Irish fashion designer found dead on boat ‘had recently finalised divorce’

An Irish-born fashion designer who was found dead on a yacht off the coast of New York state had finalised a divorce just months before.

Martha Nolan-O’Slatarra, 33, was unconscious on a boat named Ripple at Montauk Yacht Club, Long Island, when a man called 911 around midnight on August 5, the Suffolk County Police Department said.

Despite ‘good Samaritans’ trying to perform CPR, first responders pronounced her dead soon after they arrived.

US detectives said her post-mortem examination ‘did not show evidence of violence and her final cause of death is pending further examination’.

It is expected to take at least three months to produce a full report.

Court documents reported by the New York Post reveal Martha was going through uncontested divorce proceedings with her husband Sam Ryan in April, with the marriage ending months ago.

An unidentified witness told the newspaper they were ‘sound asleep’ before being woken up by a man who threw sunscreen at their boat.

They said: ‘He was running up and down, naked, screaming, “Do something!”‘

Martha’s mother Elma told the Irish Independent: ‘I don’t know what happened. We weren’t told anything about the circumstances.’

The designer, originally from Carlow around 50 miles south west of Dublin, was a regular member of the Montauk Yacht Club in the glitzy Hamptons area of New York.

Martha had moved to New York from Ireland when she was 26. She previously spoke about wanting to start her own company and brand from the age of 18.

She founded East x East, a resort-wear label in the Hamptons in 2023 and had a successful pop-up in the exclusive Gurney’s spa, a 10-minute drive from the yacht club.

After opening the spa business. she posted ‘Goals Achieved’ on TikTok on July 1, just weeks before her death.

Dylan Grace, her co-founder at East x East, said after her death: ‘We dreamed big together, laughed harder than anyone else could understand and built so much from nothing.

‘I’m truly blessed and grateful to have had you in my life.’

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