ESTEE HEIR’S NE BABY MAMA DRA
Lauder love child’s post ignites evict war
Billionaire cosmetics heir William Lauder is trying to kick his baby mama out of the $7 million Bel Air mansion he gave her — a simmering battle that reignited with their love child’s innocent social-media post, The Post has learned.
The 6,000-square-foot property on a lush, winding road overlooking Los Angeles is at the center of a legal war playing out in LA Superior Court between New York socialite Taylor Stein, 54, and the 60-year-old Estee Lauder chairman.
Both Stein and Lauder are members of storied New York families. Lauder is the son of billionaire philanthropist Leonard Lauder, who donated more than $1 billion worth of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stein is the daughter of the late legendary New York City nightclub impresario Howard Stein, who opened the 1980s hot spots Xenon and Au Bar. Her grandfather, Ruby Stein, was a loan shark murdered by the Westies gang. His headless body was found floating in Jamaica Bay in May 1977.
The couple met at a party at Lauder’s Aspen, Colo., mansion in 2000, when Lauder was still married to Karen Lauder, the mother of his two other daughters. Lauder and Stein began an illicit affair a year later, and by 2005, Stein was pregnant.
Lauder asked her to end that pregnancy because he was negotiating an agreement with his wife, whom he eventually divorced in 2009, according to reports.
Stein became pregnant again in the fall of 2006 and had the baby in May 2007. The secretive Lauder, then CEO of his family’s multinational company, did not want his personal life to end up in “the gossip press,” as one of his lawyers said at the time, and arranged for the mother and newborn to be taken to Aspen to escape media attention.
Under a 2007 agreement, Stein was to receive $1 million every year if she did not publicly disclose the identity of her child’s father and if she agreed not to come within 100 yards of any member of the Lauder family in Palm Beach, Fla., Aspen and New York, according to a report.
Stein and Lauder have had an explosively fraught relationship for years. A shouting match between them on an LA street in November 2012 resulted in Stein’s arrest after she allegedly punched him in the face. Stein pleaded guilty to a domestic charge and did 19 days of community service for the California Department of Transportation.
The recently renewed battle over the mansion apparently began late last year after the couple’s 13-yearold daughter, whose name The Post is withholding, allegedly described her parents as being “divorced” on social media.
Lauder argued that the public post violated his demands for strict secrecy, a source told The Post.
Those demands regarding his love child and former mistress have resulted in dozens of heavily redacted court filings and several attempts to seal the current case.
Stein is now accusing the billionaire baby daddy of backing out of a court-brokered arrangement to support them, court papers say.
She also accuses Lauder of engaging in a campaign of harassment that included hiring high-profile private detective Jack Palladino to spy on her, the source told The Post.
Stein first alleged in a 2018 complaint that Lauder was refusing to fund a “residence support trust” worth a reported $1 million a year and that he was trying to oust her and their daughter, as well as her 10year-old adopted son, from the sixbedroom, five-bathroom home that includes a pool, court papers say.
But by last fall — before the socialmedia post blew things up — the warring parties seemed to have reached a truce with the help of a mediator. In November 2020, Stein’s attorney drafted an e-mail to the judge in the case saying it had been settled. He sent it to Lauder’s attorney, Thomas Nolan, for review.
“Looks good,” Nolan replied, according to a copy of the e-mail filed in court. By January, Nolan was arguing in legal papers that they had “merely reached a settlement in principle, not a formal settlement.” This is when Stein discovered the long-threatened eviction from her home could be imminent.
“How is it that, suddenly, almost 2½ months after the fact, ‘Looks good,’ has been transformed by Lauder into, in essence, ‘Looks terribly wrong?’ ” Stein’s lawyers argued.
Calls and e-mails to lawyers for both Stein and Lauder were not returned.