Kevin Bacon says he’s “not jaded” after losing a significant amount of money in Bernie Madoff’s 2008 Ponzi scheme.
“There’s not that much to say, really. If it seems too good to be true, then it’s too good to be true,” Bacon, 66, told Esquire in a profile published on Friday, April 4, noting that he and wife Kyra Sedgwick are “more careful” with their finances after the whole ordeal.
Madoff was arrested in 2008 after news broke that he ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history,embezzling an estimated $64.8 billion from thousands of people. Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 felony charges pertaining to fraud, money laundering and perjury. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison and died in 2021 at the age of 81.
While speaking with Esquire, Bacon detailed how he has coped since the scandal and subsequent fallout.
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“I go to this gym. It has a few machines and only a handful of people there at any given time. There’s no showers, it’s very bare bones, but there’s a leg press machine. A leg press can be brutal,” he recalled to the magazine. “The machine is right next to a window, and when I look out that window, I’m looking right at the building where Madoff was. I’m in excruciating pain, doing the leg press, staring out that window. It’s perfect, in a funny way, because I also have to think, ‘I can get through this.’ And that’s how we felt about Madoff. It sucked, and we were certainly angry and all the things.”
He added, “But then we woke up the next day and said, ‘What do we got? We love each other. We love our children. We’re healthy. No one took away our ability to make a living.’ So we got back to work.”
Bacon and Sedgwick, 59, have been married since 1988 and share children Sosie and Travis. The couple previously revealed in 2022 that they were affected by Madoff’s crimes.
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During an appearance on the “Smartless” podcast, Bacon said that he and Sedgwick lost “most” of their fortune in the scandal.
“We had most of our money in Madoff,” the Footloose star said. “There’s obvious life lessons there –– if something is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true. Certainly, you get angry and stuff, but I have to say, there were a lot of people who were much worse off than we were — old people, people whose retirement funds were completely decimated. There’s always going to be somebody that’s going to have it a lot worse than you.”
