Liza Minnelli has opened up about her “insane” marriage to “clown” David Gest, admitting that he “controlled” everything she did during their short partnership.
The 79-year-old married producer and TV personality Gest in 2002 before separating the following year and officially divorcing in 2007.
Minnelli has candidly spoken about the marriage in her new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, describing Gest as a “conman” and “clown” who stole her belongings – including the bowler hat she wore in 1972’s Cabaret.
“I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown,” she said in the book, an extract of which has been shared in The Times. “What kind of fool was I? The biggest one who ever lived. When I look in the rear-view mirror, I realise I should never have fallen for this crap. But I ignored the red flags flapping in my face.”
She said that Gest was a “fast-talking, wheeler-dealing” who conned her into thinking that he had made money for Michael Jackson’s family, and she wrote that she started dating him during a period of “financial desperation and vulnerability”.
While Minnelli felt “no physical attraction to him”, he offered to rescue her after her medical expenses left her “flat broke”.
After their star-studded $3.2m wedding – where Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor were best man and maid of honour – the relationship began to “unravel”, Minnelli said.
She claimed that he returned many of their wedding gifts, sold them and “pocketed the cash” without telling her, before “raiding” her bank accounts. She added that he also stole her “confidence, freedom and independence” – controlling everything she ate and who she was allowed to speak to.
“I was his prisoner. Clearly, this insane marriage had to end, and soon,” she wrote.
After he sold her furniture and redecorated her apartment to look like “a bargain-basement crash pad”, Minnelli and Gest physically fought one another “like animals”, before finally separating.
“I was disgusted. I felt betrayed, humiliated, ripped off and wounded,” she says. “Unlike my earlier marriages, where I had a genuine love for my husbands that endured after we split, this one ended in a nasty, brutal divorce. He was hideous. So let me ask again: What the hell was I thinking?”
Minnelli added that she takes responsibility for what happened, admitting that if she was “full clear and sober”, she would not have been “bulldozed” by him. However, she swore to “never marry again” after the “nightmare” ordeal.
After the end of their marriage, Gest sued Minnelli for $10m – claiming that he was a victim of “domestic violence” as she would beat him during drunken rages. Minnelli denied the allegations and the suit was eventually dismissed in 2006 due to there being no “triable issue of fact”.
Gest, who produced the 2001 TV special Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration, appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2006. Ten years later, he competed on Celebrity Big Brother before leaving the show for medical reasons after 13 days. He died just two months later at the age of 62 after suffering a stroke.
