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Bernie Madoff ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and by the time it collapsed in 2008, most of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s money was with him. Celebritynetworth.com put their combined worth at $45 million in 2026. Between then and now sit a 150-year sentence, a gym window with an unusual view, and a family that got back to work.
Where They Started
Kevin Bacon built his early résumé on Footloose, Flatliners, JFK, and A Few Good Men, while Kyra Sedgwick landed roles in Born on the Fourth of July and Singles. The two met on the set of the 1988 film Lemon Sky and married the same year. By the time Madoff’s scheme came apart, they had been married for 20 years and had two children, Sosie and Travis.
What They Were Worth Before
Before any of it collapsed, the couple were doing very well. Their combined net worth was put at around $100 million, Hello! noted. Bacon had kickstarted his career at a young age, and Sedgwick is the daughter of the late venture capitalist Henry Dwight Sedgwick V, who amassed a small fortune of his own. It is a reported estimate, but it marks the starting point for what came next.
The Man Their Money Was With
Bernie Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960 with his wife, Ruth, and grew it on the back of electronic trading. He and four other Wall Street mainstays processed half of the New York Stock Exchange’s order flow, and by the late 1980s he was making in the vicinity of $100 million a year. He also chaired the Nasdaq in 1990, 1991, and 1993.
How the Pitch Worked
Madoff told investors he used a split-strike conversion, a legitimate collar strategy that guards shares against losses with a put option. The returns he reported ran a steady 10 to 20 percent a year, strong but plausible, and his portfolio appeared to stick to safe blue-chip stocks. Regulators later determined that client money was not invested as described and that account activity was misreported to keep investors confident.
The Analyst Who Saw It
Financial analyst Harry Markopolos worked out in one afternoon in 1999 that Madoff was lying, and he filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2000. The agency ignored it. In a 2005 letter, Markopolos wrote that Madoff Securities was the world’s largest Ponzi scheme. He added that no reward was due to him, and that he was turning the case in because it was the right thing to do.
What the SEC Did
The SEC had looked into Madoff on and off since 1992. In 2006, shortly after his firm nearly collapsed under a wave of redemptions, the agency asked for documentation on his trading accounts. Madoff made up a six-page list, and the SEC drafted letters to two of the firms on it but never sent them. After the fraud surfaced, eight employees faced disciplinary action, though none were fired.
How It Came Apart
By November 2008, Madoff’s firm reported year-to-date returns of 5.6 percent while the S&P 500 had dropped 38 percent. As clients kept asking for their money, he could no longer meet the requests. On Dec. 10, he confessed to his sons Mark and Andy, who worked at the firm, and they reported him to authorities the next day. His final account statements listed about $64.8 billion in purported client assets.
How Much They Had In
Bacon said on the SmartLess podcast in 2022 that the couple “had most of our money in Madoff,” though he did not name a figure. Sedgwick declined to say what they lost when asked in 2009, and Hello! described it as nearly all of their money. Whatever the exact amount, the bulk of what they had was in one place, and that place turned out to be a fraud.
Bacon’s First Reaction
Within weeks of Madoff’s arrest, Bacon told Life & Style in January 2009 that he was grateful for his health, his family and his career. “We’ll march on. We have to,” he said. He also said he was stunned to find the money gone, saying “I didn’t see it coming,” and that he needed to work, for obvious reasons, with nothing lined up at the time.
Sedgwick’s Anger
Sedgwick saved her anger for the missed warnings. Someone had blown the whistle on Madoff three times, she told Ladies Home Journal in 2009, and nobody acted. “It was hideous,” she said. The economy, in her view, had at least pushed many people to ask what really fulfills them without spending, and a return to simple pleasures was a good thing.
Shock, Then Perspective
Shock came first, Sedgwick wrote in their book What Makes a Marriage Last. Then came the part where you take stock, because otherwise you just freak out. Their children were safe, they were still working, and they could make the money back. It felt awful and scary for a long time, she wrote, but they knew they were going to get through it. Somehow.
The Morning After
After the anger, they woke up the next day and asked each other what they still had, Bacon told Esquire in 2025. The answer was that they loved each other and their children, they were healthy, and nobody had taken away their ability to make a living. He had also said, after the scheme blew up, that fans would not want to hear him “whining about money.”
The Leg Press
Bacon described a gym with only a few machines, no showers, and a leg press next to a window overlooking the building where Madoff’s company was housed. He said the machine can be brutal, and that staring at the building through the pain is perfect in a funny way, because it reminds him he can get through it. That, he said, is how he and Sedgwick felt about Madoff.
Others Lost More
Bacon and Sedgwick have both acknowledged that people lost far more than they did, and Bacon has said the real victims were those who lost their entire life savings. The U.S. Department of Justice returned about $4.3 billion to roughly 40,930 victims through the Madoff Victim Fund by December 2024. Bacon also called the episode a good cautionary tale about staying aware of what is happening with your money.
Madoff’s Sentence
Bacon and Sedgwick were among several Hollywood victims, a group that included filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Madoff pleaded guilty in 2009, at age 71, to 11 federal felony counts, including securities fraud, perjury, and money laundering. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $170 billion, and the U.S. Marshals auctioned his three homes and four boats. He died in prison on April 14, 2021, at 82.
Getting Back to Work
The couple got “a portion” of their funds back, Hello! reported, and then worked hard to rebuild. The Closer, which ran from 2005 to 2012, was already on the air when the scheme collapsed, and Sedgwick earned $300,000 per episode in 2009, with $350,000 cited at its peak. She later earned sizeable paychecks for other roles, and Bacon kept up steady work in TV, movies, and commercials.
Where Their Net Worth Stands
On paper, they have not quite returned to where they started. Celebritynetworth.com put the couple’s combined net worth at $45 million in 2026, against the roughly $100 million reported before the scheme. That is $55 million lower, or about 45 percent of the earlier figure. The two come from different estimates, so the gap compares two figures and is not a tally of what Madoff took.
Life on the Farm
Bacon and Sedgwick live on a 40-acre farm in Sharon, Connecticut, home to what Hello! called a multitude of livestock, and they have settled into farm life, well away from Hollywood. They are believed to still have a property in Los Angeles, where their children live, and another in New York, which would spread their real estate across three states.
More Careful, Not Jaded
“More careful. But not jaded.” That was Bacon’s answer in 2025 when an interviewer noted that he and Sedgwick don’t seem jaded. The lesson he takes from it has barely changed since the 2022 podcast, which is that if something seems too good to be true, it is. Whatever any estimate says about what they are worth now, the change Bacon describes is in how closely they watch their money.