Welcome back to she Pivots. I'm Julia Hart.
Welcome to she Pivots, the podcast where we talk with women who dared to pivot out of one career and into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back to she Pivots. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. You know when you meet someone and you're immediately enthralled by
their energy. That was me with Julia Hart when I watched her reality show My Unorthodox Life, I honestly wasn't really sure what she would be like in real life, and it turns out she is exactly the same. She is undoubtedly herself, and as someone who has struggled to feel like my serious energy is welcome in a world demanding us to be more serious, I can't help but feel inspired by her, especially since Julia hasn't always been
a snappy, fashionable, bold woman. Julia was born into an ultra Orthodox Jewish community, but after having her daughters, she became increasingly uncomfortable with how they were treated and how the community made women conform. In search of a life of more freedom for both herself and her daughters she left.
She used what skill she had as a former teacher to go on to make a series of incredible pivots, from starting her own shoe line, to become a creative director of La Perla and Italian luxury lingerie line, to becoming CEO and co owner of Elite World Group, to
landing her own reality series on Netflix. The two seasons of the show feature the contrast between the glitz and the glamor of their lives now in the fashion industry, and their decision to leave behind their former religious lives, from a life and a community that barely allowed or to express herself or to dream of a bigger life. Julia has embraced this new phase of her life with vivacity.
Here's a woman who has been through so much but has truly come out on the other side, determined to make a life that is truly and uniquely her own.
Enjoy. My name is Julia Hart. I am the executive producer and star of My Unorthodox Life. I'm the author of a best selling novel, Brazen, and i am the CEO of my new shaper brand Body by Julia Hart.
So lay the groundwork for us a little bit to understand a little bit more about the community that you grew up in, married and raised your children in for most of their lives. Tell us more so you know, my community is again a very very small part of the Jewish people. It's a very extremist sect, right, And I raised to be a.
Wife and a mother. That was my purpose in life. My high school education was just a joke, a complete cham and we were taught that our purpose in life was all the same. So I guess the simplest way to explain it is your biology to find your destiny. You're born a woman, your purpose is to be a wife and a mother. You're born a man. Your purpose is to become a great rabbi and become a Torus scholar.
Every morning in my world they say thank you Gud for not making me a woman, right, And when you ask why, they say, oh, because men have more positive commandments.
Right.
They're supposed to go to synagogue, they're supposed to learn Torah and women aren't. But then when you ask the question of why aren't women allowed to do that? And then the answer you get is because if a man her husband, who is her master and commander on this earth tells her to make dinner, and at the same time God is telling her to go pray. Who's she supposed to listen to? Which master comes first? So therefore she doesn't have to go to synagogue. So she only
has one master and commander, and that is her husband. Okay, So that is that's the world I grew up in. And you know right now as you see, you know everything that's happening to the Jewish communities all over the world. And people ask me all the time, how can you yell about this and then stand for here? And I to me, I honestly, I never I don't understand the question because I love my community. I always say there's no villains in my story. There are only victims. But the laws have to change.
Julia lived in Atlanta at the time, and on top of raising her kids and caring for her family, she was also required to work.
So I always worked. I was teaching pretty much every Judaic subject there is. I was teaching Clumbish, which is Bible navim, which are the prophets, hysteria, Jewish history, Parsha which is like the weekly toer reading, plumation, Gillows, which was oh gosh, how do I translate some of these things? I don't know, but like the Book of Esther, stuff like that. I taught pretty much every Jewish subject you could get your hands on, except for the Hebrew language.
I never taught Hebrew as a course. And so you know, I taught in two schools, and I had to do all the preparation. And again there's no workbook, there's no you were literally sitting there and compiling classes. It would take me like four to five hours to create a class because I didn't want any of my students ever looking at their watches. I always wanted to end on a cliffhanger. I'm a perfectionist. I'm gonna do something. I'm
gonna do something. So usually from ten to like two in the morning is when I prepared the next day's things,
and i'd be up at seven. I'd make breakfast for my husband when I had kids, who was change diapers, Get everybody off to school, Go teach in one school, find a time to eat at some point while you're going from one school to the next school, come home, make dinner, get ready for you know, I always had guests all over the house, so make sure everybody's in a room and they have food, and then when everyone put everyone to bed, and then when all the kids
are asleep, start all over again at ten o'clock at night, start marking papers and preparing for the next year. How did you manage child's care? So when I was teaching, we had this very lovely woman who it was the mother of one of my best friends, and so she was there nanny. So when I was teaching, she babe.
