Millionaire dentist’s affair with lawyer’s wife triggers vicious feud

Many drivers were no doubt confused when a 48-foot billboard suddenly sprang up on the New York thruway in the spring of 2022, featuring a smiling portrait of one of Buffalo’s wealthiest cosmetic dentists. 

Towering above the busy highway, it came with a blunt warning. 

‘This doctor has acted inappropriately. Help us stop him.’ 

For years, prominent dentist and pilot Todd Shatkin claimed former lawyer Steven Ald had been waging a relentless campaign to destroy his reputation, all as revenge for sleeping with his wife over 10 years ago, according to court documents reviewed by the Daily Mail. 

Ald was accused of mailing shocking flyers to Shatkin’s patients and staff, creating websites littered with lewd allegations of Sєxual misconduct, sending ominous and threatening texts and ultimately erecting a mᴀssive roadside billboard of the doctor’s face for all of New York to see. 

The feud exploded into an extraordinary legal battle that stretched nearly four years, producing thousands of pages of sworn testimony, competing accusations and a judge who concluded that Ald was ‘obsessed’ with harming the dentist, and ordered him to pay $55,000. 

Then the bitter feud between the rich businessmen took a shocking twist. 

Investigators working for Ald uncovered evidence linking Shatkin’s own credit card to the purchase of one of the very websites he claimed was used to harᴀss him. 

Todd Shatkin is a prominent cosmetic dentist in the Buffalo area and a pilot (pictured with Leslie, his then wife) 

A mᴀssive billboard was erected in 2022 featuring Shatkin’s face and a URL to a website dedicated to ‘exposing’ Shatkin

The revelation completely reversed the case. In 2025, Justice Grace Hanlon vacated the ruling against Ald, Shatkin’s lawsuit was ultimately dismissed and the dentist abandoned his appeal and agreed to pay Ald $187,191.86 in attorneys’ fees and costs.

Ald seemingly has no regrets about his role in the legal battle against Shatkin, who now resides in a $1 million home in Palm Beach, Florida, and frequently travels back to Buffalo flying his single engine plane. 

‘Did he feel it was worth it? I think he definitely felt it was worth it on both counts,’ Joe Finnerty, who represented Ald, told the Daily Mail. 

Ald was ‘overwhelmingly happy’ with the judge’s ruling, Finnerty said. 

‘I think he obviously felt that his speech rights, his rights under the First Amendment, had been vindicated,’ Finnerty said. 

‘Mr Ald knew that he hadn’t done what the plaintiff claimed, and he always felt that it was a set up. He felt quite badly that he, a lawyer, had violated a court order, and he felt delighted to be vindicated on that front.’

Shatkin did not respond to requests for comment on his legal battle with Ald. 

According to court records obtained by the Daily Mail, the extraordinary feud was sparked in 2010, when Ald’s then-wife, identified through public records as Wendy Gough, visited Shatkin’s practice for a dental implant consultation.

The professional relationship became romantic as Shatkin, who was married, and Gough embarked on what Shatkin later described in an affidavit as a short-lived, consensual affair.

Steven Ald’s ex-wife, Wendy Gough, now lives in Arizona

Steven Ald was accused of a yearslong revenge campaign against Shatkin over an affair with his wife

Ald said in the filings that he learned about the affair in 2012. The couple divorced soon afterwards, with his wife moving to Arizona to care for her ailing father. 

After discovering the affair, Ald allegedly found the mailing lists of Shatkin’s clients and staff at Shatkin Dental Health and sent them a series of disturbing postcards. 

One postcard that was distributed to his staff and submitted in court documents read: ‘Shatkin: He is drilling more than his patient’s teeth,’ along with a domain names such as metoo-shatkin.com and metoo-buffalo.com.

In court filings, Ald justified launching the two websites to deter Shatkin from continuing to pursue his wife. The sites referred to a complaint that Ald’s wife had allegedly made to a dental professional misconduct review board, and from other supposed victims and alleged misconduct complaints.

In his own legal filings, Shatkin noted that the website had failed to disclose that the complaint had been brought by Ald and his ex-wife and was ‘dismissed as meritless because the relationship with the former wife was consensual.’

One of the websites allegedly created by Ald to harᴀss Shatkin, according to court filings

There is no record of any disciplinary actions taken against Shatkin by the New York State Education Department’s Office of the Professions, which investigates such claims, and his license to practice remains active.

Ald’s website also detailed the story of Dawn Drescher, who worked as a secretary for Aesthetic ᴀssociates in 1998 and embarked on a Sєxual relationship with Shatkin before she was fired a few months later.

Drescher later sued Shatkin and the dental practice, alleging she had been coerced into a Sєxual relationship.

Shatkin acknowledged having a ‘consensual, romantic’ relationship in an affidavit but denied any wrongdoing.

In 2001, Drescher’s lawsuit was dismissed by a State Supreme Court justice on the grounds it was ‘frivolous’. She was ordered to pay a $1,000 penalty and $15,000 in legal fees.

Shatkin’s lawyers also claimed in their filing that Ald was behind other defamatory domains including buffalopredator.com and toddshatkinthepredator.com, which they argued were registered overseas to dodge the takedown requests.

Whenever one domain was suspended, a replacement would surface within days, Shatkin’s lawyers stated in the court paper. Ald denied being behind those specific websites.

In November 2022, State Supreme Court Justice Grace Hanlon ordered that Ald cease all contact with Shatkin.

However, the harᴀssment campaign allegedly intensified.

Shatkin claimed in an affidavit that he received several threatening text messages while on a skiing holiday in Utah with his three children in February 2023.

One message allegedly warned Shatkin: ‘Suckers like you don’t deserve to live. You will die thinking of what you have done.’

