Sasckya Slothower was born in northeastern Brazil and competed in beauty pageants from the age of 13, eventually coming in fifth in the Miss Brazil World pageant. In her late teens, she traveled to Boston to attend college, modeling in the Saks showroom and appearing in a fashion show headed up by basketball Hall of Famer Paul Pierce. She soon became bored with Massachusetts, she says, and moved to New York, finding a room in a model apartment on East 49th Street. She posed in Stella McCartney’s showroom, modeled products for Pantene and MAC Cosmetics. “Some of the models I lived with would not even eat, but just pick up a cotton ball, soak it in some liquid, and eat that to mess up their stomachs,” says Slothower, in heavily accented English and with a confident, confiding tone. “I was curvier, and I did lingerie, so I didn’t have to be as skinny. I ate little, but I could not starve myself.”
One day in the mid-2000s, a former Elite model with a special events agency asked Sasckya if she had time to pop by Wall Street at the afternoon hour of 4:30 p.m. Some Goldman Sachs traders were holding a private card game, and she needed hostesses. At the space on Pearl Street, she perhaps floated between tables with a soft smile, a young blond trader nearby. When the game broke up, he ran after her, asking for her number. She said she’d rather take his number; he countered by asking if he could take her to dinner, and when. “Well, right now,” she said. Why not?
Sasckya married Jeffrey Slothower months later. She was 21, felt young for marriage, and even kept the news from those she worked with professionally. “I didn’t want them to know I was married because I thought it made me seem like I was old,” she says. “And if they thought I was old, I wouldn’t get the job.”
About a decade later, Sasckya wasn’t old by any stretch, but the couple’s lives were beginning to shift. Jeffrey was now striking out on his own, with a financial firm he named Battery Private. And after enjoying the city for years, Sasckya had fallen in love with the beach in the Hamptons on a modeling shoot. They decided to try living in Southampton full-time.
Sasckya and Jeffrey started a family, and she took up hobbies like researching local history, figuring out exactly when the settlers came to Conscience Point. “I had been wild before, but now I connected with being a mom,” she says. How wild? She was a Playboy Playmate in 2007, appearing as a Christmastime centerfold under a different last name, and even lived in the Playboy Mansion for a few weeks.
“Every night was either dinner, or we’d take the limousine to a restaurant or the movies,” she says. “There was always something going on. So it was a nice experience. And definitely very, very naked. Girls would just get painted with spray tattoos and walk around naked. I never saw that before.”
There was talk of Sasckya dying her hair blond, which she disdained. “I told everyone, ‘I’m not dying my hair,’ and Hef was fine with that,” she says. Back then, “Kim Kardashian was on the cover, and she’s also brunette.”
Post-Playboy, Sasckya enjoyed married life for a while, then became a mom and lived in Southampton. She embraced some of the social trappings of the East End and has many party shots to her name, her wide-set eyes gazing out from photos captured at a veterinarian charity bash in East Hampton, or the Parrish Art Museum’s Midsummer Gala. The Slothowers were minor summer fixtures at beach barbecues; he with the slicked-back blond Gordon Gekko haircut, she with tight summer pastel pants. They were the type of couple who could have their anniversary celebrated in The Southampton Press, as it was several years ago. (He was in a trim tuxedo and she wore a ruched white gown, her hair falling down her back like a bolt of midnight silk.)
“The parties in the summers were nice,” says Sasckya.
The couple was now surrounded by the extreme wealth of the Hamptons, where oceanfront homes with a spread are now going for upward of $25 million. How did it feel to patronize the gourmet stores alongside private-equity moms in their clingy black Alo getups, jostling one another as they purchased tubs of lobster salad for $100 each? The Hamptons are less a location that’s a beach than a beach that forgot it was a beach. The place has become the rictus grin of the nouveau riche. It’s the Upper East Side’s revenge against urban humidity and decay, a spiritual center of sorts devoted to musing smugly upon your life and how it’s gone so right.
But off-season, the Hamptons change. When it was cold, Sasckya and Jeffrey had a much more mundane life, bringing Citarella takeout to Coopers Beach and walking Main Street. “It was nice in the summer, but then when it wasn’t the summer, the Hamptons got kind of quiet,” says Sasckya. She modeled only rarely, and it seems possible that Jeffrey’s new business was not going well. And this is when the trouble began.
Jeffrey Slothower and Sasckya Slothower attend the Midsummer Party 2017 at Parrish Art Museum on July 15, 2017 in Water Mill, New York.by Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.
