Phil Collins Alleged Oral Gift Dispute With His Ex Devolves Into High Conflict Chicanery
Phil Collins, one of the most successful recording artists of the 1980s, with such enduring hits as In the Air Tonight and Against All Odds, is locked in a legal brawl with his ex-wife Orianne Cevey over an alleged 2015 gift worth tens of millions of dollars.
The couple originally met in 1994 when Ms. Cevey was 21 years old, and Mr. Collins was fresh off dominating the soft rock pop charts of the 1980s, but hadn’t yet won an Academy Award for writing You’ll Be in My Heart for the Disney film Tarzan.
They got married in 1999, had two children together and divorced nine years later in 2008.
Then, in 2015, after living separate lives for nearly a decade, they decided to recouple.
Ms. Cevey claims that as part of the recoupling, Mr. Collins made an oral promise to give her half ownership of his $40 million Miami home.
Unfortunately, the second shot at love was not successful and the relationship soured. But Ms. Cevey would not leave Mr. Collins’s Miami home behind. Instead, she moved in there with a man fifteen years younger, whom she had apparently married recently in Las Vegas.
Mr. Collins was then forced to go to court to get Ms. Cevey and her new husband out.
In response, Ms. Cevey, sued to claim half interest in the home based on Mr. Collins’s alleged promise. She also attacked his character, specifically what she refers to as his poor personal hygiene habits and low libido.
Eventually Ms. Cevey left the marital home, but the battle over the gift continues.
This month, her attorneys are scheduled to take a video deposition of Mr. Collins and have made it known that Ms. Cevey will have them explore in detail Mr. Collins’s failings as a boyfriend and human being.
What is especially troubling to me about this dispute is that the parties have had a relationship of more than 25 years, share two children, and each have enough money to allow them to maintain a more than comfortable lifestyle, as Mr. Collins paid out $25 million to his ex in 2009 as part of the divorce settlement for their nine-year marriage. So why are they playing out their drama in this bare-knuckle brawl?
The answer is not the money but what the money represents, which could be freedom, respect, or power.
To understand how this matter is viewed by the court (and not the court of public opinion), it may be helpful to understand, at least in general terms, the legal elements of a gift.
There are three elements to a gift:
Intent to make a present, an irrevocable transfer;
Delivery of the gift; and
Acceptance of the gift.
Does the suggestion that Mr. Collins was the worst boyfriend in the world after they started to live together boslter her claim that a gift was made before the recoupling began? Short answer, no.
I like to call these kinds of allegations, which have no legal bearing on the elements of a claim, noise.
The court is not primarily interested in noise. The court is more interested in exploring facts that satisfy the elements of gift law, facts surrounding the giving of the gift,
What happened to the couple when they started to live together again after the gift was allegedly made isn’t relevant.
But the parties, the media, and the public are focused on the noise. Why? Because noise is sensational, and gift law is boring. Talking about “elements of cause of action” doesn’t have the same bite as belittling an ex over lack of sex.
This is one reason people have such problems in high-conflict matters. They want to inflict pain instead of making the strongest legal case. Being the subject of legal abuse is painful, and the theory goes that the more pain the attorneys can inflict on the party—by making scandalous allegations, filming depositions about embarrassing personal issues, and so on—the more likely they are to induce a settlement.
One other thing to note is that there is likely another engine driving this drama. In divorce matters, and post-divorce matters such as enforcing child support and maintenance, lawyers are generally not allowed to work on a contingency basis. But this is not a divorce matter, and it is likely that Ms. Cevey’s attorneys are working for a contingency fee.
If so, Ms. Cevey is not incurring legal fees and in effect is acting in a joint venture with her attorneys to profit from any settlement.
It takes a certain type of person to try to take down a music icon based on nothing more than “he said/she said,” but even people who had children together and shared lives for a quarter of century can fall into a dumpster fire of emotion, lose their minds and do nasty things.
Don’t let that be you.