Jane Musgrave
One of the most pivotal figures in Palm Beach County history will walk into the county courthouse next month to fight allegations that he sexually abused his now 56-year-old daughter when she was a child.
While 88-year-old real estate developer and political powerhouse E. Llwyd Ecclestone Jr. has repeatedly and angrily dismissed the allegations as “one big pack of lies,” his youngest daughter, Wendy Mendelsohn, is equally adamant that her influential father molested her.
“I want the world to know that I’m not lying, that I’m telling the truth, and that my father did these things to me,” she said during a deposition.
But Mendelsohn, the youngest of Ecclestone’s four children, isn’t just accusing her father of kissing and touching her inappropriately. When she filed the multimillion-dollar civil suit in 2017, she ignited a feud that consumed her entire family.
She also claims she was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child by her oldest brother, who is named after his father and is also a prominent developer.
While 62-year-old Llywd Ecclestone III has denied the allegations through his attorney, when asked during a deposition about his sister’s allegations he refused to answer. He invoked his constitutional right not to incriminate himself.
Mendelsohn isn’t suing her brother. Instead, in addition to claiming that her father assaulted her when she was 10, she says her father didn’t support her efforts to heal from her brother’s alleged abuse. Further, she claims, he punished her — financially and emotionally — for continuing to talk about it.
“He dismissed it frequently,” she said during a deposition. “He would also tell me that he could understand how a 16-year-old brother could do that to his sister, could rape his sister, in the sense that he was sympathizing with my brother and condoning it.”
Ecclestone denies the allegations in court filings. If he appeared unsympathetic, he said that wasn’t his intention.
“I wanted to heal her. I wanted her to look forward. I didn’t want to sit and be some weirdo and listen to it. To me, it’s disgusting, totally disgusting. I didn’t want to hear any of that, frankly,” he said during a deposition.
He insisted his daughter’s allegations about him, which he called a “dirty, rotten, stinking lie,” are hurtful.
“Saying that about her father for what he has done for her, what I have done for her, and taken care of her, and even the money they live on probably was given to them by me,” he said during a deposition. “And that — and she came out and said something like that, I think she’s a — not a good daughter.”
His lawyers were less charitable.
“(Mendelsohn’s) fake claims, are nothing more than a shake down attempting to coerce (Ecclestone) to pay exorbitant sums of monies … or else suffer damage to his impeccable reputation,” they wrote in court papers.
Competency in question
The salacious civil trial, set to begin Aug. 9, promises to offer a public display of the animosity that now grips the once tight-knit siblings who traveled the globe with their wildly successful father, an ardent sailor who competed in races around the world.
It will turn on dueling views from prominent psychologists about Mendelsohn’s claims that she forgot the abuse by both her brother and father for decades, but is now tormented by what are known as repressed memories.
While Ecclestone has been subpoenaed to testify, he may have an out. His memory, too, is in dispute.
Years ago, he turned large swaths of the county into luxury communities, including PGA National, Old Port Cove and Lost Tree Village. He engineered the location of the Kravis Center, transformed Palm Beach International Airport and fought to make single-member County Commission districts reality.
But, his memory has failed, his high-powered legal team of Roy Black and Lance Shinder said in court filings.
While Ecclestone’s medical records are sealed, public court records show his competency is in question.
“Defendant has indicated that he is unable to testify due to his declining health,” Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Joseph Curley wrote in an order requiring Ecclestone’s medical records be kept secret.
Attorney Rod Coleman, who represents Mendelsohn, scoffed at the notion that Ecclestone is incompetent. Coleman hired a private investigator to tail Ecclestone. When Ecclestone realized he was being followed, he tried to shake the investigator.
Ecclestone drives, goes to restaurants and continues to operate a business, Coleman said.
Ecclestone still serves on the Palm Beach County Aviation and Airports Advisory Board and is chair of the transportation committee of the Palm Beach Civic Association.
Claiming Eccelstone is incompetent is a legal ploy, Coleman said in an interview. “They thought they could game the system,” he said.
‘He wanted to silence me’
The path that led Mendelsohn to go public with her sordid allegations is a long and winding one, she said in a two-day-long 2019 deposition where she readily admitted she is financially dependent on the roughly $200,000 she receives annually from trusts and a company her father created for his children.
In 1988, when she was 21 and visiting her sister in New York City, she said she remembered that she had been sexually assaulted by her brother for two years beginning when she was 10. She said she told her sister, Elizabeth “Lisa” Erdmann, about it.
