GREENWICH, Conn. — In a place where it is difficult to stand out among the secluded mansions, Birkin bags and Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons, one woman has drawn unwanted attention this week to one of America’s wealthiest bastions.
Not long ago, photographs of Hadley Palmer, 53, had regularly graced the society pages here. She was a fixture at charity galas and can’t-miss parties.
The daughter of a hedge fund founder, she lived with her family in a $10 million mansion overlooking Long Island Sound in Belle Haven. The enclave on a peninsula has been home to hedge fund moguls like Ray Dalio and Paul Tudor Jones II — and at least one celebrity, the singer Diana Ross.
Now, Ms. Palmer is inmate No. 439165 at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, with her mug shot in the papers and in heavy rotation on the local TV news.
This week, lurid details began to emerge from a sealed criminal case of how she pleaded guilty in January to secretly recording videos of several minors in intimate situations. All three victims were under 18, and at least one was 15 or younger, the police said.
Prosecutors have recommended that she serve 90 days to five years in prison, along with 20 years of probation. She must also register as a sex offender.
“I’m sure someone is going to make a movie about it,” Herb Foote, 61, a Greenwich resident who sells solar roofing panels, said on Tuesday. He learned about the case from his wife. “It’s like, whoa,” he said. “Everybody’s imagination runs amok.”
Mr. Foote was walking up Greenwich Avenue, an upscale business corridor lined with boutiques and bistros, where one section of sidewalk is heated and the burger at the cafe Ruby & Bella’s will cost you $27 (unless you prefer the $18 hummus). It is not uncommon to see Judge Judy Sheindlin shopping or Martha Stewart lunching. Many people approached here for comment this week treated Ms. Palmer’s arrest as taboo. Outside of Richards, a luxury clothing store known for its trunk shows, one woman scurried away, a velour Chanel Paris tote bag dangling from her shoulder, when asked about the case. Another waved off a reporter, explaining: “I don’t like to be exposed.”
Marjory Tait, 90, a retired probate court employee, said Greenwich was a different place than the town she moved to in the 1960s, one where opulence had become amplified. The average home price recently eclipsed $3 million, a buying bonanza catalyzed by the flight of New Yorkers during the pandemic.
But at least one thing remains the same, she said: “They don’t like scandal much here.”
Ms. Palmer’s arrest last October went largely unnoticed. Soon after, her lawyer sought to have her case sealed, first on a temporary basis and then permanently.
A Connecticut Superior Court judge granted Ms. Palmer’s request earlier this month, a move supported by lawyers seeking to protect her victims. The Associated Press opposed the step, with a reporter for the wire service telling the judge that it had created the impression of a second, privileged tier of justice.
Michael T. Meehan, Ms. Palmer’s lawyer, has steadfastly not responded to requests for comment.
A Greenwich psychologist has also been arrested on a charge that he had failed to report the matter, as required by Connecticut’s child welfare laws.
Anna Belton, who lives in New York City and was in Greenwich for business on Wednesday, said that Ms. Palmer’s case had made her believe that “people who have power and money can do whatever they want.”
Ms. Belton added that as a Black woman, she felt like an outsider while walking near downtown, where the customers are mostly white and wealthy.
“I definitely don’t belong here,” she said.
Beside her was Megan McGrath, 50, who has lived in Greenwich for a decade and expressed her exasperation over the paucity of details about the case.
“How did it get sealed?” she asked.
Ms. McGrath said she was still not used to the signs of prosperity that surrounded her.
“I drive a Ford versus, you know, a Maserati,” she said.
A couple of stores down, past Lululemon and Saks Fifth Avenue, past a Yeti brand water bowl for thirsty pets, was Sekani Thompson, 29, busy at work with a cleaning towel in hand.
For nine years, he has worked in Greenwich as a window washer. What Ms. Palmer did was “sickening,” he said. But it spoke to “how rich people get out of stuff easily,” he added. He focused back on his work. He would be done with just a few more swipes of the glass. Behind it was a golden Rolex watch worth $86,000.