Us at the community she lived in has been described as ultra orthodox. They keep a stark divide between men and women, Like Julia said, the main job of women was to have and raise children, and oftentimes women and their mothers had kids simultaneously, so much so that Julia even nursed her own brother.
I mean I was a cow like to them, I'm just a body. It doesn't matter, Like I'm just a feeding machine. I could have fed thirty other people. Because if your biology defines you, your destiny, who you are as an individual is irrelevant.
How did you did you start to test boundary? He's like, what sparked for you to think, oh, maybe there's something outside of this life?
My daughter Miriam, so my entire life there From the day that we moved in until the day I walked out the door, I was fighting this internal battle, this unsolvable dichotomy between who I am intrinsically as a human being. I'm not try I'm not quiet. I love to study and learn. I am very entrepreneurial. I you know, I'm good at organizing things, like I had so much here on one hand and the other hand, being told Julia, stop talking, stop reading. What's wrong with you? Why can't
you be like other women? If I tell you how many times I got called into the raba's office and just say, Julia, why can't you behave? Behave? And what do they mean behave? It's not like I was wearing miniskirts there because I wasn't. I was covered head to toe behavian. Stop arguing with men. Stop reading books you're not supposed to read. That was my misbehaving, right, educating myself,
that was a problem. So there was this constant dichotomy between who I am intrinsically as a person and who I was told I had to be to be loved by God. But I thought that that was my fault, like something was inherently wrong in me. I was somehow flawed because all the other women around me were happy, Like what was Why wasn't child rearing enough? Like why
did I need more? And so I blamed myself. And then my daughter Miriam comes around, and first of all, she's a newdist This kid I could not keep clothes on her body for love or money. Literally, I'll never forget. I was in Alanta and I'm walking with my stroller and NeiMa Marcus, and I've got, you know, the bugaboo, like the fancy stroller, and I'm feeling good. I've got my nice wig on, and everybody's looking at the stroller and I'm like, oh, my daughter is just so beautiful.
Everybody's staring at her. At some point I go around to pick something, a clothing like up and she was stark naked between somehow between the door of Neem and Marcus, And when I got into the middle of the store, she had literally slowly taken off all her clothes. She was two, so but it was very embarrassing. So here was this little independent spirit who wouldn't be confined in
any way, shape or form now in my clothes. And then when she was a little bit older, she wanted to play soccer, and my husband told her, you can't, and she asked why. He said, well, if you play soccer, you're playing in a skirt, right, because when I WoT to wear pants, if you play soccer in a skirt, a man could be walking by the field and he may see your knees and get turned on and have inappropriate thoughts, and that will be your fault. So you
can't play soccer. And I'll never forget Miriam. She was five or six years old. I mean, let's not talk about the kind of man that gets turned on by women's knees, but a five year old's needs. But okay, let's leave that alone for a minute. She looks at my husband and she says, okay, Well, if he's responsible, if I'm responsible for his sins, is he responsible for mine? And that was all it took. Hearing that from the
mouth of a five year old. They had convinced me that I was somehow flawed for not being okay with it. Hearing the just sound reasonable logic coming out of the mouth of literally a five or six year old, that changed it for me because I realized it wasn't me, it was these laws, these rules.
So after Miriam, did you make a plan at that moment to say I have to leave because you did have another child afterwards?
That was when the beginning and the first eight It took me eight years between when I decided I wanted to leave and when I walked out the door and I became a voracious reader. I was completely ignorant. I didn't know anything, so books saved my life. Whenever people said, like, what if you could pinpoint one thing, I always say books. I just read, read and read Euripides, Voltaire, Descartes, Spinoza, Pantheism, you name it, I've read it. And that's how I
educated myself. That's how I changed my vocabulary and learned grammar, all through reading books. That's all I had. And then I found a way to make some money so I could have because I wasn't leading without my children. And then eight years later I got up and I packed my blankety blank, and I walked out the door. Not a single human being knew what I was doing, nobody, because I was so afraid that if someone knew, they
would tell on me. And again not out of a sense of cruelty, out of a sense of responsibility, because in their mind, I'm taking my children away from the source of holiness and beauty, right, so in their mind it would be their duty to tell on me. So I just didn't tell anybody, not a single soulnu, not one of my friends, nobody, not my siblings, nobody knew.
