-seeking people” while they conducted a torrid affair that included nude photos and sex on both a private jet and a bed the senator said had been used by President John F. Kennedy.
Bribery charges
The revelations come after Menendez, 70, and his second wife, Nadine Arslanian, were indicted on bribery and corruption charges last year after federal authorities seized nearly $500,000 in cash and gold bars at their Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home.
And last week, federal prosecutors alleged in a new filing that Arslanian, 56, received a diamond engagement ring as part of the alleged bribery scheme and used an alternate phone the couple dubbed “007” to communicate with one of their alleged coconspirators.
The couple and their co-accused, New Jersey businessmen Fred Daibes, Wael Hana and Jose Uribe, have all pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The Democratic senator claims the gold bars were Arslanian’s mother’s and that he withdrew the cash from his bank accounts for decades because of “the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”
The Post first revealed in 2013 that Menendez had conducted an affair with Cecilia Reynolds — a married former church secretary whom he met when she was the publisher of a small Spanishlanguage newspaper in Freehold, NJ.
The allegations about hidden cash were made in a dossier about the affair which was circulated in 2013 by an anonymous author to outlets including The New York Times and the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based ethics watchdog group. The Post was sent a version in 2013 and has now obtained a fuller copy of the 13-page document.
In 2013, Menendez was under federal investigation for possible influence-selling which led to an indictment but not conviction.
The nude photo and another image of the couple were apparently partially redacted before being included in the 13-page dossier.
Now The Post can disclose that the dossier claimed that Reynolds boasted about the senator’s cash piles to friends in 2007 — 15 years before the FBI allegedly discovered bags, jackets and even boots stuffed with bank notes at his Bergen County home, as well as the cache of gold bars.
“She knows a lot of intimate stuff about Menendez and even knows federal and state secrets and all about his kickback schemes etc.,” the document claimed.
“She boasted to her friends that he always had bundles of cash lying around in his safe and hidden places.
“She was told by him that he has kickbacks from contractors and influence seeking people.”
What defense?
Menendez’s attorney Robert Luskin did not return a request for comment. Reynolds also did not return a request for comment.
In June 2013, Reynolds said in a statement to The Post: “My husband and I were separated for a period of time in the past. “An y and all allegations being peddled by a former disgruntled business partner are false and malicious.” Her husband, Matt Reynolds, told a reporter the couple was married when the affair allegedly happened. He said he would “neither confirm nor deny” his wife’s relationship with Menendez.
The senator’s office released a statement minutes after Reynolds, saying, “These are the same kind of questionably timed smear tactics that we’ve seen before, and we’re not going to dignify them with a comment.”
While The Post cannot verify that Reynolds saw piles of cash, her connection to Menendez is a matter of public record, and photographs in the dossier show them together in settings that match places in Puerto Rico where the dossier alleged they had a sex-fueled seven-day trip in February 2007.
Reynolds, a Mexican immigrant who had been the secretary of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Freehold, founded a small, monthly Spanish-language newspaper called Nosotros — which translates as “Us” — in 2002, aimed at the growing Latin American community in Monmouth County.
She met Menendez in 2005 in her capacity as Nosotros’ publisher. At the time, Menendez was a congressman representing New Jersey’s 14th District, centered on Union City, 45 miles away.
His marriage to his first wife, Jane Jacobsen, an educator and the mother of his two children — Robert Jr., now a New Jersey congressman and Alicia, now an MSNBC anchor — ended in divorce in 2005, amid allegations that he had left Jacobsen for his onetime aide Kay LiCausi, 20 years his junior. Neither he nor LiCausi ever confirmed they were in a relationship.
Menendez provided a testimonial for the paper, calling it “one of the most substantive newspapers in either English or Spanish that I have read,” and was glowingly portrayed in Nosotros.
In January 2006 he was appointed to the Senate, and when he ran for election for a full term in November 2006, his campaign placed a full-page ad in Nosotros.
The ‘seduction’
In February of the next year, the dossier alleged, Menendez “seduced” Reynolds, offering her a seven-day “sexual rendezvous” in Puerto Rico, traveling on a private jet belonging to Salomon Melgen — a south Florida eye surgeon who was the senator’s friend and benefactor — and staying at the island’s governor’s “official residence.”
