Perelman’s Daughter Leads a Nasty Legal Brawl

Samantha Perelman, a 23-year-old student at Columbia University, will be at the center of a nasty family battle in a New Jersey courtroom this week.

She’s a legal novice, but she won’t be lacking for advice. Her father is Ronald O. Perelman, the 70-year-old financier and chairman of the cosmetics company Revlon, whose own fortune is estimated at roughly $14 billion. For his part, Mr. Perelman has never shied away from a court fight, having sued companies, ex-wives and a former business partner.

For years he waged war with the Samantha’s uncle James Cohen, the head of Hudson Media, magazine and newspaper wholesaler whose name is emblazoned across stores in dozens of airports around the country, charging Mr. Cohen siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars out of her inheritance. Now his daughter is leading her own charge, with her father picking up the bill.

All told, it has been an ugly legal brawl that has conservatively cost at least $60 million in legal bills so far, according to lawyers on both sides.

Like disputes over the estates of Leona Hemsley and Brooke Astor, this is a fight made for the gossip pages â€" all the more fitting given that Ms. Perelman’s mother was Claudia Cohen, a former columnist for The New York Post’s Page Six.

Until her death in 2007, Ms. Cohen was an heir to the fortune amassed by her father, Robert B. Cohen, the founder of Hudson Media. Ms. Perelman estimates that her share of the estate would have been valued at almost $700 million when her grandfather died last year, but for the actions of her uncle.

Mr. Perelman first sued Robert Cohen in 2008, but lost. In the latest round of litigation, in the New Jersey Superior Court in Hackensack, N.J., his daughter argues that her uncle, James, preyed on her sick grandfather before he died in February 2012, using “undue influence” over the 86-year-old to reduce her mother’s inheritance.

Ms. Perelman is arguing that the court should validate a 2004 will that she says would have left her mother, and ultimately her, hundreds of millions of dollars. While her mother died before her grandfather, the 2004 will said that in the event of Claudia’s death, Samantha was to inherit her mother’s share of the estate.

The nonjury trial of her lawsuit, before Judge Estela M. De La Cruz, has a witness list of more than 40 people and could take weeks to hear.

She and her father are nothing if not determined. Mr. Cohen’s lawyers say Mr. Perelman’s lawyers turned down a $100 million settlement offer in 2007, a claim that Ms. Perelman’s lawyers deny.

“What he did was greedy and not nice,” said Ms. Perelman in a videoconference interview from her father’s yacht off the shore of Greece. Ms. Perelman, who worked this summer as a production assistant on the set of the HBO show “Girls,” and is studying for a master’s in business administration, says that despite her father’s wealth her mother always wanted her to be provided for separately and she would be “incredibly heartbroken and angry to know her brother deceived her.”

Mr. Cohen, in court documents, said Ms. Perelman’s claims are “nothing short of galling” and were simply an attempt by Mr. Perelman to get a piece of Hudson Media. (Mr. Perelman said that was not true and that he “does not stand to gain anything from this litigation.”)

Mr. Cohen added that the stress of dealing with Mr. Perelman’s earlier lawsuits shortened his father’s life.

As for his niece, Mr. Cohen said his father’s decision to reduce her inheritance in the years before he died were a “rational response by him to the indignity and emotional pain” he suffered from the Perelmans’ litigation.

“My ex-brother-in-law is using Samantha as a tool to further his own gains,” he said in an interview.

The bitterness extends well beyond the courthouse. There is a legal agreement barring Mr. Perelman from entering the Cohen family’s house in Palm Beach, Fla. The Cohen family said that after Ms. Cohen’s death, Mr. Perelman crashed a family bar mitzvah and spent most of the celebration assessing Robert Cohen’s capacity, who at the time was in a wheelchair. (Mr. Perelman, who accompanied his daughter, who was invited, said he stayed only for cocktails and was not sizing him up.)