So where did you go? Like, what did you tell your children when you were walking out? And where did you literally go? So I didn't tell my children anything.
My daughter was already married and in Israel, my son was in yeshiva in Israel, so it's just Miriam and our own and Miriam I was like, let's go on vacation, and then it was really just you're going to make a fun of me here. So I'd never slept in a hotel by myself ever, right forty two years old, I'd never rented a hotel room and slept her alone like that just had never happened. I get in a can. I have no idea where we're going. It's the day
that we left was not planned. The day we left was because again Miriam, the night before she got accused of cheating because her essay was too good to have been written by a woman. She must have gotten help from somebody, and she was devastated. She's like, I worked hard, it's so good that I'm all like what. And that was it. That was the last straw. I literally packed our stuff and we walked out the door. So it was not planned, completely not planned. I got in the
car and I look, Okay, where are we going. I have no idea where we're going. And we drive into the city and I was more comfortable in like the forty seventh Street area, because that's where the diamonds are, That's where a lot of Jews are. That's like the place I would go when I would come into Manhattan. And so I'm driving by forty second and I see this big w and I'm like, oh my gosh. That hotel is called Welcome. This is amazing. And so I drove into the Double Hotel because it felt like New
York was welcoming me. And so that's where I stayed. The first night was at the w Hotel.
We're going to take a short break for some ads. Now back to the show. Barely knowing how to navigate the quote real world, Julius stayed in hotels for the next four years.
I didn't know how to rent a place I was too in Mayar's task. I was so new to world, like to the world. I didn't know, and I didn't understand how anything worked. I really didn't. I had no idea how anything worked. Obviously, it is not economical to stay at a hotel for four years, no to self.
But at the time, it just seemed like a really simple solution, you know, And we were living out of our suitcases anyway for so many years, because you know, we basically went to Mars eleven years ago, that's what it felt like. It felt like journeying to Mars. So you started the shoe company pretty within weeks. Yeah, how did you know how to start a business? Like know how to start a shoe company? And where did you know that you had such a flair for fashion? Well,
the religious communities are not known for their fashion. That's a mild understated. I remember I once wore this yellow suit to school completely covered. I mean we're talking about the collar bone, below the elbows, below the knees. They get called into the rabbi's office. He's like, Julia, Julia, what is this? What is this? And I said, what's wrong with it? I'm covered head to toe and He's like, yes, but it's yellow, and I'm like, okay, wearing the toe
doesn't say you can't wear colors. And he says to me, it's too noticeable. You're attracting attention. And I responded and I said, look, the day that God stopped making colors in flowers and in the rest of the world, you can tell me black and gray until then, you're not going to convince me that God hates color. So I'm going to continue wearing color. But I got in trouble all the time. So in terms of fashion sense, I was drawing clothing and shoes since I was like five,
just hiding them. I just didn't have a knee training, and I would hide them in my underwear drawer where I knew my husband would never look. But I'd been drawing really since I was five years old, Like, I taught myself how to sew and how to make patterns,
and I started making my own clothing there. So basically what I did is I followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law, because yes, I was covered head to toe, but by the time I was out, I was covered head to toe, but the clothes I was wearing were so tight, like you could see every you know, curve over there. So I figured out a way how to be fashionable, which I got in trouble for all the time in my world.
So did you think about trying to get a job in fashion after you are now living in Times Square in the w hotel, like or was it always like, No, I have a vision I'm going to create, Like, how did you take that first step to create a shoe company?
Honestly, I never thought about working for someone because I did everything by myself. You know, I left the community without help. I'd never heard of Footsteps, which is, you know, a program that helps women leave my community. I'd never even heard of it. It didn't occur to me to
ask for help. And so to me, it was kind of the same thing if I was going to start a shoe company, if I was going to create shoes, because I had this idea to make comfortable shoes that you shouldn't have to choose between fashion and comfort, and I knew that if I wanted it done, I had to do it myself.
