A Manhattan real estate attorney who won a landmark custody case against her ex-partner — defeating her child’s biological mom — has now put her parental rights in jeopardy with a criminal conviction and legal disbarment.
“Karma’s a wonderful thing,” crowed Brook Altman, who lost custody of her 6-year-old daughter, Harrison, in 2012 after a judge found that her lawyer-ex Allison Scollar was the “more responsible parent.”
“Responsible?” scoffed Altman. “She was an attorney who was stealing money right under everyone’s noses.”
Scollar, 55, was disbarred Thursday after it was revealed that she swiped $2 million from client escrow accounts.
The now-ex-lawyer pleaded guilty to grand larceny in March 2016, but her case was sealed as part of a cooperation agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Details of the conviction were released Thursday in a Manhattan appeals court ruling yanking her law license.
Scollar claims she was caught up in an extortion ring led by an Israeli conman posing as a Mossad agent. In 2016, Eli Luski was charged with taking $5 million from attorney escrow accounts — and then using the dough on a mistress and a million-dollar New Jersey manse.
Luski recruited two co-defendants — Scollar’s longtime pals Jay Katz and his attorney brother David Katz — to pull off the scam.
Scollar says the Katz brothers were “extremely supportive” of her bitter custody battle with Altman, so she was “susceptible to their requests” to hand over the client funds.
“Over time they kept using and abusing me,” she told The Post in an interview.
“Once I wrote the first check, I was a goner,” Scollar admitted.
Luski died while the charges were pending. The Katz brothers received between six months and a year of prison plus over $830,000 in fines at their sentencing last November. Scollar dodged jail time by ratting out the brothers, but she was ordered to repay $600,000 in stolen escrow funds.
Now she may lose something priceless.
Her ex, an Emmy Award-winning producer who helped launch Martha Stewart’s TV show, plans to seek full custody of their now-11-year-old daughter.
“Lying, cheating, stealing and hurting other people is just not how we move in the world and that’s not what I want for my daughter,” said Altman.
Currently the two moms share equal parenting time, but Scollar has legal custody of Harrison.
In 2012, Manhattan Family Court Judge Gloria Sosa-Lintner awarded custody to Scollar, who is Harrison’s adoptive mom but has no biological ties to the child, reasoning that the attorney mom was “the more responsible parent looking out for the child’s best interests, not her own interests.”
The decision was the first of its kind in New York.