The Bin Ladens

Christine Hartunian, now a struggling artist who lived in a gated community in west Los Angeles, did not initially object, but she opposed the idea that Sibba would take up indefinite residence in Saudi Arabia. She was struggling financially; she had little money in her bank accounts and relied on loans from her parents. Christine flew to Jeddah to visit with Sibba at the Bin Laden compound.³

By the summer of 2002, her daughter had developed some health problems; these were not life threatening, but they required a specialist’s care. Doctors in Saudi Arabia referred her to specialists in Southern California, and Christine took Sibba back to Los Angeles. Ibrahim, however, wanted Sibba to return to live with him and his new wife in Saudi Arabia; he argued that Sibba could get the treatment she required in the kingdom, and that she would be better off attending school there and living among the Bin Ladens. Sibba’s parents could not reach an agreement about where she should live, as required by their divorce decree, and Christine believed she was about to lose custody of her only daughter to a Saudi system where she enjoyed few legal rights. She tried initially to represent herself in the court proceedings, but in about August 2002, her family called Jack Kayajanian onto the case.

Kayajanian pored through the old divorce files, rushed to Los Angeles Superior Court, where the original decree had been filed, and won an order that would at least delay Sibba’s departure for Jeddah. Ibrahim hired a Santa Monica law firm that specialized in divorce; the lead partner on the case was a woman, as were two of her associates. These lawyers buried Kayajanian with motions and papers—new filings seemed to arrive almost around the clock. Kayajanian decided to concentrate on the medical issue, arguing that Sibba could obtain the care she needed only in the United States.⁴

Ibrahim refused to travel to America for a hearing. Because of September 11, he feared for “my own safety” because of “the backlash against people of Arabic descent in the United States…The fear is real and justified, given the notoriety of our last name. I know that our surname triggers very strong reactions in many individuals.” Judge Roy L. Paul agreed to permit Ibrahim to testify by live video transmission from a studio in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, so that he would not have to travel to Los Angeles.⁵

On October 4, 2002, Kayajanian and Ibrahim’s lawyers arrived at a special secure courtroom in Los Angeles known as “the bank,” where high-profile cases involving Hollywood celebrities were sometimes convened. Ibrahim appeared on a video monitor.⁶

Judge Paul ordered Ibrahim’s testimony to be sealed, ostensibly to protect Sibba from possible vigilante violence. Open court records nonetheless make clear what happened at the hearing: By day’s end, Kayajanian had won on the crucial custody question. Judge Paul ruled that Sibba should attend school in Southern California and receive medical treatment in the U.S. The judge ordered Ibrahim Bin Laden to put up a $4 million bond to ensure that he would return his daughter to her mother after summer vacations and religious holidays. For almost a decade, Sibba’s custody arrangements with the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia had been based on mutual trust. On both sides, that era was gone.⁷

IBRAHIM AND CHRISTINE had their difficulties, but their troubles remained unpublicized, and they paled beside the epic divorce between Yeslam and Carmen Bin Laden. Their lawsuit began in the Swiss courts during the early 1990s, but like many Bin Laden endeavors, it soon hopped international boundaries. Carmen sued Yeslam in Los Angeles, seeking (unsuccessfully) to prove that Ibrahim’s Bel Air house should be considered one of her marital assets because it had been purchased in Yeslam’s name. She also alleged that her husband had improperly sold jewelry originally purchased in Beverly Hills that belonged to her. Motions, pleadings, and sworn declarations piled up on two continents, but the years passed without resolution. The shock of September 11 seemed only to spur on both sides. After the terrorist attacks, Carmen chose what many Saudis would regard as the nuclear option: she wrote a book.

Inside the Kingdom became an international bestseller. Its tone was often respectful toward the Bin Ladens and even toward Yeslam, but Carmen suggested that the family had probably continued to support Osama long after the time it claimed to have cut him off. Carmen also offered this opinion repeatedly in television and newspaper interviews during her book tours in Europe and America. In addition, she was outspoken about the second-class condition of women in Saudi society, and she criticized the Islamic system of family law that empowered men in custody and divorce struggles. The descriptions in her book of the privileged but suffocating lives of Saudi women—accounts drawn from Carmen’s years as a wife and mother in the Bin Laden compound in Jeddah during the 1970s and early 1980s—were particularly powerful.

