Cohen Awarded $9M Judgment

Leonard Cohen’s former business manager was slapped with a $9.5 million judgment in Los Angeles Superior Court March 1st, but Cohen might not ever see the cash.

A Superior Court judge granted Cohen, 71, a default judgment February 27th after Kelley Lynch, his former business manager, failed to respond to allegations that she moved $5 million from his retirement savings. The suit claims Cohen was left with about $150,000, with more than $8 million missing.

But locating Lynch might be difficult.

“She’s hard to get in touch with. I don’t know where she lives now, and I don’t have a phone number for her,” said Scott Edelman, Cohen’s attorney. “We don’t know what she did with the money. … But she knows what’s going on because she leaves me phone messages at all hours.”

Cohen filed the suit against Lynch last summer.

Another defendant in the suit, tax professor and lawyer Richard Westin, reached an out-of-court settlement with Cohen February 13th. Details of that settlement were not revealed.

Last summer, Cohen told Canadian magazine Maclean’s he found that Lynch had linked her American Express card to his checking account. Cohen said he was tipped about the theft by the boyfriend of a Lynch employee.

The Zen Buddhist, Canadian icon Cohen told Maclean’s he originally wanted to start over and walk away from the matter, but he learned he was responsible for the missing funds and taxes on them, a number adding up to millions.

It’s not the first bit of financial turmoil Cohen has been a part of. Cohen’s lawsuit against Lynch came after a defamation lawsuit against Cohen filed by Neal Greenberg, his financial adviser, who said Cohen and his attorney attempted to ruin the adviser’s reputation and pressured him into going after his own insurance company to get money lost from Cohen’s account.