Add The New York Post on Google Socialite Libbie Mugrabi lost her Hamptons mansion on the steps of Southampton Town Hall in a public, and wild, court-ordered auction held Friday morning — a rare occurrence in the tony East End.
The auction pulled in just $5.864 million for the Bridgehampton estate — and was subdued compared with the cacophony of claims and counter claims that preceded it over the past two years.
The winning bidder, who showed up Friday dressed to the nines with his wife, would neither comment on the purchase nor provide his name. Mugrabi was not present at the sale.
Some 10 interested bidders gathered for the auction, including Mugrabi’s sister, Mia Rowe, who initially won with a $7.8 million bid — but without a check in hand. After saying she was going to a nearby Chase to retrieve $780,000 for a deposit, she never returned. That drew very loud objections from the other bidders, as interested parties had to appear with certified checks. A friend of Mugrabi’s family then turned to them and said, “This is a family matter. She’ll beat any number you put out.”
The sale wasn’t shy of other television-worthy drama. Also present was Mugrabi’s mother, Jane Scher — along with her dog named Botox — who told the lender’s attorney, Ryan Mitola, “Your client is a d–k.”
Mugrabi, who famously landed a massive $100 million in a divorce settlement just six years ago, still finds herself in a $9 million-plus hole to cover repayment, penalties and at least $140,000 in legal fees she racked up after blowing off payments on the $3.5 million mortgage she took on the dwelling.
Her inaction sparked a two-year legal donnybrook that led on Friday to her turning over the keys to the 7-acre Middle Line Highway estate, part of the settlement in her 2020 divorce from billionaire art collector David Mugrabi.
The auction’s proceeds will go toward paying off the loan, back interest and other costs.
Mugrabi earlier attempted to sell the home through a public listing in the late spring. The listed price was $25 million, with two quick subsequent reductions to $19 million.
Even that proved to be a pie-in-the-sky number, given Mugrabi telling The Post the estate was listed at the “high end” of its value and her attorney, Claude Castro, telling a court the property was worth “between $10 million and $12 million.”
Still, Friday’s auction sure brought in more than the $500 her lender, a shell company affiliated with REO Assets of America of Great Neck, N.Y., paid for it in a prior auction for the estate that was held online. The lender was the only bidder present.
That auction was held after Mugrabi first defaulted on the loan — and after vehement protests by Mugrabi and Castro over the move, the two sides struck an accord that the home was to be sold by Aug. 25, as well as many other considerations, to ensure the lender was paid back.
The attorneys agreed to go the auction route if the estate was not unloaded during that time through a real estate listing and the deed was destroyed when Mugrabi missed the deadline, Mitola said Thursday.
The auction came just 24 hours after Castro told a court that Mugrabi should be given more time to sell the home because she has lined up a new lender for an $8 million mortgage to purchase the property herself. In the early-morning hours of Friday, Castro filed an appeal in court seeking to prevent the sale from proceeding — an effort a judge denied just 2 minutes before the auction’s start time.
Mugrabi offered as collateral a Jean-Michel Basquiat artwork worth $40 million, based on an assessment from an outside appraiser she submitted to the court. Mugrabi won back rights to the painting two weeks ago after tussling over its ownership in court with fine art financier, Art Capital LLC, which was extending her money on it for a separate loan.
In regard to the Middle Line Highway home, Castro also said this summer’s listing resulted in only one offer, $7 million from a purported Nigerian prince with an allegedly sketchy background that he and Mugrabi were not comfortable with.
The question now is if Mugrabi will file for bankruptcy. Attorneys for both sides have discussed the prospect, although Mugrabi had not taken that step as of early Friday morning, according to a check with the US Eastern District Bankruptcy Court, the district where the home stands and where Mugrabi has been living.
Mugrabi seems to relish the idea of legal tangles. “I feel great every time I’m in court,” the New York Times reported her as saying s around the time of her divorce. “I love court.”
That’s probably a good thing, since there are still at least six cases she is currently involved in that haven’t been resolved. One of them, brought by art critic and cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest, claims Mugrabi has 97 of his drawings in the Middle Line home that she won’t give back.
She is on the cusp of losing her wingman for that suit, though. Her attorney, Michael Regan, of Regan and Associates, is petitioning the judge on the case to free him from working with Mugrabi, citing “an irreconcilable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship and communication,” records show.
