The Holy or the Broken by Alan Light

Author:Alan Light [Light, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-12-03T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

While the “Hallelujah” industry was expanding, it turned out that Leonard Cohen himself was not fully able to reap the benefits. In 2004, he discovered that for years, his manager, Kelley Lynch, had been defrauding him of millions of dollars, siphoning off a large amount of money that he presumed was being amassed for his retirement. The situation turned into a legal nightmare when Lynch simply disappeared. Cohen, now seventy, sued Lynch, accusing her of stealing $5 million from his personal accounts and investments while he lived at Mt. Baldy.

“It was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation,” he told the New York Times. “I didn’t even know where the bank was.”

In March 2006, a judge granted Cohen a default judgment in the case, ordering Lynch to pay $9.5 million. She ignored the suit and did not respond to a subpoena issued for her financial records. It was generally assumed that Cohen would never be able to collect the awarded amount, nor any of the money with which Lynch absconded. He suddenly found himself needing to make decisions about his career based on economics, which didn’t seem to sit well with the usual pace of his output.

As much of a disaster as Cohen’s financial situation was, it turned out that things with Lynch actually got much uglier than anyone suspected. Years later, it emerged that after he dismissed her as his manager, she began calling and e-mailing him with hostile, sometimes threatening messages. Cohen obtained numerous restraining orders against her in California and in Colorado, where she had moved. Lynch’s actions continued to escalate until, in 2012, Cohen pressed charges against her—five counts of violating protective orders and two counts of repeatedly contacting Cohen with the intent to annoy or harass.

When the trial opened in April, Cohen was the first witness to appear in Los Angeles County Superior Court. He testified that he and Lynch had a business and personal relationship for about seventeen years; she had been an assistant to his former manager, Marty Machat, and took over in the role when Machat died, in 1988. He said that at one point, they had a “brief” intimate relationship.

Cohen said that as soon as he fired Lynch as his manager, the threatening messages began, with some voice mails lasting up to ten minutes and e-mails that ran as long as fifty pages. “It started with just a few now and then, but it eventually accelerated to twenty or thirty a day,” he said. The caller leveled accusations and threats at him and said that he “needed to be taken down and shot.”

“It makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,” Cohen said. “Every time I see a car slow down, I get worried.” He added, “My sense of alarm has increased over the years as the volume of e-mails has increased.” (The case focused specifically on messages left between February 2011 and January 2012.)

Over several days, prosecutors played voice mails said to

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