Leonard Cohen's poetic thanks as former manager and lover is jailed for harassment
Singer Leonard Cohen tells of 'relentless' strategy of woman he had fired over lost earnings
Email
As befits a man regarded as perhaps the most lyrical voice in contemporary popular music, the witness statement read to a Los Angeles court by Leonard Cohen was unusually poetic in its phrasing.
Esther Addley, no doubt another adoring Leonard Cohen fan/groupie, falls for Cohen's unusually pathetic so-called victim statement. Self-styled victim. It works well for the news media.
"I want to thank the court, in the person of your honour," Cohen told an LA county superior court judge, "for the cordial, even-handed and elegant manner in which these proceedings have unfolded. It was a privilege and an education to testify in this courtroom."
When I recently read this deranged statement to my mother, she understood that Cohen was delighted his lies on the stand worked. The judge
even permitted him to confess to perjury and then
prevented my public defenders from directly addressing the perjured testimony. So, I'm sure it
was a privilege to take the stand, lie, conceal evidence, blatantly confess to perjury, and find a judge who will tolerate it. That would be Judge Robert Vanderet.
However dignified his prose and the proceedings, Cohen's testimony marked the end of a long and decidedly ugly episode in the 77-year-old singer's life, which has culminated in the jailing of his former manager for harassment.
I don't think lying through one's teeth; lying about
a woman you worked with for approximately 17 years; or lying about the IRS is really all that dignified. Leonard Cohen was not harassed. He understood I was reporting his probable criminal tax fraud to the IRS; refused to provide me with an IRS required tax document; wrongfully altered my federal and state tax returns via a perjured and fraudulent default judgment - concealing corporate books and records from Judge Ken Freeman; refused to rescind illegal K-1s that are partnership tax documents related to a company I am not a partner on; and absolutely refused to provide me with an accounting that takes into consideration my corporate ownership interest in a number of entities; my 15% share of all intellectual property; his millions in loans (plus interest) from his so-called retirement account; etc. I have rarely heard theft referred to as dignified but then again I've never been a groupie.
Kelley Lynch, 55, was sentenced to 18 months in a Californian prison and five years probation for what the sentencing judge, Robert C Vanderet, called a "long, unrelenting barrage of harassing behaviour" towards Cohen, that the singer said had made him fear for his life.
Leonard Cohen will say anything. He's facing a major tax hit. I wonder why he thought Agent Tejeda/IRS was meeting with IRS attorneys about his testimony after receiving a subpoena from me? This didn't prevent the prosecutor, Cohen, or his lawyers, from lying about IRS matters, etc. Judge Vanderet is literally out of his mind. And now people remain convinced that he's part of the corruption in Los Angeles. I could care less what he is. As Lt. Wolak/LASD noted, after investigating the situation - he has never seen anything like this in his entire life. He realized this is an IRS matter and had no doubt that Cohen owed me millions. Of course, Lt. Wolak is a very intelligent man. Perhaps Vanderet simply fell for another celebrity fraud lying in his courtroom or perhaps he's part of the corruption in Los Angeles. I have no idea. I know this - Vanderet lies. I witnessed it personally.
Lynch, a jury had been told, had targeted Cohen with thousands of long, abusive voicemails and rambling emails that could run to 50 pages, denouncing him as a "sick man" and "common thief", and suggesting that he "needed to be taken down and shot".
The jury was exposed to many lies. They were also exposed to sound recordings that were tampered with and altered. Leonard Cohen used a sound engineer to work on his tapes. He is a sick man, a common thief (who has also stolen from Steven and Marty Machat as well as Phil Spector - he had the audacity to sell Phillip's masters to Sony), and I have no doubt that Lamasang was correct when he noted that Leonard Cohen is an asshole who is going to hell.
The emails to Leonard Cohen were a matter of lines. The threads were emails to the IRS, FBI, DOJ, Treasury, FTB, Dennis Riordan, and the news media. After all, since reporting Leonard Cohen's probably tax fraud to the IRS, Kelley Lynch has been documenting everything she has gone through in emails for these parties.
"'Cohen is going to be hung,'" the singer drily told jurors at one point, "is not agreeable to hear."
Cohen read the transcripts incorrectly; lied and said I called him an asshole - when His Holiness did - and the transcript re. this "hung" statement is incoherent and I did not say "hung." The transcripts are incoherent but as Streeter arrogantly said - in a time when the City Attorney's office is whining about budget problems: they're as accurate as her secretaries got them.
The case was given added piquancy through the long and, recently, dramatic history between the Canadian singer and his harasser. Cohensued Lynch in 2005, a year after he had dismissed her as his manager, claiming she had stolen $5m (£3.1m) from his personal accounts and investments and left him virtually penniless. The court found in his favour and ordered Lynch to pay him $9.5m, but her lawyers claimed she was unreachable, and she has never repaid the money or faced criminal charges.
This story is not that dramatic. I wasn't dismissed. Leonard Cohen heard I was reporting his tax fraud to the IRS; flew in from Montreal hysterically; met with me; asked me to hand over the corporate books and records that have now been concealed from LA Superior Court; begged me to meet with him and his tax lawyer; was hysterically calling me morning, noon, and not, and I simply refused to speak with him or meet with him and his tax lawyer to unravel their handwork.
