Bernie Madoff can’t stand the way he’s depicted in an ABC miniseries, according to NBC.
NBC says they received an email from the Ponzi prisoner that dismissed the show “Madoff” as “absurd.”
“I’m sure it is fruitless to enumerate the numerous fiction and absurd mischaracterization [sic] in the ABC movie,” he wrote to NBC. “However I have never been one to turn the other cheek.”
Madoff denied slapping his son Mark, who worked for his father and hanged himself in 2010 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. Madoff also insisted that his wife, who was sued by the bank-appointed trustee but never charged with a crime, was not “an officer” in his firm.
NBC also said that Madoff objected to how his brother Peter, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence for helping Madoff deceive the SEC, was portrayed as a “pathetic soul.” He said that Peter’s “outstanding creation of our technology platform was the envy of wall street [sic.]”
ABC did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Madoff told CNNMoney in 2013, when he was just four years into his 150-year sentence, that he preferred books and newspapers over television while behind bars.
But that was before the ABC miniseries with Richard Dreyfuss and the HBO movie with Robert De Niro, both of them starring as Madoff.
Madoff, also known as inmate #61727-054, is incarcerated at the medium-security federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. The release date for the 77-year-old Ponzi mastermind is Nov. 14, 2139.
Madoff pleaded guilty in 2009 to running the biggest pyramid-style scheme in history, victimizing thousands of people by falsely claiming to invest their money in Wall Street while squandering it on his lavish lifestyle.
Investigators have recovered more than half of the $20 billion lost to his scheme.