In Belle Haven, property records show that Ms. Palmer, a mother of four, shared a renovated 19th-century mansion with her now-estranged husband, Bradley C. Palmer, a Greenwich financier.
The home, which has a solarium, walled gardens and a carriage house, is less than a mile from where one of the most searing crimes in Greenwich’s history took place: the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, 15, who had been bludgeoned with a golf club and stabbed. That crime spawned books and intense media spotlight, culminating more than 25 years later with the conviction of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin, in the teenager’s murder. Mr. Skakel’s conviction was overturned in 2018.
“Historically, Belle Haven has had a dark side,” Timothy Dumas, author of “Greentown: Murder and Mystery in Greenwich, America’s Wealthiest Community,” said on Tuesday.
Mr. Dumas described Belle Haven as “Gatsby-esque.” The enclave has its own security force, and its bylaws prohibit outsiders from taking pictures. That didn’t stop a photographer for a British tabloid this week.
A parent of a former schoolmate of one of Ms. Palmer’s children said this week that nothing had seemed amiss during repeated encounters with her. “These are nice people we thought we knew,” said the parent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid embarrassment. “You just never know about people.”
While the criminal case against Ms. Palmer is rather opaque, the unsealed records in her divorce proceedings offer a glimpse into her legal and personal strife.
When her estranged husband sought access to her social media accounts, along with any videos or photographs she may have sent to anyone with whom she had been romantically or sexually involved, Ms. Palmer objected last July.
“The plaintiff asserts her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination,” Ms. Palmer’s lawyer wrote in a motion at the time.
Mr. Palmer did not respond to a text message seeking an interview on Wednesday. His lawyers also did not respond, including one defending him in a lawsuit filed in 2021 by a former chief financial officer of his firm who contends that Mr. Palmer never paid him $3.4 million in earnings. In court filings, Mr. Palmer’s lawyer disputed those accusations.
Legal observers in Connecticut said that the hushed circumstances of Ms. Palmer’s case had recalled the systematic sealing of court files of the rich and politically connected in the state more than two decades ago. The contentious and informal practice was known as a shadow docket.
“It was very clearly delineated for insiders,” Philip Russell, a longtime defense lawyer from Greenwich and former prosecutor in the Bronx, said on Tuesday.
The inequitable arrangement prompted changes to the law and the practice book for lawyers that required a notice period for the public to comment on the sealing of cases and a judicial fact-finding process, Mr. Russell said.
Mr. Russell knows what it’s like to have a criminal case become magnified, both as a lawyer and a defendant.
In 2006, he became entangled in a widely publicized criminal case in town when he destroyed a laptop computer containing sexual abuse images of children that had been used by a longtime music director at Christ Church Greenwich. Mr. Russell, who had been representing the church, pleaded guilty to failing to report the music director’s crimes and was sentenced to six months of home confinement.
Christopher Fountain, who blogs about Greenwich on his website, For What It’s Worth, suggested on Monday that the legal system had exercised unusual discretion on Ms. Palmer’s behalf.
Writing on his blog, he cited the case of an elected official in Greenwich who made international headlines in 2016 after his arrest on charges that he had groped a woman and told her that he no longer needed to be politically correct because Donald J. Trump had been elected president. The official, Chris von Keyserling, was convicted of fourth-degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 90 days of house arrest.
“Chris, of course, lives in a second-floor walk-up apartment in Cos Cob, and not in Belle Haven,” Mr. Fountain wrote. “Mind you, Hadley’s shelter under the cone of silence has just ended rather spectacularly.”
Not everyone in Greenwich has an opinion about the case. On Wednesday morning, Alberto Flores was walking a mile and a half to work — to save money, he explained in Spanish — past the town’s Cadillac and Lexus dealerships. Asked about Ms. Palmer, he replied, “I don’t have time for that.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