About five years later, the mother of three whose husband is a general contractor said she confronted her brother.
“I think he was surprised that I remembered. I believe he said that he didn’t know or he didn’t realize that he had hurt me,” she said of the meeting in a deposition. “I don’t know, but he didn’t deny it. And basically I wanted to make sure that he didn’t do anything to hurt his child or future children and told him so. He never denied it, never said anything, and that was pretty much the end of our meeting.”
Roughly 10 years later, in 2004 or 2005, Mendelsohn said she told her father about her memories of her brother’s abuse. His reaction, she said, was crushing.
“He didn’t want to talk about it,” she said during the deposition. “He wanted to silence me. He — I don’t know. It wasn’t the normal reaction I thought I would have gotten from a father.”
Over the years, she said, his attitude didn’t change. “He would say these things to me frequently — to get over it, to grow up, if there was no penetration it’s not rape, it’s no big deal,” Mendelsohn recalled. “Those were common things out of his mouth throughout the time.”
In 2016, while in therapy to deal with the memories of what she called her brother’s abuse, she said she remembered that her father had abused her during the same years.
“I had a memory of my father rubbing himself against me until I felt something hard against me,” she said of what she called flashbacks. “I had a memory of my father kissing me on the lips and putting his tongue in my mouth.”
‘Cease and desist’ demand
By then, her relationship with her brother had imploded.
In July 2015, Llwyd III and his wife, Patricia, sent Mendelsohn and her husband a letter demanding they “cease and desist all communications with our family and us.”
Patricia Ecclestone, a former county prosecutor who no longer practices law, said she became increasingly concerned about the tone of the emails she was receiving from the Mendelsohns.
One sent by Mendelsohn’s husband, Joshua, included a photo of Wendy when she was 10 and he suggested his sister-in-law think about it when she had sex, according to court records.
“At some particular point, you got to say, ‘Whoa. You can’t stop — you can’t be sending me that stuff. That’s demented,” Patricia Ecclestone said during a deposition.
A year later, the “cease and desist” letter was breached.
One of the Mendelsohns’ daughters texted one of Llwyd III’s four children. “My mother, Wendy, was sexually abused and raped by your father, when he was 17. She was 10,” it read.
Secret video of family summit
As family tensions rose, Llwyd Ecclestone Jr.. agreed to have a meeting at the Mendelsohns’ home in Portage Landing, a gated community near Lost Tree Village where Mendelsohn and her siblings grew up. Ecclestone, who attended the meeting with his wife and ex-wife, who is Mendelsohn’s mother, said he thought the meeting was to reunite the family.
But, weeks before the July 2016 meeting, Mendelsohn said she had remembered her father’s abuse and confronted him.
At the meeting, Mendelsohn claims her father asked her why she had made such ugly allegations and vehemently denied them. It was the first time Mendelsohn’s husband learned that his wife believed her father had molested her, court records say.
Ecclestone also vigorously denies that he raised the issue, claiming his daughter did.
“Do you want to know something? That’s a fucking lie, and you’re a liar to even — it did not happen that way,” he told his daughter’s attorney, Coleman, during a deposition. “I don’t know where this stuff goes, but (I) did not come there with that in mind in any way, shape or form.”
But, there is a video recording of the meeting.
Curley, however, ruled that the recording can’t be used in its entirety at trial because Ecclestone said he didn’t know cameras were running.
That means the meeting was recorded illegally. Florida law requires people to consent before they can be taped. Recording someone without their consent is a felony.
Coleman said the law only applies to audiotaping. That means he can show the jury the video.
Further, he said, the existence of the recording means Ecclestone will have to testify truthfully about what happened at the acrimonious meeting.
Ecclestone said it ended when Mendelsohn told him, his wife and his ex-wife to get out of her house and “go have a good life.”
Rewriting the will
But, less than a week later, Mendelsohn and her father met again.
Ecclestone summoned his children to tell them about changes he had made to his estate plan.
Since his prenuptial agreement with his wife of nearly 30 years, Diana, had recently expired, he said time was critical.
Two years earlier, the siblings had rejected his plan to split his multimillion-dollar estate equally between his children and his third wife, Diana.
So, he told them, he had decided to leave all of his money to Diana.
“I can do whatever I want to. It’s not the kids’ money. It’s not the grandkids’ money. It’s my money,” he said during a deposition. “And the only one that has an interest in it would be Diana, my wife, from whatever the laws of Florida state.”
‘My father uses money to control people’
The meeting wouldn’t be Mendelsohn’s last contact with her father.
