Liza Minnelli: The fully story of Hollywood's dirtiest divorce

The Minnelli-Gest wedding was, of course, an unforgettably gruesome spectacle. The bride was apparently spaced out on pills, the groom
terribly distorted after multiple adventures in plastic surgery, and the wedding party a bizarre collection of showbusiness survivors and
hangers-on.
You make me a complete person, mewed music promoter David Gest, as matron of honour Elizabeth Taylor and best man Michael
Jackson looked on. You are everything to me and I will love you for ever.
At that, he set about kissing Liza Minnelli in a way which left those present at the Regent Hotel in New York agog, likened by one witness to
a drowning man eating a watermelon.
Minnelli s supporters hoped the marriage in March 2002 would bring her a new lease of life. She had been at a low ebb when she met Gest
17 stone, infirm and walking with a cane. She had also been in rehab five times in the preceding ten years.
He was expected to preside over the professional and personal rebirth of this most troubled star.
Instead, the marriage failed, and their split has resulted in an explosive bout of dirty-linen washing complete with allegations of assault,
drunken rages, and this week, most extraordinarily of all, an accusation that the Oscar-winning star may have exposed her husband to a
sexually transmitted disease.
In papers filed at the Supreme Court in Manhattan, Gest says that Minnelli carried the herpes virus but failed to tell him. He claims he feared
he had been infected by her following unprotected sex during the marriage, and went on to seek medical attention for a rash on his body
and other symptoms .
He is demanding damages for the anxiety it caused him and his loss of earnings during this period.
Even in the scandal-drenched world of Hollywood, no one can remember anything quite like this divorce. What everyone wants to know is:
can Gest possibly sink any lower?
And will Minnelli a fragile, pampered old-time star in her 60s be destroyed by these disgraceful, sordid and public allegations?
One thing is certain: Minnelli may spend the rest of her life regretting and paying for her brief fourth marriage to this oddball manager
and promoter, with his slippery manner and habit of wearing sunglasses indoors.
Many said at the time of the wedding that they believed the groom was a poor choice, being homosexual. Gest has denied this, claiming to
have had a long romance with a woman before he met Minnelli. But the brevity of the marriage, and his extremely feminine aspect, have left
many doubting this version of events.
The whole episode has unhappy echoes of the melodramatic disasters suffered by Minnelli s mother, Judy Garland, who was addicted to
drink and pills for her entire adult life and unhappily married five times twice to men who were bisexual. Those demons cast a long shadow
over Liza s predicament.
She concedes she is bewildered and terribly hurt by events and has been trying to stay out of the limelight, mostly locking herself away
with a retinue of advisers and supporters in her 4 million New York penthouse apartment.
She has barely worked since the marriage fell apart, appearing in a handful of episodes of a TV sitcom and starring as a therapist in a
forgettable straight-to-video sex comedy.
Do you remember how you felt when you were in school and somebody said something nasty about you behind your back? she says.
That s what it feels like when somebody lies about you.
One in her camp told the Mail this week that she was in a vulnerable position: Liza is trying to be positive but we are all completely on the
floor about the lies he (Gest) is telling. There doesn t seem to be an end to it.
The marriage went wrong almost from the start. It is thought that Minnelli had rebelled early on at the regime imposed by her ambitious
husband. He wanted her to restrict herself to 900 calories a day and undertake
international Liza s Back concert tours, CDs etc.
By way of encouragement, he was said to scream at her regularly that she was fat and disgusting .
Their first anniversary party was postponed when Liza was admitted to a clinic to detox. To no-one s surprise, after 16 months it was
announced the union was over.
At first, the whispers about what had gone wrong were merely lurid. There were claims that Liza s elderly pet terrier, Lily, had been put
down without her knowledge while she was out shopping.
There were also tales that Gest had dumped her furniture in the street, and stories about her record collection being covered in paint.
Old friends complained that Gest constantly changed the couple s phone numbers in New York to prevent them from getting in touch.
Some suspected, as the marriage ended, that Gest had designs on her collection of Warhol originals. But more recently the fight has got
heroically nasty and it has become obvious that Gest wants much, much more than just a few paintings.
Since 2003, he has filed hundreds of pages of accusations against Minnelli in the Supreme Court of Manhattan. He has accused her of
fighting him, biting a security aide and sexually harassing a chauffeur.
She has been described as running through a hotel suite in London extremely intoxicated... uncontrollable...angry . He has portrayed her
as a sneaky, habitual and violent drunk.
And this week, Gest delivered his coup de grace the herpes accusation. His legal team claim that, because she did not tell him about the
disease before their pre-nuptial agreement was signed, she has perpetrated a fraud.
According to documents filed by Gest s lawyer, Lawrence A. Omansky, under New York law a person who knows he or she has an
infectious disease and has sexual relations with another is guilty of a misdemeanour .
This may mean the pre-nuptial could be judged invalid leaving Gest free to claim a far larger part of Liza s fortune, estimated at around
$60 million.
Meanwhile, she says she feared for her life while they were together, and accuses Gest of poisoning her and controlling her with drugs. Any
physical attacks on him should be seen in this light, say her legal team.
Her lawyers also dispute Gest s many claims about his physical state. He says he has to take a cocktail of drugs due to the pain her
batterings have left him in, and is now anorexic, averse to bright lights and beset by nausea.
