In one of the most cantankerous and costliest divorce battles in Connecticut history, the ex-wife of Meriden, Conn., cosmeceutical magnate Dr. Nicholas Perricone has been kept off the television airwaves, but not out of newspaper tabloids.
The saga's latest chapter underscores the difficulty of getting warring spouses to abide by confidentiality agreements, and the courts' increasing willingness to enforce them.
Last December, when Dr. Perricone got word that ex-wife, Madeleine, was to appear on ABC's newsmagazine show "20/20," he rushed to Bridgeport Superior Court. There, Judge Julia S. Dewey obligingly issued an ex parte cease-and-desist order barring Ms. Perricone from appearing on TV to discuss her divorce litigation.
Dewey also "ordered that if [she] had already recorded such an interview she was to obtain all copies of the interview and prevent the broadcast of the interview," wrote New Haven Superior Court Judge Stephen F. Frazzini in a subsequent restraining order issued last month.
Dewey's order was scheduled for a hearing the next day, but a statewide courthouse bomb scare postponed it until Dec. 5. The day before the hearing, the New York Post published an article based on interviews with Ms. Perricone. It identified her ex-husband, the captain of a $50 million wrinkle cure empire, as "an 'anti-aging guru … accused of being a cheat who has fits of rage and used human growth hormone; and referred to Ms. Perricone as 'a manic clean freak who washed her daughter's skin raw,'" Frazzini noted.
"The only power I have left is to talk about this story," Ms. Perricone told the Post. About her brief stint as a call girl a year before she began dating Dr. Perricone, she said, "Getting involved in this, having compliments and attention, it was an addiction."
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