Article Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post
By Daphne Duret
Published July 24, 2016
On a weekday in February 2013, Marvel Entertainment
executive Ike Perlmutter and his wife, Laura, arrived at a law office to
answer questions related to a legal dispute with one of their neighbors in
the million-dollar Palm Beach condo community Sloan’s Curve.
The attorneys offered them bottled water to drink, asked them to thumb
through documents — both seemingly perfunctory tasks litigants in civil
cases perform daily.
What the Perlmutters
didn’t know then, but would soon find out in a series of
events that unfolded like the pages of a graphic novel that
could only be set in Palm Beach, was that every item they
touched had been treated with a special solution designed to
extract their DNA.
Their neighbor, Harold Peerenboom, sent the items off for
testing and, according to court records, found a lab that
purported to find genetic evidence linking the couple to a
vicious letter-writing campaign accusing him of child
molestation and double murder.
Now, in the latest act of the drama whose villain could be
left for a Palm Beach County jury to decide, the billionaire
comic book executive has filed his own lawsuit against
Peerenboom, his lawyers and others he claims mounted an
international conspiracy to illegally obtain the couple’s
DNA and defame them with false accusations. |
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Sloan’s curve condos at 2100 S. Ocean Blvd., Palm
Beach.
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Famed attorney Roy Black, whose usual work includes
fighting to keep such celebrities as Justin Bieber and such well-heeled
clients as Wellington polo mogul John Goodman out of criminal trouble, has
made a foray into civil court — first to defend Perlmutter and more recently
to file a counterclaim on his behalf.
“Although Peerenboom purports to have provided even-handed and unbiased
assistance to law enforcement officials in connection with their efforts to
identify the culprit responsible for the alleged letter-writing campaign,
Peerenboom has betrayed the public trust for his own pecuniary gain,” Black
wrote in the suit.
As of Friday, Peerenboom’s attorneys had yet to file a response in court but
in an email called the accusations in the courterclaim “defamatory,
mean-spirited” and meritless. Through the years, Peerenboom has made plenty
of accusations of his own in the case that appears to have all started with
a series of social snubs sparked by a disagreement about the direction of
the condo community’s offering of tennis lessons.
Peerenboom, a Canadian businessman and political figure so well-connected
that the nation’s prime minister was one of his bedside visitors when he had
surgery years ago, found himself in the minority at Sloan’s Curve when he
wanted to entertain the possibility of hiring a new director of the
community’s tennis program.
Tennis pro Karen Donnelly had been in charge of the program since 1993, and
Perlmutter and others wanted her to stay.
Tensions boiled over and resulted in at least three lawsuits dating to 2011.
In January 2013, Peerenboom sued the Perlmutters, Donnelly and fellow
Sloan’s Curve resident Stephen Raphael, saying that they brought a false
lawsuit against him to ward off his efforts to change the program. He also
claimed, among other things, that Laura Perlmutter “ostracized” Peerenboom’s
wife “by excluding her from social events, including a long-standing social
card game at a nearby country club.”
And then came the claims that someone – Perlmutter, Peerenboom said he
believes – started a 1,300-plus letter campaign to friends, family,
neighbors and colleagues, accusing the Canadian business executive of
various criminal acts.
The letters claim that Peerenboom was a pedophile and that he was behind the
murder of a couple in Hallandale Beach. There were also letters to prison
inmates encouraging them to see Peerenboom on Palm Beach when they were
released, court records allege.
In hopes of helping police solve these crimes, Peerenboom said, he enlisted
the services of private investigators, including one from a DNA lab who
Peerenboom said suggested collecting the Perlmutters’ water bottles when
they came in for depositions in another one of the lawsuits.
Peerenboom says he only found out shortly before the depositions that the
investigator treated sheets of paper the couple would handle in their
interview with a special material that would collect their genetic material.
They collected evidence from items the Perlmutters handled and sent it for
testing. Experts at one of the labs reported that Laura Perlmutter’s DNA was
a “match” to one of the envelopes of the letters in the writing campaign,
but to date have not produced the DNA analysis. Peerenboom’s camp also
reportedly destroyed all the original copies of the letters.
But the biggest problem? According to Florida law, it is a crime to obtain
someone’s DNA without their knowledge.
That issue is what brought the fight into Palm Beach Circuit Judge Meenu
Sasser’s courtroom this year, when Perlmutter’s lawyers tried to compel the
testimony of Peerenboom lawyer William Douberley.
Perlmutter wanted Doublerley to answer questions about discussions he had
with Peerenboom about the DNA collection, but Douberly in a 2015 deposition
asserted his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination, and
Peerenboom said his now former attorney should be exempt from answering the
question because of attorney-client privilege.
“A person who knows or believes he is committing a crime does not do what
Harold Peerenboom did,” his attorney Marc Kasowitz said in court records,
adding simply: “If he had thought he was committing or planning to commit a
crime, he would not have told police about it.”
Peerenboom testified in the hearing that he only became aware of the state
statute against DNA collection in April 2013, months after the depositions.
Sasser, in a ruling on the matter issued July 1, sided with Perlmutter. That
means, that Doublerley has to answer questions about his conversation with
Peerenboom that would otherwise be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Her 22-page ruling was a scathing rebuke of Peerenboom, whose testimony at
the hearing she found incredible.
Sasser, in her ruling, said Peerenboom admitted in his testimony that he has
gone through the trash of other Sloane’s Curve residents in attempts to
obtain DNA evidence, but said it was his lawyer’s idea to collect the DNA
from the Perlmutters in the deposition.
“Most significantly, upon cross-examination, Peerenboom admitted to his
involvement in the scheme to collect the Perlmutters’ DNA under false
pretenses and further admitted that he had continued to knowingly violate
the DNA statute after April 2013,” Sasser wrote.
No new deposition date has been set for Douberley. After the ruling, Black
in an email called the ruling “a huge and decisive victory for the
Perlmutters.”
“Further, there is no DNA match to either of the Perlmutters and Mr.
Peerenboom, who the Court found not credible, knows it,” Black said.
Peerenboom’s attorneys in an email said they will move forward with the
lawsuit, noting that Sasser’s ruling did not deal with the merits of the DNA
evidence.
As for the countersuit, Kasowitz said it was full of “irrelevant allegations
that dredge up previously debunked smear campaigns” — a reference to
Peerenboom’s political fights in Canada, which Perlmutter claims in the
lawsuit earned him the moniker “Scary Harry Perry” in Canadian newspapers.
Kasowitz said the comic book executive might have revealed more about
himself than about Peerenboom with his latest filing.
“What is particularly noteworthy, however, about the ugly tone of this
document — which the Perlmutters have evidently filed in order to harass and
injure Mr. Peerenboom — is just how much it has in common with the anonymous
hate mail campaign that is the subject of Mr. Peerenboom’s pending lawsuit
against the Perlmutters,” Kasowitz said.
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