Menendez promised “the best luxury, sleeping and having sex on the bed that JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy slept,” the dossier
alleged. The Kennedys had stayed in Puerto Rico in 1961.
“For seven days, they had wild sex, was [sic] provided official police escort and an official VIP treatment with official drivers and attendants at their disposal,” the dossier alleged.
Photographs in it show both Menendez and Reynolds posing with a man in US Forest Service uniform and visiting sites in Puerto Rico.
The dossier alleged that Reynolds “boasts even now to her closest Latina friends what it was like to have sex at 25,000 feet with Menendez even during turbulence.”
During the trip, Reynolds posed for a nude photograph — which is included in the document — and the couple stayed at the Puerto Rico governor’s official beach house. Photographs in the document match images of the house, at El Convento beach in the northeast of the island.
In 2007, Menendez was investigated by federal prosecutors over possible wrongdoing with LiCausi. No charges were brought.
After the trip, the dossier alleged, Reynolds returned to her husband.
Immigrant factor
Two years later, Menendez helped Reynolds set up a social service agency for immigrants, despite her lack of training in the field.
He wrote to Monmouth University — for which he secured $7 million in federal grants — calling her “extraordinary,” which helped her secure admission to a highly competitive business incubator program, where she was mentored in coming up with the Nosostros Center for Immigration Services in Asbury Park. The opening ceremony took place in May 2010.
By then Menendez had moved on to a new love, Gwendolyn Beck, a former money manager for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Menendez dispatched his deputy chief of staff to deliver a Senate proclamation in Spanish declaring the center an important asset in the community.
Despite the hoopla, the center did not prosper, with critics charging that instead of providing free legal help for immigrants, it directed them to private attorneys.
It was evicted for not paying rent, and New Jersey revoked its nonprofit status in 2013, according to public records.
The senator also posed with Reynolds in a group photo that appeared on Nosostros’ front page after a May 2011 visit to another immigrant center she helped set up in Freehold. That year Reynolds donated $2,500 to Menendez’s campaign, according to public records.
In 2013, when the dossier was circulated, Menendez and Melgen were both under federal investigation, which was to lead to indictments against them both.
Separately, The Daily Caller had just reported allegations that the men had used underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. The woman who made the underage sex allegations later recanted them and Menendez, who was never charged with underage sex, angrily denied the claims as a “right-wing” smear.
Menendez by then was dating Alicia Mucci, a widowed mother of five from Paramus, to whom he proposed in the Capitol Dome in December 2013.
Returning favors
In 2015, Menendez was charged with helping Melgen, including deploying his Senate staff to secure immigration visas for three foreign girlfriends of the married doctor, in return for favors.
Melgen, who donated $751,000 to Menendez’s 2012 re-election alone, allegedly provided the senator with trips on his private jet, stays at his luxury villa in the Dominican Republic — with Beck as a guest in 2010 — and 650,000 American Express points to secure him a suite at a top Paris hotel where he wooed an unnamed girlfriend. The lawmaker was charged with lobbying the administration to adjust Medicare reimbursements in an attempt to make millions for Melgen. Menendez split from Mucci on the eve of the trial.
It is not known if Reynolds, who the dossier alleges was on Melgen’s jet, was questioned by the FBI during the investigation.
The federal bribery case against Melgen and Menendez ended in a mistrial in November 2017, and early in 2018, the Department of Justice decided against a retrial of Menendez.
Melgen was sentenced to 17 years in prison for a $73 million Medicare fraud scheme but was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020, after lobbying by Menendez.
Menendez started dating Arslanian, a divorced mom of two, in early 2018, at the same time as she was dating singer R. Kelly’s defense attorney.
He proposed to Arslanian, whom he nicknamed “Bubbles” in a nod to her cleavage, at the Taj Mahal during a congressional trip to India in 2019, moved into her Englewood Cliffs home and married her in 2020, two years before the FBI raid on their home that led to his latest indictment.