Daniel Shak, a wealthy New York hedge fund manager, has filed a lawsuit against his ex-wife Beth Shak for a portion of her luxury shoe collection, which he claims he knew nothing about at the time of their divorce.
Daniel Shak, 52, claimed that Beth Shak, a well-known professional poker player, never told him about her 1,200 pairs of designer shoes when they parted ways three years ago.
The finance titan, who had shared a $7.5 million apartment on Fifth Avenue with his then-wife, said that she kept her enormous stockpile of shoes hidden from him possibly in a “secret room”, the New York Post reported.
Daniel Shak now wants to get his hands on his ex-wife’s pricey pumps, which he says would entitle him to hundreds of thousands of dollars more in their divorce settlement.
However, Daniel Shak’s claim that his ex-wife had successfully kept him in the dark about her footwear obsession is highly questionable considering the fact that her collection has been featured in numerous TV shows, from MTV’s Cribs to the Today Show.
Beth Shak’s Facebook page is plastered with images of glittering sky-high stilettos by Christian Louboutin – her favorite shoe designer – and in April she launched her own website dedicated to her obsession called Shoes R Forever, where she offers her picks and writes about the hottest trends in footwear.
Beth Shak, 43, a mother of three, even has an image of a Christian Louboutin stiletto tattooed on a private area of her body, the Post reported.
She renowned shoe aficionado was featured in a recently released documentary called God Save My Shoes about women’s relationship with their heels, and according to a recent post on her Facebook page, Beth Shak plans to start her own shoe line soon.
The World Series of Poker player told the Post that Daniel Shak would have to have been the most unobservant husband in history to be unaware of her passion for shoes that would have made the fictional Sex & the City shoe maven Carrie Bradshaw blush.
“I’m shaking my head over this whole thing,” Beth Shak said.
“He is saying he didn’t know the closet in our master bedroom existed.”
Daniel Shak, however, insists that he discovered his ex-wife’s “secret” only last year, according to his lawsuit.
“Dan trusted his wife and was not inspecting his home to try to find inventory or <<secret rooms>>,” the suit claims.
A source told the Post that Daniel Shak is asking a court near their old family home in suburban Philadelphia for an accounting of his ex-wife’s footwear.
He estimates her collection at $1 million and says he is due at least 35% of that.
Daniel Shak, an avid poker player himself, reportedly lost millions of dollars in the gold market last year.
In 2011, Beth Shak brought a film crew from NBC’s Today Show into her three cavernous closets to put on display her pricey size-seven acquisitions, sheepishly admitting to a reporter that some of her fancy footwear cost her as much as $4,000 a pair.
Beth Shak said her collection includes 700 pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes, which she compared to “fine art” in an interview with the Post last year.
Still, Beth Shak has ways to go if she wants to catch up with the world’s most notorious shoe fiend Imelda Marcos, the wife of former Philippine dictator, who caused worldwide outrage in 1986 when a U.S. diplomat revealed that she owned 3,000 pairs of shoes.
