The Exiled Victims of Bernie Madoff - Money 2009 -- New York Magazine

The Exiled Victims of Bernie Madoff - Money 2009 -- New York Magazine:

"For most of us, the Madoff matter is over. The man is in jail for the rest of his life, his associates have lawyered up, his wife is a pariah. But for those victimized by Madoff, the story is just beginning. There are several kinds of Madoff victims, of course. Some are wealthy beyond imagination and hardly affected at all. Others are clear hardship cases, people living in squalor after losing everything, and the government has reached out to many of them. But then there is a middle population—Ebel and thousands like her—who led quiet lives building savings only to watch it vanish. For these people, the Madoff fraud sent them into a spiral of downward mobility. They lost virtually all of their money, had to recalibrate their dreams, and suffered the public embarrassment of having fallen for one of history’s biggest frauds. Now this group is experiencing a second phase of victimhood, a wave of financial, legal, and emotional aftershocks. Perhaps most of all, they feel abandoned by the public and the officials who they believe should be helping them."