- A fashion heiress and her sister are fighting to keep their Gilded Age townhouse.
- They are the widow and sister-in-law of iconic fashion designer Oleg Cassini.
- A judge has declared the battle over. Is it?
For six years, they stalled creditors, ignored deadlines, and filed stacks of legal documents. They declined to unlock their ornate front doors for court-ordered visits by realtors, lawyers, and federal marshals.
And even now, they keep fighting to reclaim their former Gilded Age Manhattan townhouse — on the brink of its $34.5 million bankruptcy sale, set to close as early as Sunday.
Fashion heiress Marianne Nestor and her sister Peggy, both in their 80s, say they are not ready to give up their battle for the 1901 townhouse, where iconic designer Oleg Cassini once sketched fashions for Jaqueline Onassis.
"It's not going to close," Marianne, Cassini's widow, told Business Insider of the property, the sisters' home for 40 years.
"This would make a good movie on Hulu," she said of their spirited legal effort — which opponents in at least three courthouses have called "improper," "convoluted," "absurd" — and even "annoying."
Inside the sale
On Wednesday, a bankruptcy judge approved the final liquidation plan for the townhouse, rejecting the pair's 11th-hour protests.
"I'm not saying anything," a frustrated-sounding Judge Michael Wiles responded when the buyer's lawyer asked for one last assurance that the sale cannot be delayed by further litigation.
"This has been miserably difficult," bankruptcy trustee Albert Togut told the judge Wednesday of his own four years of litigating against the octogenarian siblings.
"We should not be abused anymore," the trustee, a 40-year veteran of the bankruptcy courts, said of his energetic, self-represented adversaries.
The Nestors, meanwhile, promise to return to the property, where the locks have been changed after they were forcibly evicted — they say wrongly — two years ago by US Marshals.
"It's not going to have any clear title, so I don't know that they're going to be able to close it," Marianne told Business Insider in a phone call.
"They went in there like they owned the place," she protested of the trustee and his lawyers.
The judge had ordered the sisters' eviction after they failed to comply with years of orders that the townhouse be marketed and sold to satisfy more than $30 million in foreclosed mortgages and other liens against the property.
This week, he rejected Marianne's last-ditch promise to match the buyer's $34.5 million offer — in cash — after the sisters failed to provide a penny's proof that there was money to do so.
Afterward, Marianne told Business Insider that the money remains "available," and declined to give details, saying the bankruptcy court "never gave me a number."
In a phone interview on Thursday, she accused the trustee of lying, forgery, breaking into her home, intentionally damaging the home to collect $4 million in insurance, and colluding with the "crooked" judge — and possibly with the Chinese government.
"The whole thing smells," she said. "Everything has been done illegally."
On Friday, she filed 75 pages of additional protests at the court in Lower Manhattan, asking for more time and resurrecting arguments repeatedly rejected by the judge.
"My understanding is a decision is not an order," she said in one, adding in handwriting, "I entered a correct bid."
Earlier this week, Togut, the trustee, described the "chaos" he said he and his team of lawyers have endured to get to the point of closing the sale.
The sisters "refused to cooperate with marketing," he wrote, barring their door even to the realtor's photographers.
They "filed repeated frivolous appeals and objections," he added, creating "a litigation cloud that may have deterred potential buyers."
A secret marriage and mounting debts
Wednesday's approval closes the book on a saga that began in 1984 — 12 years after Marianne's secret marriage to the designer — when the two sisters purchased the townhouse.
Oleg Cassini had created Jackie Kennedy's iconic pillbox-topped look during her days as first lady, and would continue to keep a design studio at the 18,000-square-foot townhouse until his death in 2006 at age 92.
When Cassini died, an extended battle began over the late designer's fortune that continues to this day.
By 2016, a surrogate judge on Long Island had removed Marianne as executor, citing mismanagement, a claim she denies. Cassini's clothing and perfume lines were court-ordered out of the sisters' hands and into receivership.
The widow owes more than $133 million in civil judgments, attorneys in that case said in a 2024 court filing. "That's bullshit," Marianne told Business Insider.
The fashion heiress was also jailed "for refusals to comply with court orders," the receiver also wrote.
Yes, she was thrown in jail, Marianne said in response — by another "crooked" judge.
As the estate battle dragged on, debts against the Manhattan townhouse started coming due.
Peggy Nestor filed for bankruptcy in 2023, one day before a state judge in New York scheduled a sale of the townhouse to repay $17 million in mortgage arrears.
The bankruptcy bought the Nestors another two years in the townhouse, which they promised to sell before ghosting and then suing their attorney.
They insisted that they were too old to be evicted and that their rights as tenants were protected by New York's rent-stabilization laws — claims shot down in federal bankruptcy court and by appellate judges.
In the two weeks before Wednesday's final sign-off, the sisters made multiple attempts to foil the proceedings.
These included accusing Togut in court papers of theft and incompetence, calling the sale a "set up," threatening to seek "treble damages, which are in the millions," and requesting the bankruptcy's "removal from Your Honor's court."
Neither sister was present for Wednesday's liquidation approval, though the judge noted on the record that both had been there minutes earlier.
They were filing more papers, he said, and complaining to court staff that they needed to rush back to the townhouse "to call the police or the FBI" to stop an in-progress moving of "their" items out of the home.
"That is an absurd contention," the judge said.
On Thursday, Marianne Nestor told Business Insider that she did call the police and the FBI. She is waiting for a call back, she said.