That would come in early 2017 when she said he called her to say that if she and her family would sign a confidentiality agreement, pledging never to again mention her allegations of abuse, he would let them back into the family.
Coleman said money was also offered. During a deposition, he handed Mendelsohn a letter that showed Ecclestone had offered to pay her $5.1 million to drop the suit. She said she had never seen that particular offer but acknowledged there had been others.
“Were there discussions about money? Yes, but they were conditioned,” she said. “They were conditioned to my silence.”
She said she wasn’t going to let her father control her with his money.
“My father uses money to control people,” she said in a deposition. “Money, control and power is what he does.”
Counterargument: She’s in it for the money
Despite Mendelsohn’s protestations, Ecclestone’s attorneys said the entire saga is about money.
They point to a letter her first attorney wrote, offering not to include her damning allegations against her father and brother in a lawsuit if Ecclestone would pay up.
She wanted one quarter of his estate, her share of the two existing trusts and for him to set up an estimated $740,000 trust to cover the costs of her three children’s college educations.
Describing the offer as fair, attorney Denise Bleau said it was what Mendelsohn would have received from her father if negotiations with his children over his estate plan hadn’t fallen apart. Further, she said, Ecclestone has paid the cost of college for all of his grandchildren.
After Ecclestone rejected that offer, Mendolsohn sued her siblings to get her share of the trusts. She accused them and independent trustees of mismanaging the money. She lost, but is appealing.
The lawsuit against her father is just her latest attempt at “financial blackmail,” Ecclestone’s attorney’s wrote.
“This action constitutes (Mendelsohn’s) ongoing attempted extortion of millions of dollars from (her father) beyond the millions of dollars (she) has received as completed and generous gifts provided by (her father),” they wrote in court papers.
They predicted her efforts would fail.
Already, Curley has rejected her request to seek punitive damages against her father. He ruled that the “scant evidence” Mendelsohn presented about her father’s emotional and financial bullying didn’t justify allowing the jury to consider extra damages, which could reach tens of millions of dollars.
Unsubstantiated flashbacks
The only evidence of the sexual abuse is her claim that she had “flashbacks” nearly 40 years after she claims she was molested.
All of her siblings signed affidavits, saying they never saw their father behaving inappropriately and don’t believe her. No police reports were filed. No teachers were told.
Experts she hired said she suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome and dissociative amnesia as a result of her abuse.
“It sometimes happens that at the time the event occurs, especially if one is a child, one doesn’t have the capacity to understand the implications of what’s occurring, and then in retrospect the event — one has a different understanding based on a different level of experience and maturity,” Steven Gold, a Plantation psychologist, said during a deposition.
But, an expert hired by Ecclestone, has a different view.
Dr. Harrison Pope Jr., a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, said repressed memories are extremely rare and many in the mental health field doubt their existence.
But, he said, those that have been verified involve people who were so traumatized at the time that they blocked it from their memories. There is no evidence Mendelsohn was traumatized at the time, he said.
‘If she wanted more money, she can work like everybody else’
For his part, Ecclestone insists he tried to support Mendelsohn when she told him of her brother’s abuse. He said he talked to his namesake and urged him to apologize to his daughter. On at least one occasion, Ecclestone said he went to a therapist appointment with his daughter to show he was trying to help her heal.
He balked at Mendelsohn’s allegations that he tried to isolate her from the family or punish her financially.
“I haven’t encouraged anyone not to have contact with her. Everyone can do what they want,” he said during a deposition. “As far as the financial support, she was given money after college. She was given the Dynasty Trusts, and she owned them. And there’s plenty of income. If she wanted more money, she can work like everybody else in the family does. Or her husband can do the same thing.”
Ecclestone’s lawyers said he deserves to put the lawsuit behind him.
“We have an 87-year-old ill man who is entitled to leave this earth clearing his name,” Shinder said at a hearing last year. “I’m not sure what’s worse than being in a position where you believe you’ve been wrongly accused by your child of sexual abuse (or being unable) to clear your name.”
If she wins a huge judgment, Mendelsohn, who is joined in the lawsuit by her husband, said she knows her emotional troubles won’t be over. “Money won’t help me heal,” she said when questioned by Ecclestone’s attorneys.
She said any money she receives would be set aside for her children and future grandchildren and to help organizations that help victims of childhood sexual violence.
But, she said, her motives for filing the lawsuit have nothing to do with money.
“I seek justice. I seek accountability. I seek him taking responsibility for his actions,” she said.
