Jocelyn Wildenstein has gone from billionaire to broke. 
 
 The former socialite — nicknamed “Catwoman” for her obsession with plastic surgery to give her feline facial features — has filed for federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and astonishingly lists her Citibank account balance as “$0.” 
 
 The 77-year-old Manhattanite is scratching by on just $900 a month in Social Security income, the filing states. 
 
 “I am not employed and my only income is Social Security,” Wildenstein mews in an affidavit. “I often turn to friends and family in order to pay my ongoing expenses.” 
 
 But while she’s cash poor, Wildenstein is sitting on some pricey real estate. 
 
 The woman once called “Bride of Wildenstein” over her shocking facial reconstructions is perched in three adjoining apartments worth $11.75 million on the 51st floor of Trump World Tower. But she owes $4.6 million to Modern Bank for the massive home, which is currently in foreclosure, according to court papers. The city’s seeking nearly $25,000 in unpaid property taxes. 
 
 Other assets are underwater including a $38,000 payment to Chase Auto Finance for a 2006 Bentley that’s now worth just $35,000. Ina similar vein, she owes the prestigious 
 
 Manhattan storage company Day & Meyer, Murray and Young $700,000 for belongings that total $100,000, the filing says. 
 
 The rest of her assets are a $1,000 wardrobe and $100 television. 
 
 She’s seeking bankruptcy protection to “reorganize my financial affairs,” Wildenstein says in the statement, noting that she has a total $16.4 million in assets and $6.4 million in liabilities. 
 
 Wildenstein could claw her way out of bankruptcy if she gets the $4.5 million she says she’s due from her divorce. She was married to the late billionaire art dealer Alec 
 
 Wildenstein until 1999 when she netted a reported $2.5 billion in the split. 
 
 But those funds are apparently long gone. She’s $273,000 in debt to at least three law firms and owes the contractor who renovated her Trump World Tower apartment $175,000. The owner of a Beverly Hills bungalow she’d rented is after her for another $165,000. 
 
 Her American Express appears to be maxed out– she’s listed $70,000 debt with the credit card company. 
 
 The public bankruptcy has Wildenstein crouching under the covers, a close pal told The Post. 
 
 “She is beside herself that this has come out,” the friend said. 
 
 Another person who’s known Wildenstein for decades explained the fallen socialites financial straits. 
 
 “She is a very nice lady but she is very gullible. She has been taken by everyone,” the source said. 
 
 She’s embroiled in several lawsuits related to her foreclosures and credit card debt. 
 
 Wildenstein’s had a tough couple of years. She was arrested twice over incidents involving her on-again, off-again fiancé Lloyd Klein. 
 
 This article originally appeared in Page Six. 

 POOCHY Jocelyne Wildenstein with her five Italian greyhounds in the Bonnard Room of the famil’s 14-room Manhattan town house, January 11, 1998. The mother of the litter is on the far right, tethered by a Chanel leash. 
 
 Jocelyne Wildenstein figured there might be trouble. Three days earlier, on August 31, her estranged husband, Alec, had faxed her a letter at their ranch in Kenya, Ol Jogi, where she had been living for several months. “It is impossible for me to let you come in at #11,” Alec wrote, alluding to their 14-room Manhattan town house on East 64th Street. “[I will] be entertaining at home this week.” Jocelyne went anyway. Just before midnight on September 2, she arrived at the town house with her two bodyguards. What happened next depends on whom you ask. Jocelyne says that when she and her assistant went upstairs to the couple’s bedroom Alec appeared at the door wearing only a towel. Once he saw her, Jocelyne says, Alec grabbed a loaded nine-mm. semi-automatic and aimed it at her—and continued to do so even after the bodyguards identified themselves. Jocelyne also says she “glimpsed” a naked blonde woman in the bedroom. Alec disagrees, insisting that Jocelyne was downstairs when he first saw the bodyguards, whom he mistook for burglars. Once he discov-ered who they were, Alec says, he quickly put the gun away. In the end, Alec left the town house—in handcuffs—after one of Jocelyne’s bodyguards called the police. “I will see you are out on the streets!” Alec reportedly shouted as police led him away on charges of menacing. He spent 16 long hours in custody, some of it at Manhattan’s infamous Tombs, where cellmates had plenty to say about the jailbird wearing an Armani suit and a Legion d’Honneur lapel pin. “That day,” Alec says of Jocelyne, “I broke off all feeling for her.” It was also the day when the art world’s wealthiest, most secre-tive family became tabloid fodder. Alec and Jocelyne’s messy, very public divorce is seamy enough, with its charges of adultery, greed, and gunplay. Photographs of Jocelyne’s once delicate face, stretched freakishly tight by plastic surgery, have only heightened the scrutiny and ridicule. (New York’s Daily News dubbed her “The Bride of Wildenstein.”) Worse, the divorce has earned the wrath of family patriarch Daniel Wildenstein. 
 
