Eric Schmidt's 31-year-old ex-lover has accused the former Google CEO of stalking, abuse and “toxic masculinity” – claiming he subjected her to “an absolute digital surveillance system” as the pair secretly fought over money, a failed artificial intelligence startup and access to a sprawling Bel Air mansion, it has been revealed The Post.
Michelle Ritter – Schmidt's last publicly known extramarital loverwho has reportedly maintained an open marriage for years to Wendy Schmidt, his wife of 45 years, late last year filed for a temporary restraining order against the 70-year-old tech titan, according to bombshell court documents obtained by The Post.
In early December, Ritter and Schmidt, whose Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $44.8 billion. — entered into a “written settlement agreement” that required Schmidt to make “substantial payments” to Ritter, but the details of which remain classified, according to a motion filed Sept. 8 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
But just a week later, on Dec. 11, Ritter filed an explosive “domestic violence restraining order” against Schmidt — only to revoke it three weeks later, on Jan. 6, after the two sides apparently reached a new agreement, court documents show.
In the withdrawn TRO, Ritter alleged that the tech mogul had days earlier blocked her from accessing the website of her startup Steel Perlot, an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm in which Schmidt had invested $100 million, a source close to the situation told The Post.
“Please consider Eric’s technical background,” Ritter said in a statement. “I literally cannot make a phone call or send a personal email without supervision.”
The aspiring tech entrepreneur, who is 39 years his junior, also claims in the statement that Schmidt demanded that she agree to “silence any allegations of sexual assault or harassment and sign a knowingly false statement that such allegations never occurred.”
Ritter did not elaborate on those allegations in the unredacted portions of her statement.
Skip Miller, the 31-year-old's Los Angeles lawyer, declined to comment. A representative for Eric Schmidt also declined to comment.
In an 82-page response dated Oct. 8, Schmidt's lawyers said Michelle Ritter's “patently false complaint constitutes a blatant abuse of the court system.” But the vast majority of legal objections were redacted ahead of a court hearing in downtown Los Angeles, which is scheduled for Dec. 4.
The billionaire's legal team, led by tough-talking Los Angeles lawyer Patricia Glaser, filed a motion to seal the court documents on Oct. 8, but a final ruling on the matter has yet to be made.
In her December TRO report, Ritter stated: “Unfortunately, my ex-partner is extremely strong and capable and has used every means[s] to block my access to protected data, devices, finances or business, or to simply live in peace.”
Two days before the December lawsuit, Ritter's parents were allegedly escorted to and from dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant by a pair of private investigators. Cops were called, and when officers questioned the private party, one said he worked for a billionaire's “private security” and “didn't intend to wake him up,” according to the documents.
The documents also indicated that Ritter was staying at 1060 Brooklawn Dr. — a 15,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion that Schmidt purchased for $61 million from the heirs of the Hilton hotel dynasty. In the lawsuit, Ritter asked for exclusive access to the luxury complex and also asked the court to protect her dog, a German shepherd named Henry.
IN Article on tech news site The Information, August 2024Ritter was reportedly still holed up in the 13-bedroom mansion, “with its old Hollywood features including a sweeping staircase, marble coffee table and manicured gardens with a koi pond.”
According to the story, Ritter herself added a “red sofa shaped like lips” and a “glass cabinet filled with guitars.” Outside, “a large rainbow-colored 'Love' sign that Schmidt's friend created for one of their trips to Burning Man” sat near a wrought-iron gate at the end of the driveway, the tech site reported.
The article added that Ritter said she was “taking the next logical step to separate her life from Schmidt's by preparing to move.”
Last month, Ritter — a 2021 Columbia Law School graduate who recently represented herself in the case — listed the address of a relatively modest Beverly Hills apartment located upstairs from a Jersey Mike's sandwich shop.
In her statement, Ritter said that on Dec. 17, less than a week after she filed for the restraining order, she and Schmidt entered into an amended settlement agreement. A few weeks later, she withdrew the TRO request, but Schmidt has since failed to live up to his end of the bargain, she said.
Instead, Schmidt is allegedly pushing for an arbitration case currently pending against her, whose $75,000 fee she says she cannot afford to pay, calling it a “cynical attempt to protect the dispute and win through economic drain on resources,” according to court documents.
Ritter last appeared in The Post in May 2024. when Schmidt showed up at a swanky party in Los Angeles with his wife in her place. But new court filings reveal an explosive backstory: Just a month ago, a long-simmering dispute between the two exploded when a court mediation took a wrong turn on April 4, 2024, according to court documents.
“Schmidt and his attorney requested that mediation could proceed only if allegations of abuse and harassment were excluded,” Ritter said in a Sept. 8 statement. According to her statement, Ritter's attorney did not comply and “retaliation and consequences were immediate.”
Over the following weeks, Ritter “was deprived of all housing and access to her personal and business belongings in New York, Miami and Aspen,” according to the complaint. “Items will never be returned in full.”
The following month, Schmidt and Ritter were the subject of a lawsuit. Forbes reports that its artificial intelligence startup is mired in chaos despite Schmidt's $100 million investment. Steel Perlo “This appears to be the first time he's publicly entered into a serious business relationship with someone he's dating,” the magazine reports.
In January 2023, a Steel Perlot executive asked Schmidt for nearly $2.5 million to pay off wage and credit card debts that the company and its subsidiaries had accumulated that month, according to Forbes. “Eric copied has context,” the executive wrote, according to a copy of the email seen by Forbes. Sources told the magazine that Schmidt's family office paid the bills.
In addition to the Hilton complex in Bel Air, Ritter held meetings with employees at Schmidt's various residences, including “a Manhattan penthouse and a sprawling lakefront estate near East Hampton that Schmidt bought for $47 million in 2021,” the magazine reported.
According to an article in The Information, Ritter “had a penchant for drinking wine out of coffee mugs during business meetings and on many occasions failed to show up for meetings she arranged with her employees,” citing three unnamed former employees.
Ritter also “asked employees to buy prescription drugs for her without a doctor's order,” The Information reported, adding, “Some employees said in interviews that they were afraid of her.”
Forbes also reported that another company, Audem Management, was founded in 2021 after Schmidt and Ritter began dating and is run by Ritter's father. Audem “is used to pay butlers, housekeepers, maintenance and construction workers at properties owned by Schmidt and sometimes occupied by Ritter,” Forbes reports.
Employees told Forbes they believed they were sold a “sale of a bill” for a “vanity project,” claiming that Ritter implied that Steel Perlot's investors included Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates. Representatives for all three declined to comment to Forbes, but a spokesman for Schmidt told the publication that the billionaire “intends to continue to provide financial support to Steel Perlot.”
Schmidt was “a very, very active chairman,” Ritter told Forbes. “We have a very typical CEO-chairman relationship.” Sources told The Post that the former lovebirds officially split nearly two years ago.
Schmidt has been called the “Casanova” of Silicon Valley after years of flaunting much younger girlfriends and spoke openly about how AI could ruin dating for men.
His alleged past affairs These include fashion designers, socialites, PR people and concert pianists. In 2019, Schmidt gave his then-girlfriend Alexandra Duisberg—a blonde medical school graduate turned fashionista who was 32 years his junior—a huge 10-carat pink sapphire ring that sparked engagement rumors.
He was CEO of search engine giant Google from 2001 to 2017 and was brought in by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to build the company into a global technology powerhouse.
