Dad’s gay secret

His shame cut me out of $80M will, says daughter

KNOWING HER dad’s deepest secret cost her dearly when he died.

The daughter of a wealthy Manhattan landlord said her father cut her out of his will — and a hefty piece of his $80 million fortune — because she walked in on him with a male paramour when he wasn’t out of the closet.

Diana Downing, 54, said her relationship with her dad never recovered after she barged in on the rendezvous decades ago.

“While it is challenging to untangle the dynamics of our family, I believe that strains between my father and myself emerged when I was a young teenager,” Downing wrote in an affidavit as part of an attempt to get an inheritance. Downing accused her father of being “a closeted homosexual with a difficult to control temper.”

“I also suspect that I interrupted an encounter between my father and a male lover,” she wrote. “I believe that my father was so embarrassed that he shunned me.”

Downing (above) said her dad, Vincent Downing, never recovered from his discomfort over the incident.The two never reconciled before Vincent Downing died at 86 on May 10, 2016, when he was crushed by a car in a pedestrian crosswalk on the Upper East Side. He was survived by Diana and two other children. A Yale University-trained lawyer, Vincent became a successful real estate investor, amassing apartment buildings throughout Manhattan that pull in $3 million in rental income every 18 months, records show.

Diana, written out of the will, is fighting her siblings for a piece of her dad’s estate. She filed a petition this month in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court to halt the distribution of his assets to the beneficiaries of his will.

She said that Vincent, who had a townhouse on the Upper East Side, was really a resident of Paris for the past 20 years. If she can prove that, French law would grant her some of her dad’s money since children can’t be disinherited in France. She is also waging a legal battle in France over the same claims.

Diana declined to comment, but Helen Chaitman, a lawyer for Diana’s brother David Downing, called her allegations about walking in on her dad ”totally fabricated” with “no basis in fact.”

Another lawyer for David previously noted in filings that Diana pleaded guilty in 2010 to felony charges related to a Medicaid fraud scheme involving her claiming to get free rent in exchange for operating an E. 80th St. building. In reality, she owned the building and the one next door. The conviction led to her disbarment as an attorney.

David’s lawyers also deny his father was a resident of France, noting he voted in New York, filed his taxes in the U.S. and lived in Manhattan most of the time.

Diana said emails and mail back up her claim that her dad — who had U.S. and Irish citizenship — lived in France. Plus he had most of his medical procedures in France and his family visited him there, she said.

She said in her affidavit that if he hadn’t died in the accident in 2016, she and her father may have made amends. He even reached out to her at one point when he learned she was staying near him in Paris.“I believe that, shortly before he died, my father was preparing to reconnect with me,” she wrote.