They will claim many of these ailments are imaginary and that others are due to a botched hair transplant operation rather than anything
Minnelli may have done.
Ominously, the former couple and their lawyers have yet to begin thrashing out the divorce proper. The current legal imbroglio is over a $10
million suit started by Gest in 2003, suing his estranged wife for loss of work and illness caused by the marriage.
The case has suffered many delays because both sides are constantly arguing over minor details about what can and can t be heard in
court.
One major delay was in getting all of Gest s telephone records, another was caused because he said his accounts were not kept on
computer.
There are also arguments over whether Gest s doctors should be allowed to submit video evidence from Hawaii. And he wants the right to
question a staff member at a rehab centre who is also Minnelli s friend while Minnelli claims that conversations inside rehab are
confidential.
The only people enjoying this bitter dispute are, naturally, the lawyers, whose fees clock up as the case drags on. This spring, Judge Jane
Solomon warned both sides that she had had enough of their whiny garbage , adding: It s undignified and it will stop.
Domestic violence claims
Fat chance of that! Hostilities opened when Gest filed his first, startling deposition. His lawsuit painted himself as a victim of domestic
violence and detailed numerous assaults which he claimed his wife had committed.
He said the worst attack occurred while they were staying at the Connaught Hotel in London in June 2003, when she threw a lamp at him
and began beating (Gest) about the head and face with her fists without relenting...Alcohol gave her remarkable force and strength.
On another occasion, he says she also beat him up when he caught her drinking vodka and tried to put her into rehab. He claims that she hit
him in and about the head with open hands and closed fists, employing all her strength... Throughout the physical attack, she hurled insults
and shouted: Don t make me go, I don t want to go.
And he alleges her drinking was so bad that when she gave herself a black eye after a drunken fall in September last year, they lied to the
media that she had had a cancerous growth removed from under her eye.
These were astonishing, embarrassing allegations, even given Minnelli s well-known struggle with alcoholism.
Gest insisted that as a result of the beatings, he suffered from virtually constant, unrelenting pain in the head as well as vertigo, nausea,
hypertension, scalp tenderness, insomnia, dysphoria (a feeling of being ill at ease), photosensitivity and phonophobia (hypersensitivity to
sound) and needed 11 different medications a day to deal with the injuries.
He has had a CT scan and MRI scan. His court papers claim that his injuries are long-term: He continues to experience sensitivity to light
and sound, recurrent nausea, vomiting and anorexia.
Gest said that Minnelli also attacked his production manager, Steven Benanav, and bit his security director, Willie Green, on the chest during
one of her rampages.
Since the suit was filed, things have only become worse for Minnelli. Mohammed Soumayah, her one-time chauffeur, has also submitted a
lawsuit seeking damages for personal injuries sustained while working for her.
The 58-year-old father-of-two, who worked for her for more than ten years, described her as a violent, sex-starved maniac who harassed him
with demands for physical satisfaction, and abused him until he agreed to sleep with her for fear of losing his job.
Minnelli has now filed a counterclaim for 150,000, saying Soumayah is trying to destroy her. He has been asked to appear in court to back
up Gest s allegations of assault.
And so the case grinds on.
Gest is now demanding that Minnelli be forced to produce all of her bank statements, tax returns, and any contracts, invoices and/or paid
receipts .
He also wants her to disclose what evidence she has for her defence, which is to claim that he is inventing his injuries.
Defendant (Minnelli) seeks to show that all of plaintiff s visits to physicians were part of an elaborate hoax and seeks to use all medical
records to impeach him, Gest s lawyer notes.
The Minnelli team are not impressed by the herpes issue: Gest does not, for the record, carry the virus. They believe that because he
couldn t find anything wrong with himself, he invented the rest of his injuries and/or that he is a hypochondriac and he is inventing and/or
creating illusory injuries.
One problem they do face is that Liza initially claimed she had never hit Gest. Now she is set to argue that she only hit him with good
reason . Gest s team warn that the contradiction will allow them to argue that she is mentally unfit and not a credible witness.
The suit continues: Defendant has conjured up claims that she was living in fear of plaintiff, obviously laying the groundwork for a self-
defence argument.
The second relevant anticipated defence is that defendant claims that she lived in fear that plaintiff was drugging her and that, essentially,
any injury plaintiff might have sustained from defendant s physical blows was essentially self-defence.
Minnelli says a string of witnesses will back up her story, including an administrator at her rehab clinic, the Caron Foundation, in whom she
has confided.
The strain on Minnelli has been considerable. She collapsed recently and ended up in hospital after falling out of bed when drunk at 4am.
She needed treatment which included a two-day stay in the psychiatric unit of a New York hospital.
She admitted of her alcoholism: My whole life, this disease has been rampant. I inherited it, and it s been horrendous, but I have always
asked for help.
And what of Gest? He was most recently seen dining at Le Caprice in London s Mayfair with his old friend Petula Clark, apparently
untroubled by the anorexia and nausea he has been so keen to trumpet to the courts.
Gest once promised Minnelli that her star would again burn as brightly as it did in Cabaret; that the world would watch in awe of her talents.
Instead, he has delivered an object lesson in putting on a far more sordid spectacle than that.
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