My Unorthodox Life star Julia Haart has revealed that her ex-husband Yosef Hendler said their daughter, 5, would not be able to play sports if her outfits were sexualized.
Designer and entrepreneur Haart, now 50, starred in the popular Netflix series last year, which focused on her rise in the fashion industry after leaving her strictly religious household at the age of 42.
Now, Haart – who is currently embroiled in an ugly divorce from her second husband and Elite World Group CEO Silvio Scaglia – has revealed more intimate details about her journey through her newly released memoir Brazen, which was released on Tuesday.
Candid: My Unorthodox Life star Julia Haart has revealed that her ex-husband Yosef Hendler said their five-year-old daughter couldn’t play sports if her outfits were sexualised
Promoting the book in This Morning on Thursday, she described parts of her daughter Miriam’s upbringing and said she had begun to wonder why she couldn’t play sports.
She explained that when her daughter started asking questions about such things, she eventually decided to leave the family and her strict religious life.
She said: “I should have left 20 years ago. That’s when my daughter Miriam turned five and started giving a voice to the questions I’ve had throughout my life.
“She started asking questions and said to me, ‘I’d like to play a sport,’ and my ex said it’s not decent to wear a skirt and if a man sees you, he might have some sort of sexual response to it to have. so you can’t play sports!’
Hart: While promoting the book Thursday morning, she described parts of her daughter Miriam’s upbringing and said she began to question why she couldn’t play sports (pictured with Miriam in 2021)
‘And my five year old ‘oh why am I responsible for his sins’. She started asking all the questions I had dreaded my whole life.”
Speaking further about the book and her now feminist beliefs, she said, “It’s basically the story of my career. It’s really all the mess, the confusion, the details. The book is the whole story.
“All my life I thought to myself, my intellect is not inferior to a man. I had all these questions. I had all this guilt for even thinking that.
Fame: Designer and entrepreneur Haart, now 50, starred in the popular Netflix series last year, which focused on her rise in fashion after leaving her strictly religious household at the age of 42
“The thing is, most people have all these barriers to what they can and can’t do. Religion trains you, if you don’t follow these steps you are going against God. That is shocking.
“It was very difficult. I have always felt the need to obey and listen. I remember that no changemaker was ever popular.
She continued, “No one has thrown me in jail for demanding freedom. I believe in God more now than when I lived there. My life has been a series of miracles since I walked through that door.
“I get tens of thousands of DMs and some letters talking about what the show has done for their lives and how they’ve changed circumstances.”
Her story: Julia has opened up about escaping her sheltered Jewish upbringing in her newly released memoir, Brazen, which was released Tuesday
Haart launched her own eponymous footwear line and became the creative director of Italian luxury house La Perla after deciding in 2013 to leave her Haredi community — where “women were seldom seen and never heard” — after 42 years.
She was born in Moscow, Russia and immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of three.
When she was 11, they settled in Monsey, a suburb 35 miles north of New York City with the largest population of Hasidic Jews in the US outside of New York City, with nearly half the households speaking Yiddish or Hebrew.
“We lived in the 18th century,” she previously told the Los Angeles Times of her yeshiwi background, explaining that modesty is paramount for women and access to outside information through television, radio, or even newspapers is difficult to come by.
Marriage: Haart married Yosef when she was 19, and she wrote in her book that she had only met him a few times before their marriage
She also described a sexist worldview in which men study the Torah but women do not “because their minds were unable to comprehend it”.
She explained, “I was told, ‘Women are light-headed’ – ‘nashim da’atan kalos’. Where I lived, women were rarely seen and never heard.
“Our lives were governed by a web of decency laws that required us not only to cover our bodies from head to toe but also to conduct ourselves comparatively. You grow up thinking you don’t matter at all.”
But Haart’s interests always went beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
She read a lot – from classic literature to fashion magazines, which she had to steal from a nearby 7-Eleven.
In her book, Haart wrote that she “spent the first 42 years of my life in utter misery,” but admitted in a new interview to The Times that she deliberately “downplayed” the “level of her misery” in it.
“I didn’t mean to be a victim, right? I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me,” she told them while discussing the memoir.
At 16, she taught herself to sew and made her own modest versions of the dresses she saw in those magazines.
Haart married a man named Yosef Hendler at the age of 19, and she wrote in her book that she had only met him a few times before their marriage.
Tough: She’s currently embroiled in a nasty divorce battle with her second husband – Silvio Scaglia, CEO of Elite World Group (pictured together in 2017)
Together they had four children – Batsheva, Miriam, Shlomo and Aron – and they were raised with the same religious upbringing.
As time went on, Haart became more and more depressed and she even started to think about ways to kill herself.
“The day came when I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stay a second longer,” she previously told the New York Post.
“You are trapped in a life that is not yours. So it was stay and die or go out the door.”
She eventually decided starving was the best route because people would assume it was unintentional, an eating disorder — so her children wouldn’t bear the shame of their mother’s suicide. At just over 5 feet tall, she came down to 73 pounds.
Show: She starred in the popular Netflix series last year, which focused on her rise in fashion after leaving her strictly religious household at the age of 42
But when she saw her daughter Miriam facing the same adjustment struggles as she did, she realized it was time to go instead.
It took her years to get out — she was secretly selling insurance to save up enough money to finally break free in 2012.
She launched her own line of shoes back in 2013 after finding investors “in the craziest places,” including on a plane and in an eye doctor’s office.
“It really didn’t cross my mind that I was going to fail because I was so freaking ignorant,” she said on her show.
However, she didn’t fail and eventually landed a collaboration with La Perla. She was the brand’s creative director until 2016.
“43 years of my life have been stolen from me. I don’t have time,’ she added.
In 2017, Haart designed dresses for the Met Gala for Kendall Jenner and Mary J. Blige, whom she escorted to the A-list event.
As creative director, her designs have also been worn by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Anna Kendrick, Lily Collins, Lea Michele, Laure Dern, Padma Lakshmi and Kourtney Kardashian.
Now, Haart wants to use her story to change the lives of other women who may be going through something similar.
Wow: She has become a big name in the fashion world and in 2017 she designed Met Gala dresses for Jenner and Mary J. Blige (pictured with Anna Wintour)