I have misappropriated nothign but Leonard Cohen has stolen millions from me; withheld commissions; and every order, judgment, and verdict he has obtained is based on fraud, perjury, concealment, and lies. The individual who wasn't charged criminally is Leonard Cohen. While I filed a complaint with the DA's Major Fraud Unit re. Cohen's theft from me (millions), fraud, etc. they chose not to prosecute him. Watching the DA's investigator hanging out in the courtroom with Cohen and hearing that he was lunching with Cohen made things absolutely clear to me, particularly as Cohen then testified about Phil Spector and a gun. Evidently Leonard Cohen's good rock and roll gun stories about Phil Spector annoy him. And now, there are three different versions of these highly embellished Phil Spector gun stories before LA Superior Court. Cohen testified that Phillip held a gun to his head - an automatic; he wrote the prosecutor in my matter (she concealed this) that Phillip held a gun to his neck; and Phil Spector's prosecutors used a version that involves a semi-automatic held to Cohen's chest. Of course, the prosecutors forgot the bottle of wine that frequently accompanies that version of events.
The theft prompted the hard-up Cohen to begin touring again after five years in a Zen Buddhist monastery in California. Marathon tours of Europe, north America and Australasia met with ecstatic reviews and were enormously popular, going no small distance to repair the hole in his retirement fund. Billboard magazine reported that the 2009 world tour alone had earned Cohen $9.5m.
Leonard Cohen planned to tour behind Dear Heather. He just didn't want the record company pressuring him. He initially said he was going on tour and giving interviews that his financial adviser and tax lawyer defrauded him and wanted me to help him mediate against them. I refused. In fact, Boies Schiller - who I kept in close contact with - thought Cohen and his lawyer were attempting to engage me in criminal conduct and advised me to go wired to my meetings with them. Leonard Cohen borrowed millions from the retirement account - including to buy houses for his girlfriend and son, pay transaction fees on deals that were his personal expenses, and generally used that retirement account as his piggy bank.
Cohen told the court that Lynch's campaign of harassment had begun shortly after he fired her in late 2004, having been tipped off that the glowing reports he had received about his financial investments were untrue, and subsequently discovering that most of his career earnings were gone.
Leonard Cohen is a pathological liar. He heard I was going to the IRS and concocted a deranged victim story. Leonard Cohen likes to present himself as a victim. Cohen had just received $1 million for Dear Heather and this story changes every time I read it.
Lynch had been a long-time family friend – both her parents had worked with Cohen, and she had managed him for 17 years – and Cohen acknowledged in court that they had had a "brief intimate relationship" during their time working together.
Leonard Cohen and I did not have a brief intimate relationship and one wonders is his lifelong history of drug abuse - legal and otherwise - has taken a permanent toll. Perhaps Leonard Cohen actually thinks sexual harassment (having your personal manager read legal and business documents to you while you bath in a bubble bath) is an intimate relationship.
She had reacted to her dismissal, he said, by calling him repeatedly – "it started with just a few, but it eventually accelerated to 20 or 30 a day" – in tones that became more threatening, and ignoring restraining orders not to contact him. "It makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings," Cohen said. "Every time I see a car slow down, I get worried." Prosecutors showed the jury 10 binders of printed emails, which they said Cohen had received from Lynch since February 2011 alone.
Yes, Leonard Cohen loves these carefully crafted garbage comments. I would assume he's more worried about the IRS since his lawyer wrote them and said they understood when I received an email from a Treasury agent advising me to report Cohen's tax fraud to Agent Tejeda/IRS Los Angeles Fraud Unit that it was a game changer. I'm sure the fact that the IRS, FBI, DOJ, Treasury, FTB, and Dennis Riordan are copied in on my emails documenting everything really concerns him.
In his opening statements, Michael Kelly, a public defender representing Lynch, said the case was "about relationships and how relationships oftentimes get messy". Lynch, he said, is "not a celebrity. She's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame… so she's at a disadvantage here."
Yes, I'm at a disadvantage because Leonard Cohen is a wealthy and powerful celebrity who has aligned himself with the District Attorney and City Attorney, bankrupted me, and forced me into homelessness. As I like to say - this is one hell of a folksinger.
The messages, her defence argued, had been "cries for help" after the 2005 court finding had destroyed her reputation. But prosecutor Sandra Jo Streeter said that Lynch had embarked on the campaign of harassment as revenge. "This is nothing more than the unravelling of a con," she said.
Actually, I've advised the IRS that Streeter's nothing more than the unraveling of a con and have provided them with her lies about the IRS, Cohen's theft from me, and other matters. It was clear to me and at least one of my lawyers during the trial - Streeter attempted to sabotage the IRS and me. Her motive? She met a celebrity; was gushing into her cell phone about him; skipping out of the courtroom to tell Cohen that the LA Times would take one still photograph; and was evidently so nervous she was breaking items like the podium. She is an utterly pathetic woman and she, like Cohen, cannot stop lying.
The court case is the latest twist in the remarkable career of one of the most influential artists of his generation. Born in Montreal in 1934, Cohen first made his name as a poet before turning to music in the late 1960s. His lyrical gifts and highly distinctive downbeat baritone earned him a cult following among generations of music fans, along with an unshakeable reputation for morose melancholy.
There's nothing remarkable about any of this. Leonard Cohen's greed caught up with him; he has a lifelong history, from what I can tell, of tax fraud in the U.S. and Canada, he does not like to properly compensate people (see Steve Machat), and he attempted to throw me under the bus after offering me 50% community property, presumably to lie and say his advisers defrauded him. He defrauded the U.S. and state governments. He was not defrauded.
"It is my prayer that Ms Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform."
Leonard Cohen wouldn't know a prayer if he fell over one. There's nothing lowly about self-reform but he fails to notice this. Leonard Cohen is one of the most arrogant men on earth. He continues to maintain his revenge fantasies. Unfortunately for Cohen, many many people see right through him. And now, his pathetic advocate, Stephen Gianelli, is out on the prowl again. Leonard Cohen employs people to target others for him. See Ann Diamond. Steven Machat also received vicious emails from some of Cohen's fans. That's how this fraud operates.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/19/leonard-cohen-former-manager-jailed