‘I feel the Court needs to know that these text messages in the last few days have gone beyond being harᴀssing and now are threatening my life,’ Shatkin wrote in an affidavit.

Threatening text messages Shatkin claimed he received while on a family vacation in Utah

Threatening text messages Shatkin claimed he received while on a family vacation in Utah

Shatkin’s lawyers claimed in their court filing the texts proved that Ald was tracking the dentist’s movements – including via his private plane. Ald has denied sending the threatening messages to Shatkin. 

Shatkin further claimed in affidavits that Ald had harᴀssed and cyberstalked his daughter and sent a ‘hate-filled’ letter to his son, who works at his dental practice.

He alleged that Ald had contacted him seeking millions of dollars to ‘compensate him for the damage to his family.’ Ald denied harᴀssing Shatkin’s family or trying to extort him.

On top of the emotional toll, Shatkin said in court filings that fighting the case was impacting his business, adding that a three-day court hearing had cost him $150,000 in lost earnings.

In July 2023, Judge Hanlon ruled that Ald had violated the cease-and-desist order and awarded the dentist $55,000 in legal fees and costs. The judge wrote that Ald appeared ‘obsessed’ with Shatkin.

‘The court finds that throughout Steven Ald’s testimony he displayed the following traits, he was nervous, evasive, obstructionist and contradictory, which led this court to conclude that Steven Ald’s testimony lacked any credibility,’ Hanlon wrote.

‘The evidence, including the Defendant’s own admissions, indicate he is obsessed with harming the Plaintiff and has been since he found out about an affair between the Plaintiff and his ex-wife in 2012.’

A year later, when Ald’s legal team uncovered evidence that Shatkin had purchased one of the domain names he accused Ald of setting up, the case turned on its head. 

Investigators working for Ald tied Shatkin’s credit card to the purchase of the domain buffalo-diaries.com, which Shatkin’s lawyers had previously argued was part of the online campaign against him.

Shatkin had testified in April 2023 that he had no involvement with the sites he accused Ald of creating.

Confronted with the findings, Shatkin acknowledged in an affidavit filed in August 2024 that he had, in fact, purchased the domain, but said his earlier testimony was the result of an ‘honest mistake.’

Shatkin testified that he bought the domain after receiving a January 2023 text message he believed was from Ald referencing the domain, fearing it would be used to launch another website targeting him. 

Shatkin also claimed the continued fallout from the legal battle contributed to the collapse of his nearly 30-year marriage to his wife, Leslie. 

‘It was also emotionally grueling for me to testify on April 18, 2023, not only because I had to relive the experience of how helpless I felt when I was being subject to daily and sometime hourly harᴀssing text messages, but also because at the time I was in the process of undergoing a divorce,’ Shatkin wrote. 

Leslie Shatkin did not respond to requests for comment on her divorce from Todd or about the preceding legal battle with Ald. 

Shatkin testified that the lawsuit’s continued fallout contributed to the divorce from his wife, Leslie (pictured) 

Shatkin did appeal the judge’s ruling but ultimately abandoned his efforts, and agreed to pay Ald nearly $200,000

‘And it was painful for me, in many respects, to realize that to some extent the distress this was causing my family was because of my own actions in having had an affair with the Defendant’s wife.’ 

Judge Grace Hanlon vacated the earlier contempt finding against Ald after concluding the new evidence changed the context of the dispute.

Shatkin did appeal the judge’s ruling but ultimately abandoned his efforts, and agreed to pay Ald nearly $200,000.  

Finnerty, Ald’s lawyer, said it had been a ‘laborious,’ months-long process to tie Shatkin’s credit card to the purchase of the domain name, involving subpoenas to credit card companies and domain hosting sites both domestic and overseas.

His firm worked with investigators from the Buffalo-based Beckage Firm to discover that Shatkin had used a corporate American Express card from his dental practice to purchase the domain.

They were unable to establish who had sent the threatening text messages to Shatkin.

‘We never were able to indicate who actually posted those messages, or who purchased the other sites, but we were able to show an inconsistency between the dentist’s sworn testimony in court and the documentation with respect to at least one of those sites.

‘Mr. Ald had suspicions and he shared them with us, and we acted in concert with the Beckage Firm, on those suspicions to this extent.

‘Mr. Ald was adamant that he did not do it, and so he authorized both Beckage and us to do everything we could to prove that he did not do it, or at least trying to prove that whatever had been presented by the plaintiff in court was infirm.’

Away from their legal battles, the two adversaries strike very different figures.

Shatkin, 61, a pilot and philanthropist, recently purchased a million dollar property in Palm Beach, Florida

Ald allegedly mailed postcards like this one to Shatkin’s patients an staff, according to court filings

Shatkin, 61, a pilot and philanthropist, recently purchased a million-dollar property in Palm Beach, Florida, and flies himself between Florida and Buffalo on his Cirrus 2020 Cirrus Design Corp SR22, a high-performance, single-engine aircraft.

Over a 35-year career, he claimed to have placed more than 30,000 dental implants and trained over 20,000 dentists worldwide in a dental implant technique he developed. Before the court case, he and his wife Leslie would often be cited in the Buffalo press cutting checks to local charities.

Wendy Gough, according to her LinkedIn page, is a medical nutritionist and ALS advocate in Scottsdale, Arizona. She frequently posts about ALS on TikTok, where she has generated nearly 7,000 followers. 

Ald lives in a small village roughly 30 miles southwest of downtown Buffalo, in a quiet rural stretch of Erie County not far from the eastern shore of Lake Erie.

Though long retired from practicing law, Ald said on a personal website that he is dedicated to developing affordable housing projects, ᴀssisting low-income tenants and has a team of sled dogs he has raised and competes with which he documents on a YouTube page.