Power: It’s Not Easy Being the Greens

Firstrust started to play hardball. In early March, Gadget Boy was fired, and Marla tried to close her Legacy account at Firstrust. But the manager of the Market Street branch, Marla claims, told her there was a levy on it. She did manage to withdraw $855,000 from her personal account.

A week later, Marla, DiDio and Epstein were sued in Philadelphia, and Marla in Montgomery County, for, among other things, conspiring to start a rival bank. After another week, Marla fought back with a tit-for-tat lawsuit, delivered to Richard the day before his 53rd birthday. (“Happy birthday!” its cover letter states.) Marla claims he and his father illegally froze Legacy’s account and concocted a scheme to encourage her to believe that their “father and son tag team” wanted Legacy to succeed even as they orchestrated its failure, to pressure Marla to settle the divorce case.

Perhaps Marla’s mind-set was informed by an earlier marital dustup in the Green family. Her sister-in-law, Betsy Green, claimed she was pressured to settle in her ongoing Green v. Green battle. In that divorce, Betsy Green was sued in four courts, and a holding company run by Richard filed foreclosure notices on the couple’s Gladwyne and Jersey Shore homes for nonpayment of mortgage, though Betsy claims in court that the supposed mortgage had been delinquent for years. While Betsy was awarded the second-highest spousal and child-support stipend — $37,000 a month — in the history of Montgomery County, a lawsuit she filed last year claims she has received only a fraction of it.

As for Marla, she found herself, upon arriving home from a trip last spring, detained at customs so the officer could inform her that her husband was seeking a protection-from-abuse order against her, evicting her from his office and gym. She later filed her own PFA petition and alleged that Richard concealed her jewelry and towed her Jaguar. She appended pages upon pages of increasingly incendiary complaints.

As the battle rages on, you might note the irony: Marla was almost certainly better off playing the socialite rather than getting involved in business. Raoul Felder himself told the New Yorker that divorce law is “unfair to men” for rewarding women with half the estate even if they haven’t earned any of it. But had Marla never tried to earn it, she might have kept her divorce in divorce court. No doubt everyone will end up doing just fine. But the only ones better off will be the Greens’ lawyers.