Dr. Dre Headed For An Expensive Divorce – A Fight for Billions
Sometimes you just have to go for it. Nicole Young, who filed for divorce on June 29 from Dr. Dre, né Andre Young, after being separated since March, has done just that. News broke this week that she’s trying to make her way out of a prenup signed decades ago, and her strategy, while pretty unlikely to succeed, is remarkable in its boldness.
When Young originally filed for divorce, she made no mention of a prenup, which would govern the division of Dr. Dre’s estimated $800 million net worth, a fortune amassed through a successful music career certainly, but mainly through selling Beats by Dre to Apple in 2014. (When news of the divorce filing broke, TMZ quoted “sources connected to Nicole” claiming there was no prenup.) Dr. Dre, on the other hand, agreed to pay spousal support, but asked that property be divided according to their prenup, which he said does in fact exist.
On August 4, The Blast reported that Young, represented by Samantha Spector, had sent something of a Hail Mary. In a filing made in L.A. court, she claimed that, in an act of love and regret, Dr. Dre tore up copies of their prenup a couple years into the marriage. They both understood that it no longer existed, she wrote in the document. Young asked to have the issue bifurcated from the divorce—meaning to have the prenup issue solved before moving forward with the divorce.
Young makes a few claims in the filing, the first of which is that her husband pressured her into signing a prenup “very shortly” before the marriage. “I was extremely reluctant, resistant and afraid to sign the agreement and felt backed into a corner,” she wrote. “Given the extraordinary pressure and intimidation by Andre, I was left with no option but to hire a lawyer (of course with the help of Andre’s team of professionals) and unwillingly signed the agreement very shortly before our marriage.”
The pressure part of her argument probably won’t hold much water. “If the threat was, ‘if you don’t sign, we won’t get married,’ well, that’s most people’s position in getting a prenup, right?” said Samantha Bley DeJean, a family law attorney practicing out of San Francisco with no involvement in this case. She added that if Young herself graduated law school before signing the agreement, it won’t do her any favors here—that is, she would have signed the prenup with full knowledge of how most contracts are both signed and amended. That’s law school 101.
The “very shortly before our marriage” portion, however, might matter more. In California both parties need at least seven days to review the contents of a prenup before signing. There’s no mention of those dates in the document, so it’s unclear how the timeline might work in Young’s favor.
The second claim is that Dr. Dre tore up the prenup, declaring it null and void. “Andre acknowledged to me that he felt ashamed he had pressured me into signing a premarital agreement and he tore up multiple copies of the agreement in front of me,” she wrote. “Since the day he tore up the agreements we both understood that there was no premarital agreement, and that it was null and void.”
Judith Poller, who is also not involved in this case but has worked on high-caliber divorces often in part in California, said, “There’ve been very few instances where [prenups are] overturned, and the fact that somebody might say during the marriage, when in their happiest moment, ‘I’m sorry I made you go through this process, and I’m gonna rip it up,’ means absolutely nothing.”
Generally, to amend the prenup or bury it, the thing “has to be signed in the same formality that the initial agreement was signed. So for example, in California, they don’t use the notaries, but they often have witnesses, and it absolutely would have to be in writing.
“It’s like the dog ate my homework. It just doesn’t work,” Poller added.
Regardless, people close to Dr. Dre deny both that he pressured Young into signing it and that he ripped it up, according to TMZ. Dr. Dre’s attorney, powerhouse attorney Laura Wasser, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The final claim in the filing is that neither Young nor her attorneys have been able to get their hands on the prenup, which DeJean said could help her get a trial granted, one that, as DeJean explained, would determine, “One, whether there’s a valid agreement, and two, even if there is one, whether or not the court will enforce the terms of it.
“What she has done is said as little as she can now [in the filing], in order to set the issue up for the court. She has either intentionally held back some key information or maybe it’s because she doesn’t know certain facts that she will later try to obtain in discovery. Either way not disclosing everything right now will give her as much optionality with the facts later,” DeJean said, adding that she believes, based on the asks alone, that the judge will acquiesce to at least taking a look at the prenup dispute before moving forward with the rest of the divorce.
“Said in a very simple way, I expect this motion to be granted. The judge will set it for a separate hearing and trial, and then they will get into the specifics,” she said.
Young is also seeking spousal support (custody is not an issue because their three kids are adults), and Dr. Dre is amenable to paying it, according to his own filing—how much, of course, is probably included in the prenup, though that can get renegotiated during divorce proceedings if their assets are markedly different then when the prenup was signed (which, of course, they are).
