The longtime caretaker of an ailing Manhattan real estate billionaire “jealously manipulated” him before whisking him to Russia and letting him rot — so she could get her hands on a $2 million inheritance, according to a lawsuit.
The tragic death of Allan H. Goldman Jan. 15, 2022 came after Natalia Vostrikova allegedly spent years siphoning off a total of $8.2 million of his money, his family contended in court papers.
Goldman was in a “severely deteriorated” state when he died at age 78 of multiple organ failure, following a years-long battle with Parkinson’s disease, according to the Nassau Supreme Court lawsuit brought by his eldest son, Steven Gurney-Goldman, who is executor of Allan’s estate.
He was worth at least $1 billion, thanks to his father Sol Goldman, who once counted the Chrysler Building in his massive real estate portfolio. Before his health began to fail, Allan Goldman helped oversee the family business, Solil Management, with his younger sister Jane, who is now embroiled in her own legal battle with Allan’s kids.
Goldman had been getting care for years at the Mayo Clinic and while wheelchair-bound, was in fair shape in May 2020, according to an autopsy report included in the ongoing legal fight against Vostrikova.
Vostrikova, 71, worked for Goldman for decades, beginning in the early 1990s as a nanny to two of his kids and then as a housekeeper before becoming her boss’s full-time caregiver as he struggled with the progressive nerve disorder, which causes tremors and muscle stiffness.
She allegedly “jealously manipulated and strictly controlled access to Mr. Goldman” for years prior to 2018, when Goldman established an estate plan which left her the generous gift, his children contend in the legal papers.
After learning of the massive payout, Vostrikova allegedly refused to let anyone else be alone with her wealthy benefactor, withheld his meds and began denying he even had Parkinson’s before absconding with him to Russia in July 2021, where she booked a room at the luxury, five-star Baltschug Kempinski Hotel, his children said.
She claimed Goldman was getting medical care in Russia he could not receive elsewhere — but instead, Vostrikova cruelly left her longtime employer in the hotel, where rooms go for 17,100 rubles, or roughly $231 a night, while she spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on his American Express card and “bragged … about the quality of her life because of Mr. Goldman’s money.”
For more than five months, Vostrikova allegedly failed to properly feed or bathe Goldman, and didn’t move his stiff, bedridden body — leading to massive bedsores which became infected and in at least one spot were so extreme as to leave his bone exposed, according to court papers.
In that span he lost 50 pounds and was barely able to speak when one of his children managed to get him on the phone.
“I need you,” Goldman uttered before Vostrikova allegedly hung up the phone.
When his kids questioned her and said they were arranging for visas to come retrieve him, she derided them as “selfish children,” they said in the legal filing.
In January 2022, Vostrikova finally had a doctor examine Goldman. The physician urged her to admit him to a Moscow hospital but she allegedly didn’t want to pay to place him in the facility. Instead, she sent the gravely ill man alone on a more than 400-mile drive north to a hospital in St. Petersburg, where he died a day after arriving, the family said in court papers.
After Goldman’s death, his kids discovered Vostrikova, who earned $120,000 a year, had been siphoning off his funds, including $1.8 million for a five-bedroom, four-bath, 5,426-square-foot home in ritzy Bayville that included a heated in-ground pool and cabana, they said in the litigation against her.
Vostrikova has denied the allegations in her own court papers and accused Goldman’s children of defamation.
“It’s a lot of lies,” Vostrikova told The Post, describing herself as Goldman’s “wife.”
Goldman’s ex-wife Susan claimed Allan and Vostrikova had been romantically involved since 2007 for approximately 15 or 20 years, and that Vostrikova brought him to Russia for stem cell therapy — but Goldman’s daughter denied that.
“My father did not believe that Natasha cared about him. According to the nurses’ logs, my father told a nurse that Natasha pretended to care about him but that pretending was better than nothing,” Stephanie Goldman said in legal papers, adding, I do not believe he had the cognitive ability to make most decisions, including financial ones, much less the cognitive or physical ability to authorize and sign the checks he
purportedly issued to Natasha.”