In twenty thirteen, she launched her footwear brand, and in true Julia fashion, she started her shoe line as a way to redefine the idea that beauty and comfort can't go together. Her signature platform pumps that she wears to any and every occasion put her on the map, opening
her career to even bigger opportunities. So one of the things that I like to think about when talking with women who have gone through something and then are making a pivot, is how all of the skills of the thing we did before actually set us up a.
One hundred percent one hundred percent I mean, think about it. I was teaching two jobs, multiple classes, doing all the prep work while cooking and cleaning and taking care of babies. I learned a had a multitask be how to utilize every minute of my day optimally and see how to keep my cool under extreme circumstances. And there's no question that those skills have kept me through.
Those are all through like the executive management kind of category. Do you think there were actually like particular skills that ended up transferring into either creating shoes or then I mean from there you went to lapurla and then to elite world management.
I think it's not actually a skill, it's I see the spaces in between people see what is I see? What isn't? I am fascinated by the unknown. Because every industry I go into that, what do I do? I literally turn it upside down. Right when I went into the shoes, I made the first comfortable high heeled shoe.
It was beautiful, it was elegant. It was so comfortable that at a certain point, I think we were going to be carried in the four seasons in Hong Kong in their spat even though it's a high heel, because it was just so ergonomically designed. Then with Lapurla, I made clothing with bras and all this stuff built inside. No one had ever done that before.
She went on to become the creative director at La Perla, again challenging the status quo by creating a new line that made lingerie more wearable.
An article recently came out that the only period that they actually increased in sales was when I was creative director. So, like everywhere I go, I turned things around. You know, the management company EWG, it was a modeling agency, was an excellent modeling agency, and I turned it into a media congomerate by recognizing that the talent, they're the new media.
They have the audience and treating them as such and giving them autonomy in their careers and longevity in their careers by making them into brand names on social media. So I think you know the one. I would say there are two uniting threads in everything I do. One is it has to help women somehow. I don't do things that aren't female related. I just don't. It's not where my head goes. Also, I don't know men. You know, like you guys grew up together. I started talking to
guys at forty two. I'm super clueless when it comes to men. Women. They're my people. I understand them, I love them. I want to make their world better, and that's where it comes from. It didn't come from anger my community. To the contrary, it comes from this massive love. I want the women in my world. I want women in every world, in Iran and Saudi Arabia. I want every woman to have self determination and autonomy. The point is everything I do is related and directed and geared
towards women. My followers are ninety two percent female. I think the men who watched my show were either husbands of boyfriends of sons of and their mom or their girlfriend or their sister. Said, you have to watch the show. So that's one continuous thread through everything I do, and then the other one is finding something that's missing, thinking how could I do something better, and then organizing it, streamlining it, and creating a system where it moves automatically.
That's been my sweet spot. And I think the biggest part of that is I don't think I know everything. I'm an eternal student. I'm always learning. I love the unknown. I'm obsessed with what isn't and I think most people are afraid of the unknown.
I'm so happy that you're putting language to this because I feel like the big pivot points in my life have come from realizing that things that I didn't think were skilled were just sort of like personality traits I think were then realizing that they were skills. Like I was not a good student, I did not excel in school, and then I worked on a political campaign and I killed it.
That's success right there.
I've never been able to put language to it, So I'm so happy that you just did.
Thank you for doing that.
I'm like, my brain is running at all these different yes.
But that's why you're so incredibly successful. You focused on what wasn't right, the things, the spaces in between that people just don't want to go to. They're just afraid. People are afraid of the unknown. They like the none is comfortable, right. I hate being comfortable. I'm comfortable. I'm doing something wrong.
We're going to take a short break for some ads. Now back to the show. Julia has been able to find enormous success in her career after pivoting from her life in the ultra Orthodox community, but with fame comes public scrutiny, which happened after she announced her divorce in twenty twenty two.
