Phil Collins' ex-wife has allegedly commandeered his Miami mansion with armed guards
Phil Collins wasn’t thinking about Orianne Cevey when he sang about a woman with “the built-in ability to take everything she sees,” but he may as well have been. According to Miami Dade County court documents shared by The Miami Herald, the rocker’s ex-wife has commandeered his $33 million South Florida mansion with the help of her new husband, a 31-year old musician, and a crew of four armed guards. Per the Herald, Cevey and her makeshift army “changed the security codes for the alarms, blocked surveillance cameras and barred real estate agents from showing the house.”
Collins married Cevey in 1994 and the pair went on to have two children. They divorced in 2006, but reunited a decade later. This past August, however, Cevey allegedly broke up with the guy who wrote “That’s All” over text. Now, per the filing, she’s threatening to release private information about Collins unless he pays “a preposterous amount of money based on an oral agreement that does not exist.”
It continues, noting that Cevey and her husband, Tom Bates, are “threatening, implicitly and explicitly, to prolong their unlawful occupation of the property through force.”
Collins and his lawyers are seeking an injunction to “end the armed occupation and takeover” of the home. He also expressed concern over the “valuable and irreplaceable personal property,” which we can only assume includes those fucked-up puppets from the “Land Of Confusion” video.
“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,” Jeffrey Fisher, Collins’ attorney, said in statement to the Herald. “I’m going to use every legal remedy to get her out of the house.”
Should those legal remedies fail, John McClane is standing by.