When her separation from Kevin Costner, to whom she was married for 18 years, became known in June, Christine Costner began demanding a quarter of a million dollars a month, or 232,000 euros, to support her three children. However, the 49-year-old designer’s demands continued to be lowered until this Friday, a judge in Santa Barbara, a city north of Los Angeles, ruled that the 64-year-old actor must pay $63,209 euros per month in alimony for the three boys; That is, a quarter of what Christine asked for and half of what she temporarily ruled yesterday.
The trial over the maintenance of the three minors began on Thursday. It then became known that Christine (née Baumgartner) wanted to demand $175,000 (162,000 euros) per month for the minors, but ultimately lowered her demands to $161,592 (just under 150,000 euros). The judge did not grant him this amount and ordered a provisional pension of 129,000 dollars per month (119,630 euros) until the final decision this Friday to maintain the lifestyle of Cayden (16), Hayes (14) and Grace (13). Style that, according to Christine’s lawyer, they should have, since living in luxury is “in the DNA” of the boys who grew up in the four-hectare family house with garden, volleyball court and infinity pool in Carpinteria, next to and overlooking Santa Bárbara the Pacific, just a few meters from the sea. “Here we have created everything you could dream of,” she said enthusiastically at Thursday’s hearing, ensuring that her children had “created a community” in the area.
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However, Kevin Costner always denied that the boys needed so much money, accusing his ex-wife of “paying the maintenance bills” with her own expenses on personal trainers and even cosmetic surgery, in which he allegedly invested $190,000 “inflated”. (174,000 euros) in one year. He also accused her of having to pay for everything because she had “no plans to find a job or engage in any activity that generates income,” which her lawyers repeated a day later, explaining that this was how she covered her expenses want the boy’s pension.
Kevin and Christine Costner at an awards ceremony in Santa Monica, California, in February 2022. Jeff Kravitz (FilmMagic)
At that hearing on Friday, where the couple were in the same room and, according to the media in attendance, barely making eye contact, the interpreter of “The Bodyguard and Messenger of the Future” took the stand to talk about his failed marriage: “We have not reached this strange world, and for that I am sorry.” According to reports leaked on Thursday, Kevin Costner has about $ 17.3 million in his accounts, almost 16 million euros, while the available money “for the period 2021- 2022 was $19,248,467.” [17.750.000 euros], 1,604,039 dollars per month”, one and a half million euros per month. His ex-wife was demanding $160,000 a month from him, 10% of his budget, and today her lawyers discovered he was hiding some of his income from her as they demanded detailed explanations of his earnings from the hit Paramount series Yellowstone . He has bluntly stated, as TMZ leaked: “I have never hidden money from my wife.” His fortune is estimated at around €230 million.
In his statement, Costner assured that he left the series in the fifth season after “long and very hard-fought negotiations.” He had signed up to work on the fifth, sixth and seventh parts, each of which was supposed to contain ten chapters, but the fifth was eventually divided into two parts of eight parts each (the first is already published, the second should be published this year). . ). But the fact that this fifth season was duplicated prevented him from working on a great four-part western called Horizon, an epic saga about the United States that he writes, directs, stars in and is directed by he has already completed the first two. According to him and as reported by People, “no scripts had been written” for the second part and “those for the first were not even ready yet”, so the sixth would come out much later and was not compatible with his project. They paid him about $12 million (11 million euros) for each part of the fifth season, and that was the end of his participation and the series itself.
“We tried to negotiate the sequel in the sixth,” “they offered me less money than in the others, there were creative problems …,” assured Costner and finally ended the project. “They have told me that it is a little disappointing that I am no longer on the most watched series on television,” he explained, while also warning: “It is likely that I will take them to court.” The end The series, which will end with the second part of the fifth season, was announced days after the couple’s divorce. Christine Costner claimed this Friday that she had nothing to do with the actor’s decision to leave her: “I have avoided making public the reasons for our divorce to protect the privacy of our family, but I don’t have Kevin pressured to leave Yellowstone.”
Kevin Costner and his then wife Christine Baumgartner at the opening of a store in Madrid in 2005. FERNANDO VAZQUEZ (FERNANDO VAZQUEZ/CORDONPRESS)
According to the Chron, Christine Costner described in the trial a luxurious and very Hollywood lifestyle, with monthly expenses of 40,000 dollars (37,000 euros) on flowers and gifts and excessive Christmas parties with 40 tons of snow sent to warm Santa Barbara to honor his guests. Now, he says, he has had to borrow money from friends to pay the mortgage of his mother, whom he helps financially, and also from his brother, who left him $80,000 (74,000 euros) to help him move into his new house finance.
Costner’s lawyer, the famous Laura Wasser, has filed a plea in court seeking to destroy Christine Costner’s claims and in which she indicated that she intends to use the pension to support herself even though she has already received a payment, noted in the prenuptial agreement in the amount of 1.5 million dollars (1.4 million euros). He has stated that the family “doesn’t live like movie stars,” that Costner has gotten rid of his private plane and that the boys don’t wear designer clothes or expensive cars and go to regular schools. Regarding the requirements for such a high income, he explained: “I have never seen such a high requirement for a child pension, even in Los Angeles.” It appears that Wasser and Costner won the first round. The second comes in November, when the terms will be decided not on the child grant, but on the divorce itself and therefore what Christine will receive.