 It was in 1977, while on safari with friends in Kenya, that Jocelyn fell in love with Alec, who was there to inspect his family’s 66,000-acre ranch. “A lion had to be killed at a neighbor’s ranch,” Alec recalls. “The night before, Jocelyne asked, ‘Could I go with you?’ I said, As long as you keep your mouth shut.’” At dawn, they sat wordlessly, waiting for the big cat. Alec made his kill. On their first day together, they rode motorcycles to a hilltop and shared their first kiss. “It was quite intense,” Jocelyne recalls. Jocelyne was a 31-year-old knockout—“an exciting woman,” if Alec says. She’d grown up in Lausanne, Switzerland, the daughter of a struggling department-store buyer. She’d moved to Paris before she was 20 and had already spent a decade exploring Africa. And she had a boyfriend: European filmmaker Sergio Gobbi, whom she’d been dating for five years. Alec was also involved. Since 1965, he’d been living in Paris with Maria Kimberly, a Ford model who’d starred in Jacques Tati’s comedy Traffic. “That relationship stopped the moment I saw Jocelyne,” Alec says. They eloped to Las Vegas on April 30, 1978. Later they invited friends and family to a second ceremony in Lausanne. But Alec’s father, Daniel, was conspicuously missing. “He was against marriage in general,” says Alec. More specifically, he was against Jocelyne. Daniel went as far as to urge Maria Kimberly to try to win his son back. “My father checks things out,” Alec says. “My father tried to warn me.” Warn him about what? “I have two children,” Alec hedges. “I don’t want them to hate their mother.” Then, unable to restrain himself, he asks, “What was she doing before she went out with Sergio Gobbi?” Jocelyne has boasted that, long before she stepped onto the Wildensteins’ Gulfstream IV, she’d flown aboard a larger jet owned by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Alec laughs and says, “She had been on many other jets besides Adnan Khashoggi’s.” (Jocelyne says that she had been on only one other jet at that time.) He discounts rumors that Jocelyne had worked for Madame Claude, the famous Parisian bordello owner. “My father and I were great friends with Madame Claude,” says Alec. “I knew all her girls. . . . She would have just told me.” But, Alec adds, there were other madams in Paris back then. Asked about the rumors that she was a courtesan, Jocelyne denies them, saying, “Really? Well, they have to try to find something against me.” To which Alec replies, “She never answered, did she?” Jocelyne disputes the general consensus that Daniel always kept her at arm’s length. “With me,” she says, “he was extra nice.” Certainly, they grew closer after she gave him two grandchildren, Diane and Alec junior. The couple spent two years in a penthouse in New York’s Olympic Tower, then moved to the town house on East 64th Street. But Jocelyne was happiest at Ol Jogi. “I really put my imagination and heart into it,” says Jocelyne, who takes credit for “overseeing” the ranch’s 200 buildings, two swimming pools, 55 man-made lakes—and 366 servants. She also lays claim to the ranch’s other extravagances, including the two tigers who live in a bulletproof glass cave near one of the pools. Jocelyne says Alec didn’t blink when she bought a $350,000 Chanel dress (designed by her and Karl Lagerfeld) and $10 million worth of jewelry—it was simply the way of a Wildenstein. For Diane’s 17th birthday, they built her a $3 million mansion at Ol Jogi. In an average month, Jocelyne estimates, she and Alec would spend at least $1 million. And then there was the plastic surgery. They’d been married about a year, Alec recalls, when Jocelyne told him his eyes looked baggy. So they went in for his-and-hers eye-lifts, but for Jocelyne it was just the beginning. “She was crazy,” says Alec. “I would always find out last. She was thinking that she could fix her face like a piece of furniture. Skin does not work that way. But she wouldn’t listen.” “I don’t think I’ve known her when she wasn’t healing from something,” says a friend, who regrets the way Jocelyne has “mutilated herself.” Over time, Jocelyne created a ritual mask that was vaguely African and so taut that she could barely blink. Friends suspect that she’s trying to look like a jungle cat. “The lynx has perfect eyes,” says Jocelyne, who keeps one as a pet. But she insists her feline look comes naturally. “If I show you pictures of my grandmother,” she says, “what you see is these eyes—cat eyes—and high cheekbones.” In the past, Jocelyne has claimed that she had the face-lifts because Alec “hates to be with old people.” But now she admits, “He never pushed me. . . . No, he all the time told me that I look very young.” She adds, “Until the day you don’t look young enough!” Ultimately, though, Jocelyne’s preventive medicine may have caused what it was meant to cure. Asked if he had other lovers, Alec says, “Do you want me to brag? I’m a Frenchman.” He’d been “not unhappy” during the early years with Jocelyne. “There was excitement—physical excitement.” Her “good health” (“very important, as I am an animal breeder”) had produced two children. But aside from good health and a love of Africa, Alec says, “we had nothing in common.” And once the kids had moved away to school, “the fights were constant. She was hysterical. The servants were shocked by her language and behavior.” (Jocelyne says, “That is absurd. . . . We never, ever fought. Like every couple, you can have an argument.”) 
 
