Actor Kevin Bacon reflects on his financial losses due to Bernie Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme, expressing that while the sting remains, he is not jaded by the experience. In a recent interview with Esquire, Bacon revisits the infamous incident nearly twenty years after Madoff’s fraudulent operations were exposed.
Madoff, who ran a Wall Street firm named after himself, was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for orchestrating “history’s largest Ponzi scheme,” according to the FBI. He was arrested in December 2008 for securities fraud totaling $64 billion and passed away in federal prison at the age of 82 in 2021.
Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, were among those defrauded by Madoff. Although the exact amount they lost is unclear, Bacon mentioned on the “SmartLess” podcast in 2022 that they had kept “most” of their savings with him.
During the Esquire interview, Bacon shared how memories of Madoff still affect him. He described his experience at a small gym that has a leg press machine situated right next to the window facing Madoff’s former building. “When I look out that window, I’m looking right at the building where Madoff was,” Bacon noted. He finds motivation in the view: “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.”
Despite the anger and frustration from the incident, Bacon emphasized the importance of resilience. “It sucked, and we were certainly angry. 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.”
Those impacted by Madoff’s scheme have received partial compensation through the Madoff Victim Fund, which, as of December 2024, had distributed $131.4 million to about 23,400 victims—still only a fraction of the total losses suffered.