Judith Giuliani - First Marriages, Medical Sales Career, Motherhood

First Marriages, Medical Sales Career, Motherhood

After graduation, Stish worked for a few months as a nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania; it was the only time in her career that she engaged in direct patient care. On December 8, 1974, at the age of 19, she and Jeffrey Ross, a 25-year-old medical supply salesman, eloped to Las Vegas and were married at the Chapel of the Bells. The couple soon relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina where they both took jobs with U.S. Surgical Corporation in 1975 selling medical supplies in the Southeast; Judi Ross specialized in showing doctors in operating rooms a new surgical stapling method; she was judged excellent at her work. She and Ross separated amicably after four years, and their marriage ended in divorce which was finalized on November 14, 1979. The couple had no children.

Five days later, on November 19, 1979, Judi Stish Ross married wallpaper salesman Bruce Nathan, whom she had met during her separation from her first husband. Judi Nathan stopped working around that time; the couple lived in Charlotte for two years, then moved to Atlanta, Georgia. The Nathans adopted a daughter, Whitney, in March 1985. The family moved to Manhattan in 1987 and Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles in 1991. During these years, she briefly worked for DynaMed Surgical in California. She also converted from Roman Catholicism to Presbyterianism.

The Nathans' marriage fell apart during the early 1990s and led to a well-publicized divorce case and custody battle. She accused him of physical abuse, and he accused her of physical and mental abuse, along with being an "unfit mother" who kidnapped their daughter and engaged in social opportunism. The Nathans' divorce was finalized in 1992 and she won primary custody of their child. Nathan, who came to prefer the name Judith around this time, moved back to New York in March 1992, enrolling her daughter at the Spence School in Manhattan. Nathan used her alimony payments to cover part of the tuition for her daughter; the rest came from scholarships her friends helped to secure. Nathan lived with friends for almost a year, borrowing pots and pans. Now a single mother, her parents took out a second mortgage to help her pay her legal bills; she worked as a dental receptionist and attended New York University computer and business classes at night and on weekends. Nathan received a New York nursing license and began working in 1993 as a pharmaceutical sales representative with the hospital sales division of Bristol-Myers Squibb, selling surgical supplies, anti-depressants, and antibiotics in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn; one of her specialties was infectious diseases. Around this time Judith became romantically involved with Woodhull Hospital clinical psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis; she and her daughter lived with him for four years, until early 1999. Meanwhile, she became one of Bristol-Myers' top sales managers, by 1997 managing a 12-person sales team.