Advertisement

Phil Collins wants to end ex wife’s ‘armed occupation’ of his mansion, suits says

You may want to sit down for this one, and grab a colada while you’re at it.

The Miami Herald has viewed Miami Dade County court documents seeking an injunction against Phil Collins’ ex wife and they’re pretty jaw dropping, even by Miami standards.

In a nutshell: Orianne Cevey apparently broke up with Collins via text back in August and then went off and got hitched to her musician boyfriend in Las Vegas. Here’s the rub, despite the fact that they are so over, she still wants to live in the rocker’s $33 million mansion. Yeppers. With her new guy.

Flashback: The music legend and Cevey went through a divorce from hell after an almost 10 year-marriage. The two split in 2008 after Collins gave her a record $46.7 million, but in 2016 reconciled for the sake of their two sons.

Their two boys are apparently, thankfully, not in South Florida. Matthew, 15, is in boarding school in France, and Nic, 19, is on his own embarking on a music career, as per court papers.

Cevey is just living large with the spanking new, much younger spouse, Thomas Bates, a 31 year old local musician.

The Daily Mail posted pictures of the newlyweds, photographed holding hands on Tuesday strolling hand in hand near her Design District store, OC Jewellery.

Why won’t Cevey leave? Would you want to leave? C’mon. In all seriousness, documents say she has a fully bought and paid for $1 million plus pad in Las Vegas, where she got hitched to Bates over the summer by an Elvis impersonator.

Papers say Collins has wanted her gone since he found out about the nuptials, saying Cevey has no legal right to the property, which is “100 percent” owned by him. Court papers reveal that by Aug. 6 – four days after their Sin City wedding – the “In the Air Tonight” singer was demanding that his ex vacate.

As per the 96-page filing obtained Friday, the jewelry store owner is threatening to release private information about her famous ex unless he pays her “a preposterous amount of money based on an oral agreement that does not exist.”

Hello, extortion. Yes that word was used.

Cevey does not want to go quietly into that good South Florida night, that is for sure. The documents say that the mother of two, called Mrs. Bates in the suit, hired a crew of at least four armed guards to patrol the home, changed the security codes for the alarms, blocked surveillance cameras and barred real estate agents from showing the house.

The new couple are “threatening, implicitly and explicitly, to prolong their unlawful occupation of the property through force,” the filing states. “An injunction is urgently needed to end an armed occupation and takeover of the Phil Collins home by his ex girlfriend and her new husband, the defendants in the action.”

In the complaint, Collins also is concerned about his memorabilia, including multiple awards and instruments. He believes that there is a “substantial risk that Mrs. Bates or Mr. Bates or their agents will remove, conceal or destroy valuable and irreplaceable personal property.”

Jeffrey Fisher, Collins’ attorney, gave a statement to the Miami Herald: “Mrs. Bates, as she is now known, is trying to shake down Phil Collins for money, and as his attorney and former federal prosecutor, I have zero tolerance for that type of behavior. I’m going to use every legal remedy to get her out of the house.”

Cevey’s lawyer Frank Maister did not respond to an email Friday but told the Miami Herald earlier this week that they had no comment about the case.

“We will deal with Mr. Collins in the courthouse, not the gossip column,” Maister wrote in an email.

The hearing is at 3:30 p.m. Monday via Zoom.