Listen, we're starting off our show today with a guest who has been the focus of tabloid headlines for the past ten months. I cannot imagine waking up every single day and seeing my name in a headline with people speculating about my life. Millions of people first came to know Julia Hart, the woman who was a part of those headlines.
Just last year, during Julia Heart was fired from a position ant a strange husband, Sylvia Scoglia.
Hart's company in the midst of the couple split employees. Since you left, the community became public. We're on a TV show, so quickly. You know, there's been a variety of different scandals that have come up, and it's all public. You went from totally unknown, thinking that you had no rights basically and no individual personality, to being out debating pieces about your public professional private light out in public. How do you deal with that?
Oh? So hard, it's so odd. Anyway, who told you it's not hard? They're lying? It's very difficult. Obviously, there's I don't think I you know, before the whistleblower came out and the truth started coming out, I got accused of the craziest things. I got accused of being a liar, a thief, a con artist, to seduct I think the
only accusation that wasn't thrown at me was whitch. But you know, it was very difficult because it was a man again coming and taking everything I had built and worked and created, and how easy it was, and how many people believed it even though there was no proof for it because it didn't actually happen. There was an article that said I stole a car, and now, of course they have the proof that I paid for it
and we have the documentation. But there were months before that all came out, months of time where people genuinely thought I was a thief and a liar, and it almost killed me. I'm gonna be honest. There were days I didn't walk out in my bedroom. They were very difficult days. I dropped probably twelve pounds, and I can't really afford to drop twelve pounds. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping. It was very, very rough, very rough, and three things got me through. This is so it's like
the serendipity here was just through the roof. So the day that I went that, I found out that I lost in Delaware, which it just again makes absolute no sense. I have so many documents that say fifty to fifty, but we're almost there. We're a getting one step at a time. I'm not given up until I get truth in justice. But when that came down, I was just destroyed.
I was so devastated, and I'm sitting on the floor or in my office hysterically crying, and I get a phone call from this woman Ellen Gavin, who is basically like my political guru person. I became involved in politics once they repealed Roe versus Wade for the first time in my life, and I didn't know what I was doing I'd never really been politically active. So she calls me she has no idea what happened because it hasn't
hit the press yet. This is five minutes after I find out myself, and she says to me, Julia, do you want tickets to an off Broadway show about the Suffragettes called Seffs? And I'm thinking to myself, do you have any idea what just happen in my life? I Am like completely broken. I am sitting here on my floor crying my eyes out at the injustice of what's been done to me. I'm going to a Broadway show.
I'm like, this is ridiculous. And then I said to myself, no, if you sit here on the floor and you cry, he wins. Every man that has ever pushed a woman down and used his power to destroy they went not going to do it. So I said, you know what, I'm going to this fucking excuse my language, this off Fraudway show. I get to this show, and what is it about women demanding rights and what happens to them. They're not just called bad people in the press or
liars or thieves. They're actually stuck into jail. They are force fed, they are put in a dungeon for what for demanding freedom? And while they're in that dungeon, they're still fighting. And I watched that and I walked out of that show and I said, I am not going to cry. I am not going to be destroyed. I'm not hiding in my room anymore. I am going to fight back. And it totally shifted my mental space, I
would say. And then once I made that decision, the next step was, Okay, how do I deal with all the pain and crazy that's going on? Because it is a lot to get constantly attacked knowing that you're innocent. It's an awful feeling. It sucks. And I started meditating. I took a lot of courses, and I learned how to calm myself down and to go to a happier place. And I go into a dark room, I close the door, I meditate and it just calms everything and then I
can face whatever it is and move forward. So that's number two. And then number three is my children. My kids. I should have probably put them first. I mean with me through thick and thin, stood by my side, moved into the apartment to be with me and hold me and support me. And have done everything everything to shower we with love to kind of countact all the garbage I got two years ago.
But when you were thinking about writing your book, you said that you wanted to write it for women to be a model, and that's why you wanted to talk through the really hard parts. And honestly, that's a big part of why I do this podcast. And sometimes I feel about the fact that I'm asking women to really talk through the hardest part. But if it wasn't the hardest part, it wouldn't have prompted a change.