The book’s success exacerbated the strains between her ex-husband, Yeslam, in Geneva and the senior Bin Laden brothers around Bakr in Jeddah. Carmen might not be the world’s most compliant woman, but Bakr and the brothers around him tended to blame Yeslam for Carmen’s decision to go public. Presumably money had been one motivation in her decision to write the book: Why couldn’t Yeslam reach a settlement with her that would satisfy her? Why had he allowed the divorce to drag on for so long? How had Yeslam allowed himself to become estranged from his own daughters—what kind of father would permit this?⁸ There had been many divorces among the Bin Ladens, but none with the Dickensian duration or humiliating public profile of this one.

Yeslam and Carmen were both entrepreneurial; in the aftermath of September 11, they competed not only in their divorce litigation but also for control of the Bin Laden brand. Through her book tours, Carmen became the most famous Bin Laden in the world after Osama. Yeslam seemed determined to catch up.

On her side, Carmen had an ally in this contest—her eldest daughter, Wafah, who followed her into the limelight after 2003. Wafah had been a graduate student at Columbia University at the time of the September 11 attacks; she lived in a $6,000-per-month rented loft in New York City’s West Village. She was a strikingly beautiful woman in her early twenties who aspired to a career as a popular singer. To promote her first recording, she sat for an interview with Barbara Walters. Wafah seemed to be in search of the marketing equivalent of a jujitsu move, in which a wrestler uses an opponent’s momentum as a weapon against him—in Wafah’s case, she would flip Osama’s notoriety into her own pop music career. She posed for come-hither pictures in a popular American men’s magazine, GQ. She changed her surname to Daufour, her mother’s maiden name, but Wafah did not shy away from her status as a Bin Laden; this brought the media to her door. And yet, she said, “I feel that everybody’s judging me and rejecting me. Come on, where’s the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are just like yours.” She spoke no Arabic and did not carry a Saudi passport. Perhaps her feeling of isolation was genuine, but there was also a hint of rock-and-roll posture in her complaints—she was an ingenue rebel without a culture. Her CD sales proved to be modest.⁹

Yeslam raced to the marketplace ahead of his estranged wife and daughter in one respect: In February 2001 he had applied to trademark “Bin Laden” under Swiss law, through Falcon Sporting Goods, one of his companies. Yeslam planned to develop a line of Bin Laden–labeled clothing, glasses, and perhaps jewelry, bicycles, backpacks, and luggage. After the September 11 attacks, Yeslam’s Swiss attorney, Juerg Brand, confirmed their plans to go forward with a Bin Laden clothing line, initially in the Arab world. “The name is one of the most famous names in the world,” Brand said. Asked if he also intended to sell the jeans in the United States, Brand followed one unfortunate phrase with another: “We can’t make an immediate jump across the ocean,” he said.¹⁰

Bin Laden jeans might appeal to rebellious Arab teenagers, but Yeslam and his partners did not account for the reaction in Switzerland and the United States. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property announced that it would revoke the Bin Laden trademark because it violated “accepted moral standards.” Yeslam then said his plans had been misunderstood. He recognized, he said, that selling a Bin Laden–labeled clothing line would be “insensitive.” And yet, he declared later, “I am not only a Bin Laden. I am Yeslam Bin Laden. I have my own identity.” Osama to him was now only “a name in a newspaper.”¹¹

Yeslam opened a luxury boutique in a pedestrian square in Old Geneva, where he sold luxury handbags, silk scarves, perfumes, and handmade watches whose faces were engraved with a map of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the watches cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars. He settled on a new brand: Yeslam. He spent hours blending the perfumes that bore his name; he sifted jasmine and fruit scents in a perfume he labeled “Passion.”

The British writer Marianne MacDonald visited him in Geneva and found him a “shy, quiet man dressed in an Hermes jacket with Dior jeans covering his narrow legs.” Yeslam struck her as sensitive; he spoke openly about the anxieties that had bothered him since childhood.¹²

Had Osama ruined his life? Yeslam clasped his hands. “Whatever had to happen, happened,” he told MacDonald. “There is nothing I can do. If you say, ‘Look what happened to me,’ I would only put myself into a depression. If I can do something I love, and create perfume and watches and so on, then I am doing something that’s good for me.”