 Last March, Jocelyne’s father, Armand, died of pneumonia. Jocelyne flew to Kenya, where he’d been stay-ing, but Alec remained in New York. “So,” Jocelyne says, “I kept my father for 14 days in the fridge” until Alec could make it. Alec claims that the funeral was delayed because Jocelyne insisted on finding an ebony coffin and “a perfect burial spot—all for the sake of appearance.” “Alec gave a nice speech,“ Jocelyne concedes. But three weeks later, in New York, he told her the marriage was dead. Typically, they remember the day differently. Alec recalls that he was running to work when “she flew off the handle because I had changed cologne. She started calling me names. She called me at the office and said, ‘I want to know why immediately.’” Jocelyne says she simply asked if he wanted to have dinner with friends at Le Bernardin. He said no and that they needed to speak. “He told me, I’m dating a couple of women,’” Jocelyne claims. “I say, ‘A couple of women or one? . . . Because ... if I you don’t know exactly what you want, I am I ready to be patient.’” Alec says he was trying to “soften the landing” for Jocelyne. But he admits he lied that day in April. In fact, he was involved with just one woman: Yelena Jarikova, a gorgeous 21-year-old raised in Russia. Alec fell hard for Jarikova. He says he met her a month before he told Jocelyne he was leaving, adding, “All you have to be is on the launching pad and meet somebody to make the countdown.” Jarikova was at Alec’s side when his horse Peintre Celebre won the Arc de Triomphe race in France. She took her mother and little brother to Ol Jogi. Playing Pygmalion, Alec set about creating a supermodel. He paid fashion photographer Wayne Maser to shoot Jarikova’s portfolio and asked his friend Eileen Ford to give her a modeling contract. She has since posed for Harper’s Bazaar, walked the Chanel runway in Paris, and landed a small role in Woody Allen’s upcoming film. After meeting Jarikova, Alec became a vegetarian, began working out, and lost 57 pounds. When he couldn’t shed the rest of his “old fat,” he had liposuction. He also underwent nasal surgery to cure the snoring Jocelyne had long endured. Alec dismisses those who call a 57-year-old man’s devotion to a 21-year-old woman foolish. “Why foolish? You can be 21 and have the mentality of a 50-year-old. You can be 50 and have the mentality of a 10-year-old. . . . I’m in love and I’m not ashamed.” 
 