The Perelman side has its own extralegal criticisms of James Cohen, pointing to what it considers his conspicuous consumption â€" Mr. Cohen’s 25,000-square-foot house in Alpine, N.J., that includes 15 bathrooms and 13 fireplaces, according to a 2007 feature in Architectural Digest.

The legal clashes and mudslinging have their roots in happier times. Mr. Perelman met Claudia Cohn in 1984 at Le Cirque; a year later they were married. Samantha, the couple’s only child together, was born in 1990.

But four years later, the couple filed for divorce. Ms. Cohen received a healthy settlement, roughly $80 million, but the split, which played out in New York’s tabloids, was acrimonious.

In 2001 Ms. Cohen discovered she had cancer. She and Mr. Perelman had become friends again, and he spent millions of dollars trying to find a cure for her. In 2007, just before she died, Ms. Cohen changed her will to make Mr. Perelman, rather than a close friend of hers, executor of her estate.

Sparks flew immediately between the two families. Ms. Perelman said that just weeks after her mother’s death, her uncle tried to buy out Claudia Cohen’s stake in a partnership that controlled the Cohen family’s house in Palm Beach. She said the timing was hurtful, and he lowballed the price.

James Cohen’s legal team said that the Cohens were only observing the terms of the partnership and that the discussion was prompted by a call from one of Mr. Perelman’s lawyers, an allegation Mr. Perelman’s lawyers deny.

The wrangling uncovered a money transfer that is central to Ms. Perelman’s lawsuit. In 2008 the Cohen’s sold Hudson Media’s retail operations to a private equity firm, a sale that both sides agree resulted in a payment of roughly $600 million to Mr. Cohen.

Ms. Perelman says a big chunk of this money should have gone to her grandfather and when he died, it would have gone to her under the provisions of the 2004 will. Furthermore, she contends that her uncle was siphoning assets for years out of Hudson Media and into a company he alone controlled, further reducing her inheritance.

James Cohen said he owned about 90 percent of the assets that were sold, and was entitled to the cash. Separately, he said his father’s estate planning, dating back to the 1990s, intended for assets to be transferred to him.

Ms. Perelman claims her uncle has not paid taxes on any of the asset transfers, an allegation that Mr. Cohen says it not true.

In 2008, Mr. Perelman, in his capacity as executor of his ex-wife’s will, filed a flurry of lawsuits against Robert and James Cohen, the main one claiming that Robert had made an oral promise to Claudia before 1978 to leave half his fortune to her.

By now Robert Cohen was suffering from a debilitating neurological disorder called progressive supranuclear palsy, which can cause problems with thinking and even swallowing. Mr. Perelman’s team argued Robert lacked capacity to change his will and James used his influence over him to begin bleeding his father’s estate.

Mr. Cohen, in a weakened state, was deposed in this case. The videotapes of his testimony, which are expected to play a role in the trial that starts this week, show Mr. Cohen struggling to answer basic questions. Some of his answers, when he croaks yes and no, are clear. At one point he blurts out an expletive to describe the lawsuit Mr. Perelman has brought, demonstrating an understanding of the proceedings. There are also hours of tape that are seemingly unintelligible.

“In what year did you last change your will?” he is asked. He lets out a number of unintelligible grunts. “Did you say 2008?” an interpreter paid for by the Cohen family asks.

This round didn’t go well for Mr. Perelman. He lost on all but one count and a judge penalized his legal team $1.9 million for filing a “frivolous claim.” She also found Mr. Cohen was “functionally competent” and added that he might again decide to change his will, “since he has the capacity to do it at any time.”

One claim, that James used undue influence over his father to change his will, was dismissed. Since Robert was alive, he was the only person who could make that claim against James, the court found.

Now that Robert Cohen is dead, Ms. Perelman is bringing that claim, contending her uncle was heavily involved in his father’s estate planning for years, making changes that consistently benefited him at her mother’s â€" and her â€" expense.

Mr. Cohen’s response: “There are no witnesses who will say I unduly influenced my father, because I did not.”