There you go. I think in a way, the nights before the book came out were more frightening than when the show came out. Why because I don't know if you've read the book, but the book is extremely Someone
called it radical honesty. I mean, I share all the bumps and the bruises and the mistakes and everything, because I thought, if the purpose of writing this book is to help other women realize their potential, realize that it's never too late to change their lives, if I leave out all the bumpy parts, if I make it look easy, then the first time they have an impediment, they'll stop and say, oh, I'm not meant to do this. Julia Fats was so easy she went from this to this success. No,
that's not how it worked. It was a very very difficult road. I've worked twenty hour days for the last eleven years. You know, I'm a warrior. I fight for what I believe in, and it's been a very difficult road. And I thought it was important to share that the road being difficult, that's okay, making mistakes, that's part of it. Like we cannot be afraid of messing up. We can't, you know. And I think a lot of it has
to do with the fact which this is. My daughter came up with this, and I thought it was genius. Guys from the time they're young learn how to deal with rejection. Why because they're the ones asking girls out. Right, even in our culture, a feminist modern culture, predominantly, it's still guys asking girls out. Now, you would say that's a bad thing. Poor guy, it's all on him. No, But what it teaches him is that it's not so bad rejection. Five women rejects him, but one woman says yes.
He just keeps going through it. So by the time a young man becomes an adult, he has learned how to to deal with rejection. He has learned to ignore
it and just move forward. Women, however, we have been taught to be polite and sweet and kind and this and that, and we're always being judged right, you're too loud, you're too flashy, you're to this, you're to that, you're not enough, you're If you think about all the things that women get accused of on a daily basis, all the voices that they're hearing are negative voices telling them what they can't be doing, and once they hit a roadblock, very often they think all these people were right, I
shouldn't have started this right. We don't deal with rejection as well because we're not as trained in it. I want people to know losing sometimes is okay because then you win more. You just got to keep going through it. You can't ever give up.
Looking back at all of these different situations, is there something that really stands out for you that at the time you thought was such a low point that you thought you really wouldn't get out of it, And now in retrospect, you look back and you feel like it's really launched you to where you are now.
Well, I'd love to say that after my divorce is over, that'll be great. You know, I would say the two most difficult moments in my life, or the day that I left my community and then you know, the time after I filed for divorce. Those those have been the most traumatic experiences of my life. One was literally moving to Mars being a complete unknown, and the other was watching all my work and building a billion dollar business being snatched for me. That was painful. So will I
say I've learned from it? Not until it's over and I've won and justice has been served. I want justice, I really do. I want justice. It's funny. I have no anger or anything like that. I just I want truth to matter. I just want justice. You know. I think I'd rather wait until it's over. Then I can say, yes, I learned so much from it. But I'm not ready to say that yet. But of course I learned a lot from leaving my community, because that's why I started
my shoe brand. Because I figured if I could time travel, I could do anything. And that moment of understanding that I'm much stronger than I thought I was, and I have capabilities I'm yet unaware of. I figured, if I could survive time travel. Of course I could build a shoe company. Of course I could create laingry like. It just didn't occur to me that I couldn't. So I did.
Thank you so much for joining us, Julia.
I had such an incredible time. You're an extraordinary woman. You are really such a wow just wow. Really, I'm impressed and I'm appreciative that we got to spend time together. I hope more and more people continue to listen to your podcast, because I think you're doing something truly valuable for humanity.
Julia continues to be her fabulous self, living in New York City, now uses her platform to uplift and support women, involving herself in politics and empower other women and their ventures. She also just started her own shapewear line called Plus Body, and she is also the author of a best selling book. You can follow Julia on Instagram at Julia Heart to stay up to date on all her latest pivots. Thanks
for listening to this episode of She Pivots. If you made it this far, you're a true pivoter, So thanks for being part of this community. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, leave us a rating Please be nice tell your friends about us. To learn more about our guests, follow us on Instagram at she pivots the Podcast, or sign up for our newsletter where you can get exclusive behind the scenes content, or on our website she pivots the Podcast Talk to You Next Week.
Special thanks to the she pivots team, Executive producer Emily eda Velosik, Associate producer and social media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson, Events and Logistics coordinator Madeline Snovac, and audio editor and mixer Nina pollock I endorse Tea Pivots