28. A ROLLS-ROYCE IN THE RAIN
IBRAHIM AND CHRISTINE BIN LADEN formally separated on November 22, 1991, after almost five years of marriage. They had a two-year-old daughter, Sibba; Christine moved with her into a Los Angeles–area duplex apartment. She hired divorce lawyers. In February they filed papers in Los Angeles County Superior Court seeking a temporary restraining order against Ibrahim; Christine feared, she wrote in a declaration, that her husband “may become angry with me” over her decision to leave their marriage “and may retaliate by taking my daughter with him to Saudi Arabia.”
Christine was then thirty-one years old, about five years younger than her husband. She told the court of her “desperate financial situation.” It was a sort of desperation, however, that was peculiar to the west side of Los Angeles. “For many years during the marriage, Ibrahim provided me with a monthly allowance of approximately $15,000,” she reported. Yet for January and February of 1992, following their separation, he had provided her only $5,000, which was “woefully inadequate.” She had no income apart from Ibrahim’s support. Because of her husband’s sudden parsimony, she wrote, “our lifestyle has been changed and our living conditions are substandard to those which we had during marriage.” She explained to the court:
Ibrahim, my daughter and I lived in our Bel Air mansion at 634 Stone Canyon Road. This was a 7,000 square foot house, on three acres of property, with a seven car garage. The house is presently worth between $8–$10 million dollars. We employed full-time groundskeepers, household help, chauffeurs, and enjoyed private security. We had many cars, two of which were Rolls-Royces. Ibrahim would take my daughter and I on frequent vacation trips. We always flew First Class or on one of the private family jets. We would spend a month at a time traveling in Europe, or skiing in Switzerland, or short trips to Hawaii. This lifestyle also supported me making trips to New York, to go shopping, the opera and the theater. Last year Ibrahim let me buy a $16,000 fur coat on a shopping trip.
Christine inventoried the considerable investments she had made in education and other forms of self- improvement, such as the $3,250 she had recently spent on cosmetic surgery, as well as additional sums on manicures, pedicures, waxing, hair coloring, and haircuts. She had enrolled in private needlepoint classes and took private lessons in English horseback riding, painting, watercolors, sculpture, and Arabic. It was “not uncommon” for her to spend $3,500 on a dress. Ibrahim bought her “furs, jewelry, a $30,000 watch,” and a $90,000 diamond wedding ring. She purchased a Steinway piano for their Bel Air home, and they “always ate at the best restaurants,” such as Spago and Morton’s.
Not that the issues all revolved around her: Christine reported that she also typically spent $3,000 per month on Sibba’s and her clothing. It cost her several hundred dollars per month just to buy birthday presents adequate for Sibba to give to her Bel Air toddler friends at parties. The Bin Ladens, she added, did not shirk when it came to their own parties for children. In Jeddah, the previous September, she had spent $7,000 on a party for Sibba that included “a monkey, the rental of five horses, a hot air balloon, a private disc jockey, a photographer and catering, decoration and gifts for our guests.”
Christine did not wish to create the impression that she had built this lifestyle on her own. Ibrahim, she reported, also lived well. For example:
He has flown us to Switzerland just for the weekend to see a car show. He has numerous cars: Two Rolls- Royces, a Honda, a Lexus, a Mercedes 500 SEL and a Lamborghini jeep. Ibrahim will, at times, rent a Mercedes at $350 a day so that he does not have to drive his Rolls-Royce in the rain.
His passion for his cars had left her with some resentment. In particular, when she became pregnant with Sibba, Ibrahim had promised “to buy me a Rolls-Royce of my own; however, I only received a Limited Edition Jeep Cherokee.” She expected better of him. He was, after all, involved in construction in Saudi Arabia of the two Holy Mosques, airports, highways, military bases, royal palaces, and other large development projects.
The Bin Laden family is worth in excess of $2 billion dollars. This organization employs 17,000 people and has substantial real estate holdings. This family organization also owns a fleet of 8–9 airplanes, with a full staff of pilots and stewardesses. The family just recently purchased a G-4 Aircraft worth approximately $25 million, and a new Learjet.
Christine’s declaration offered a hint about how she might be assuaged now that she and Ibrahim were destined for divorce. She had found her previous personal allowance of $15,000 per month, she noted in her court filing, to be “adequate.”1
THEY HAD MET in Beverly Hills during the mid-1980s, according to Jack Kayajanian, one of Christine’s attorneys. Ibrahim was in the company of Dodi Fayed, who later died in a Paris automobile accident with Princess Diana of Wales. (Fayed was the son of a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Mohamed Fayed, who purchased control of Harrods department store in London and the Hotel Ritz in Paris, where members of the Bin Laden family frequently stayed.) Christine Hartunian, as she was then, was a daughter of an Armenian Christian businessman who lived in Orange County, California. At twenty-five, Christine relied upon her father for financial support and had never earned enough money at a job to have filed a tax return. She was tall, slender, dark, and beautiful—“a very attractive, very flashy young lady,” as another of her attorneys, Michael Balaban, recalled. One of her favorite nightspots was the Denim and Diamonds bar in Santa Monica, then a fashionable urban cowboy watering hole with a sparkling globe above the dance floor and stuffed heads of moose and deer mounted on the walls.2
As Balaban got to know Christine, he found that she seemed to drop the names of a number of celebrities, suggesting that they were her friends. Balaban thought she was “full of crap,” as he put it later. One day, however, he was meeting with his client in his Los Angeles office. A partner of Balaban’s represented Paul McCartney, the former Beatle, on a copyright matter, and McCartney happened to be in the law firm’s waiting room. Christine stepped into the corridor; McCartney saw her and exclaimed, “Christine! How the hell are you?” As Balaban said later: “You don’t forget things like that. She knew what the hell she was doing.”3
Ibrahim Bin Laden was not batting in the same league. He was the youngest full brother of Yeslam and Khalil. He had followed them to Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California for a year, but he did not share his older brothers’ interest in business. He seemed content to drift along on his dividend payments. One of the Americans who occasionally joined him on the L.A. nightclub circuit recalled an evening at a restaurant in Beverly Hills when several of the Bin Laden brothers had come into town and gathered for dinner. It was around the time when Ibrahim fell for Christine. The Bin Laden brothers had a ritual, the American recalled: when the restaurant bill arrived, they would wrestle for control of the check, each more determined than the next to perform the role of host and patron. Ibrahim was the only brother present who did not seem interested in this performance. “In the end, my father is going to pay for this,” he explained. Another time, this person recalled, Ibrahim said he did not see the point of working as an executive in the family business. They could never surpass their father’s financial achievements. They had more than enough money. What was the point of striving so hard?4
Ibrahim was devout. Christine regarded herself as a Christian, without allegiance to any particular denomination, but as she and Ibrahim talked about marrying, she agreed to convert to Islam. There would be no other way to live comfortably as a member of the Bin Laden family. As their wedding neared, however, the couple negotiated over how to synthesize—in the form of a written prenuptial contract—the imperatives of his upbringing in Saudi Arabia with those of her upbringing in Southern California.
A Los Angeles–area attorney, Robert Shahin, drafted a proposed agreement, titled “Antenuptial Agreement Submitting Marriage to Islamic Law.” It was an extraordinary document, one that attempted to ensure that Ibrahim was protected by Saudi laws governing child custody and inheritance issues, in exchange for his pledge to Christine to forswear his right under Islamic law to take more than one wife. A draft copy was later filed in court.
It began:
Whereas the Bridegroom and Bride anticipate moving from time to time from various parts of the world to others…The parties agree as follows:
