A 15-carat, $500,000 diamond has taken center stage in a Manhattan skin-care mogul’s blistering divorce fight.
Peter Thomas Roth, whose namesake company peddles $52 “cloud cream” and $85 “eyelid lift serum,” among other products, is divorcing his wife Noreen. The two continued to live together in their Upper East Side town house after their split, even as Roth dated Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife, Brooke Mueller.
But the couple now finds itself between a rock and a hard place — after Roth’s 94-year-old mother, Carole, sued Noreen last week to get back the precious stone she claims her daughter-in-law took from her.
Peter, 59, and Noreen, 56, wed in 1996 in a glittering Plaza hotel ceremony, for which the bride sported a stunning set of pear-shaped diamond earrings set in yellow gold. The earrings had been created at Peter’s suggestion, using a diamond that Noreen already owned and Carole’s $500,000 rock, which she received as a gift in 1966 and wore as a ring for 30 years.
Carole claims she shared the earrings with her daughter-in-law, who borrowed them frequently. But last year Noreen refused to return the gems — then ditched Peter and their kids for a new man and a new apartment in Queens, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit Carole filed against Noreen.
But a lawyer for the wife charges Carole’s complaint is just a legal feint in Noreen and Peter’s increasingly ugly divorce, which has sparked its own $175 million legal filing.
In newly filed Manhattan court papers, Noreen claims Roth has been plotting for more than four years to hide his cash in the event of a divorce, and enlisted lawyers Kenneth and Asher Rubinstein to help him do it. His mother’s diamond lawsuit is just another veiled grab for assets, she claims.
“It borders on shocking that a son would expose his 94-year-old mother to the rigors of litigation just to gain an advantage in a divorce case,” said Noreen’s lawyer, Judd Burstein — adding that the diamond earrings were a wedding present to Noreen “and we have overwhelming evidence of it.”
Roth allegedly hired the Rubinsteins to dupe his wife into “tax fraud” by convincing her to put all their joint assets — including their company and properties in Manhattan, Connecticut and Water Mill, Long Island — into a series of irrevocable trusts, she claims.
The move “grossly undervalued assets so that they could be gifted [to] the Roths’ children without paying gift tax,” Noreen claims in the new court papers.
Noreen was also convinced to include her separate assets in the trusts, while Peter’s individual assets were left out.
Noreen, who is suing the Rubinsteins but not her husband in the civil case, claims the attorneys schemed with Peter to deprive her “of everything she had worked to acquire in her life.”
Peter Roth didn’t ask his mother to sue his ex over the diamonds, according to Roth’s lawyer, Marilyn Chinitz.
“That is an absolute blatant untruth,” she said.
Peter, whose relationship with Mueller ended in the fall after she had a meltdown and landed in the hospital for psychiatric evaluation, once insisted his split with Noreen is “amicable.”
“We work together,” he told Page Six last year. “Things fizzled out and it was time to move on, and she 100 percent feels the same.”
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