Gold bar Bob Menendez’s wife isn’t ‘mastermind’ of graft scheme — she’s ill, isolated ‘submissive housewife’: friends
Bob Menendez’s wife Nadine Arslanian is no international criminal “mastermind” but “a submissive housewife,” her longtime friends told The Post — after the Democratic senator’s corruption trial began with him throwing her under the bus.
Federal agents who conducted a raid of their home in June 2022 found $480,000 in cash stuffed into envelopes and coat pockets as well as 13 gold bars, worth more than $100,000, according to court papers. The couple have vigorously denied the charges.
On Wednesday, Menendez’s lawyers blamed Arslanian, saying she “kept him in the dark” on financial matters and stashed gold bars in a locked closet where she kept her clothes at the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home.
Lawyers for the embattled New Jersey politician, 70, portrayed Arslanian, 57, as “a tall and beautiful global woman” who grew up in Lebanon, speaks four languages and calls Menendez “amour de ma vie,” French for “love of my life” in opening statements Wednesday.
But despite her husband’s description of her, friends told The Post that Arslanian is not an international sophisticate.
She is “clingy” with men, and would regularly bring her boyfriends to a “girls’ night out,” said one of her longtime friends. “She is no mastermind,” another said.
They also described her as increasingly “isolated” after she cut off communication with even her closest friends, changing her phone number and refusing to see them months before she was indicted on corruption and bribery charges along with Menendez and three others in September.
Pat Dori said he felt compelled to speak out after he read about Menendez revealing on Thursday that his wife had stage three breast cancer and Wednesday’s opening statement blaming his wife for the gold bars.
“She’s not the Joan Collins character in ‘Dynasty’ that they’re portraying her to be,” said Dori, referring to the British actor in the 1980s soap opera about dueling oil-rich Texas families. Collins played Alexis Carrington Colby, the devious and conniving wife of an oil tycoon.
“She’s not a female Bond villain, but a struggling housewife trying to make it,” he told The Post.
“She’s incapable of masterminding anything like this. She was brought up to obey her husband, yes. But she is no mastermind.”
Instead, Dori said Arslanian is cornered — without money of her own to pay her lawyers and battling cancer. “She’s in dire financial straits and her friends feel she’s being hit from every possible angle.”
Friends told The Post they were shocked when Menendez announced that Arslanian is suffering from breast cancer, and undergoing treatment which will include a mastectomy.
Some are fearful she will not survive her own trial which is scheduled to take place in July, after her treatments are complete. Her attorneys declined to.
“I’m fearful she is not going to be able to survive this,” Dori said. “She is sick and being steamrolled.”
But she is unlikely to leave Menendez, friends said, even though the senator does not appear to be staying with her at their modest split-level home — at least not during the first week of his trial.
On Friday he emerged from a Manhattan hotel to breakfast on fries and Tabasco sauce before heading for court.
“She’s the type who wants to be with her man 24/7, and the type who believes in fairy tales,” said a friend who did not want to be identified.
“She’s really old fashioned when it comes to marriage. She is also totally naive — the kind of person who never gets a joke.”
Friends told The Post that Arslanian, a divorcee with two children when she first met the senator, first began dating Menendez in 2012, contradicting official accounts that they first met in 2018.
“They dated for a few months in 2012, and then moved on to other people,” said the friend. “Then they hooked back up again in 2018, but they certainly knew each other for a long time.”
Arslanian went on to date Douglas Anton, a New Jersey lawyer who once represented disgraced musician R. Kelly.
Anton said he called local police when Arslanian went missing in 2018 while she was on a secret romantic getaway with Menendez in the Dominican Republic.
“I did a missing persons report, and they had to come to the house to check to make sure that someone didn’t kill her and put her in a closet,” Anton told The Post last month.
Police found the lights on as well as televisions blaring in the living room and a bedroom, according to northJersey.com, citing records obtained from the Englewood Cliffs Police Department.
Arslanian was “found” several days later when she boarded a flight back to the US, Anton said.
Friends encouraged Arslanian to marry the senator once they started dating again, largely because they felt she needed financial security and health insurance after she suffered a head injury.
“She was going through excruciating pain and we saw Bob as her light,” said Dori.
“We encouraged her to marry Bob,” said the other friend. “After she met him, she put him on a pedestal. Everything was always Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob.”
He proposed in front of the Taj Mahal during a Congressional trip to India.
Menendez wooed her in other ways by appealing to her Armenian heritage and lobbying the Senate to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide, which it passed in 2019.
The issue was of paramount importance to her family, especially her father, now 94.
Arslanian told the Armenian Report podcast that 13 “immediate members” of her family were killed in the genocide.
On Dec. 12, 2019, Menendez announced that the resolution had passed the Senate and choked up when he made the televised announcement.
He texted Arslanian, by then his fiancée, that afternoon, “Truth, perseverance and a commitment to a cause greater than yourself, in honor of your family, and all who suffered, I hope your father was watching.” He added “Never Forget” in Armenian script.
The couple wed in October 2020 at an Armenian church in Queens, New York. Many of Arslanian’s closest friends did not attend the wedding because of COVID protocols, said another friend.
“We were so happy for her,” the friend said.
But after Menendez’s lawyers blamed Arslanian for the alleged bribery, friends are not so sure that she made the right decision, or will stay with the senator after their respective trials are over.
“Sadly, this trial has ruined her reputation,” said Dori. “I think right now she’s having difficulty seeing light at the end of the tunnel.”