 At first, the divorce talks were cordial. But by June, Alec’s attorneys were argu-ing that in 1978 Jocelyne had signed an agreement that stripped her of any claim to the family’s wealth. And Alec said that he made only $100,000 a year and that all the properties, paintings, cars, and assets the couple had enjoyed were owned by Daniel Wildenstein. From July to August, Jocelyne’s monthly allowance of $150,000 was reduced to $50,000. Then her credit cards were canceled, her household authority undercut, and her personal accountant fired. For Alec, the final straw was the public humiliation of September 3, when he was arrested. “On September 3, things changed,” Alec says. “My father couldn’t accept that, and I couldn’t, either.” Criminal-court judge Martin Murphy granted Jocelyne an order of protection and the right to remain in the town house. Alec’s lawyers moved for her eviction, suggesting that she might take a scissors to the Bonnards. Mean-while, the Wildensteins changed the safe combinations, barred her from Ol Jogi (where her mother, Liliane, is being nursed for Alzheimer’s), and ordered the town house’s servants to ignore her. “My husband seemingly has no more use for me,” Jocelyne argued in court papers, “preferring to lavish our fortune on his girlfriend.” She also admitted that she doesn’t know how to turn on the town house’s industrial kitchen stove. Her lawyer, Bernard Clair, demanded that Jocelyne receive “interim support” of $200,000 a month, $500,000 in legal fees, and access to all the properties and servants, and that $50 million in “security” be set aside pending the outcome of the case. Alec’s attorney Raoul Felder moved to ban media coverage of the case—not just for security reasons, but also to spare Jocelyne humiliation. He noted that her distinctive face had become the subject of international tabloid ridicule. He also cited the “Bride of Wildenstein” headline and London’s Sunday Mirror, which had compared Jocelyne to a space alien. In December, Alec cut off Jocelyne’s cell phone after she ran up a $5,000 monthly bill. (She was convinced her house phone was bugged.) All of her guests were directed to the servants’ entrance, and the kitchen staff refused to refill her bedside fruit bowl. And most of the other Wildensteins—including those who also live in the 64th Street town house—have stopped speaking to her. But Jocelyne remains undaunted. She has hired Republican strategist Ed Rollins as her spokesman. (He promptly called the Wildensteins among the most arrogant people he’d ever met.) She seeks comfort from old friends, such as Georgette Mosbacher and Roger Tamraz, the Egyptian-born businessman who paid $300,000 for access to President Clinton. And she spent Christmas in Mustique with her plas-tic surgeon, Dr. Richard Coburn, who reportedly had a potential patient flee his office after seeing Jocelyne.
– Jocelyn Wildenstein—better known as "Catwoman," the "Lion Woman of New York," and the "Bride of Wildenstein" for her surgically created cat-like countenance—has filed for bankruptcy. At one time Wildenstein spent at least $1 million a month on a lifestyle that included Gulfstream jets, safaris, and pet tigers, extensively chronicled in a Vanity Fair profile. Although the 77-year-old Manhattan socialite has nothing in her bank account, she has plenty of assets, notes Fox News. They include three connected apartments on the 51st floor of Trump World Tower worth $11.75 million (but she owes $4.6 million on the complex, which is in foreclosure and owes $25,000 in property taxes); a 2006 Bentley worth $35,000 (but she owes $38,000 on it); and $100,000 in belongings (but they're in a storage facility and she owes $700,000 to the storage company). Wildenstein also owes $273,000 to various law firms, $175,000 to her contractor, and $165,000 to the owner of a Beverly Hills rental property. The debt is somewhat remarkable because in 1999 Wildenstein received an estimated $2.5 billion in her divorce from art dealer Alec Wildenstein, now deceased. But all is not lost, as she is reporting $16.4 million in assets and $6.4 million in debt. She also gets $900 a month in Social Security. And she believes she can recover financially if she gets the $4.5 million due from her divorce. But for now, she says, "I am not employed and my only income is Social Security … I often turn to friends and family in order to pay my ongoing expenses."