Who

The wife of Jerry Seinfeld, Jessica Sklar Seinfeld is the slightly unoriginal author of Deceptively Delicious and the founder of the non-profit organization Baby Buggy.

Backstory

Nina Sklar—she legally changed her first name to Jessica in 1995—was raised in Burlington and studied at the University of Vermont, before moving to New York where she worked in PR for Golden Books and Tommy Hilfiger. Jessica first hit the headlines in 1998: Less than a month after she married Eric Nederlander, the heir to the Broadway theater empire, the tabloids reported that she'd ditched her hubby for star comedian Jerry Seinfeld, whom she'd reportedly met at the Reebok Club on the Upper West Side. The jilted Nederlander slammed Sklar in the press and called her a "gold-digger." (Sklar, for her part, has claimed their relationship was already in shambles when she met Jerry.) Jessica and Jerry married in 1999 and she's since maintained an active presence on the social scene, founded a non-profit (she runs Baby Buggy, which provides clothing and food to struggling young mothers), and authored a book.

Drama

In 2007 Jessica released Deceptively Delicious, a cookbook based on hoodwinking your kids into eating healthy foods. A big-time promo campaign—including a priceless stop on the set of Oprah—helped the book leap to the No. 1 slot on the non-fiction bestsellers list, but the debut author was soon mired in controversy when it was revealed that a suspiciously similar tome, The Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine, had been published months earlier. (About 15 of Seinfeld's recipes were nearly identical to Lapine's concoctions.) Jerry leapt to his wife's defense in the New York Times and on the Late Show with David Letterman, in which he referred to Lapine as a "wacko"; Lapine has since struck back with a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement and defamation.

Personal

Jerry proposed to Jessica in 1998 over dinner at Balthazar; the couple married on Christmas Day in 1999. They now have three kids—Sascha, Julian, and Shepherd—and split their time between a vast apartment at the Beresford, a compound in Amagansett which they bought from Billy Joel for $32 million in 2001, and a spread in Telluride, Colorado.