On a flight from Ireland to New York in June 2004, Britney Spears proposed to Kevin Federline, a backup dancer she’d been dating for about three months. “We were a couple hours into the flight and we’d been talking the whole time, stuff about life, wanting to have kids,” Spears told People magazine shortly afterward. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘What if you want to get married?’ ” She was 22 at the time, had sold 27 million albums, and had about $30 million, according to Rolling Stone. She had also been married before. Six months earlier, Spears had spent 55 hours wed to a childhood friend after making a 5:30 a.m. visit to a drive-thru chapel in Las Vegas. When Spears’s management team heard about her engagement to Federline, they set her up with a wedding planner, a jeweler—and Laura Wasser.
Wasser, 47, is a partner at the Los Angeles family law firm Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles, which was started by her father, Dennis Wasser, in 1976, and specializes in helping multimillionaires, athletes, and celebrities get married or divorced. Laura has a big smile and thick brown hair that falls halfway down her back. She’s petite but strong and looks like someone who might have been an aerobics instructor—which she was for a while, at a Crunch gym, during college.
Kim Kardashian and Laura Wasser
Kim Kardashian and her divorce lawyer Laura Wasser head into a meeting in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2013.
Photographer: Dharma/INFphoto.com
Wasser’s client list includes Angelina Jolie (when she filed to divorce Billy Bob Thornton), Denise Richards (Charlie Sheen), Nick Lachey (Jessica Simpson), Stevie Wonder (twice, actually), Maria Shriver (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and at least three Kardashians. She charges $850 an hour, requires a $25,000 retainer, and rarely represents people who have less than $10 million. She’s one of the top lawyers in what, when you include custody battles and paternity testing, has turned family law into what research firm IBISWorld calls an $11 billion business and one of the most lucrative areas of law.
“There’s a mythology of Laura Wasser in Hollywood,” says Brian Grazer, the co-founder of Imagine Entertainment, who hired her for his 2006 divorce from Gigi Levangie Grazer, and who still calls her from time to time for advice. “She has a reputation for being tough.” The celebrity tabloid website TMZ, which sometimes follows her around to see which clients she’s meeting with, has nicknamed her the Disso Queen.
Spears’s team wanted to introduce Britney to the comforts of the prenuptial contract. Wasser says she gets phone calls like that all the time: “A lot of times what will happen, particularly with young women, is they don’t want a prenup. They’re in love. This is fantasy time—‘We’re never going to get divorced, and I don’t want anybody, certainly not some old guy in a suit, telling me how it’s going to work out.’ So they bring me in. We have the conversation.”
Wasser talked with Spears on the phone and laid out for her the financial consequences of marriage: California, unlike most states, treats anything acquired during a marriage as community property, which means that everything a couple has earned will be divided evenly if they split. “In New York it’s different, it’s an equitable distribution. Here you can sit on the couch and eat bonbons while your husband’s at work, and you’ll still get half of everything,” Wasser says. And if you’re an actor or musician who earns royalties, those future payments are half someone else’s, too. “I mean, love, honor, and obey—OK, fine, whatever,” Wasser says. “But the point is the minute you get married in the state of California, every dollar you earn, every page of that novel you write, every painting you paint is communal property. It’s half-owned by your spouse.” That is, unless you have a prenuptial agreement that says otherwise.
Spears hired Wasser to negotiate her prenup, then married Federline in September 2004. Two years later, when she filed for divorce, she hired Wasser again. Wasser represented her for a year but left the case in September 2007, during the couple’s acrimonious custody battle for their sons and a very public breakdown by Spears. Wasser won’t say what led to her departure; she still represents Spears’s father, Jamie, who remains the pop star’s legal conservator. “It was an ugly split-up,” is all she’ll say. “We got out of that case.”
Since Spears’s divorce, the speed with which scandals spread has only increased, making Wasser, who’s as expert at navigating paparazzi as she is at practicing law, Hollywood’s complete divorce solution. Divorce is just as heartbreaking for those with their own Walk of Fame star as it is for those without one. But when you’re famous, the demise of your relationship can also affect your reputation—and career.