Kelley Lynch, following her arrest at Juanita’s Restaurant in Boulder, Co.Several readers have emailed us to find out what happened to Leonard Cohen’s former manager Kelley Lynch—whose life fell apart after she got caught in late 2004 with her hand in the till to the tune of five million dollars, and for the last 14 months has waged a relentless, and at times hilarious, internet and email war against this blog and its editor.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the saga, Lynch (who was Cohen’s manager from ’88-’2004) suffered a mental breakdown, lost her home in foreclosure, got sued by Cohen for $7.3 million (and had a theft based civil judgment entered against her in that amount), lost custody of her 12 year old son, was evicted from her office (resulting in an additional money judgment), was sued on her $70,000 unpaid Neiman Marcus account, suffered several additional money judgments and started living on the streets of Santa Monica.
Lynch also commenced her now trade-mark campaign of internet terror against Leonard Cohen and anyone else who dared disagree with her flood of daily incoherent, ranting, and conspiracy themed emails and blog posts—as anyone who has ever participated in an internet discussion on the subject of Leonard Cohen or the Phil Spector case knows all too well.
Lynch also shrugged off several civil harassment restraining orders issued against her (including two in Cohen’s favor) as well as six bench warrants for her arrest as all “fraudulent”.
In approximately 2007 Lynch left Santa Monica and moved in with a former Buddhist acquaintance in Boulder, Colorado—which arrangement terminated shortly after Lynch was served at the residence with yet additional legal papers. (Lynch claims that she left because the man had "mother-in-law problems".)
From there Lynch moved to a succession of transient living accommodations, was (in her words) “frequently arrested” by the Boulder Police Department, briefly fled to New Jersey (after Cohen’s lawyers obtained a restraining order against her following a Colorado court hearing), returned to Louisville, Colorado (all the while leaving 10-15 ranting voice messages a day on Bruce Cutler’s office telephone system, and sending as many emails a day to the IRS and the FBI demanding the arrest of her growing list of “enemies”), and then moved in 2009 to Houston, Texas where she lived in a homeless shelter at night, and relentlessly blogged by day from a branch of the Houston Public Library.
In November of 2009 Lynch moved back to Los Angeles and into the apartment of her 23 year old son Rutger Penick.
Throughout all of this time, Kelley Lynch has clung to the fantasy that her “dear friend” Phil Spector will ride to her rescue by providing the budget and lawyers necessary for Lynch to vanquish Cohen, this blog, the LAPD, prosecutor Alan Jackson and her myriad other perceived “enemies” in court.
But, alas, after thousands of voice messages and email messages to Phil Spector’s former and current “legal team”, and notwithstanding direct entreaties by post to the now incarcerated creator of the Wall of Sound, the proverbial “lawyers, guns, and money” have failed to issue forth. Darn!
Because Kelley Lynch is impervious to logic and consumed by conspiracy theories regarding the genesis of her downhill slide (instead of realizing she was fired for stealing-->no job, no money-->no money, no house-->no house, no custody and so on) she is always exasperating and her hundreds of emails a week (copy to the IRS, the FBI, governors, attorneys, mayors, the media) hilarious.
But on July 8, 2010 Kelley Lynch seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. No posts on her inane “Cyber-terrorismWatch Dog Blog”. No daily rant emails. No posts on other sites about how she is going to “take everyone down legally”.
So where is she? Curious? Then let’s get to the gossip!
Actually, it’s more than gossip.
On July 8, 2010 Kelley Lynch abruptly moved out of her son Rutger’s Los Angeles apartment and in with an old friend—again from her “Buddhist days”—in Fort Lauderdale Florida.
How do we know this?
A source ran into her two weeks ago in Ft. Lauderdale with her old friend “Eric”—who is a dealer in antique Buddhist artifacts, and reported that she is now bunking with him.
It turns out that “Eric” is Eric Salter, who attended a Buddhist seminary with Lynch’s second husband Douglas Penick—so there is a definitely connection there dating back decades. (Note that Mr. Salter has sent us a dozen emails denying that Lynch is living with him.)
Additionally, in the last three and a half weeks, we have received roughly 300 emails from Kelley Lynch that were sent from a Fort Lauderdale IP address.
And then there are the 30 unsolicited emails we received from Ms. Lynch in the last few days gratuitously denying that she is now at Eric’s—and to stop “criminally harassing” her “friend Eric Salter”, as well as the dozen emails to the FBI, the IRS, and other demanding that we be “investigated” and “charged” with “criminally harassing Eric”. Which is, of course, the same pattern of denial that Lynch engaged in when we published that she was blogging from Boulder, when we noted that she was living in Houston, and when we mentioned here that she had moved in with her son Rutger in Los Angeles.
In other words, anything that Kelley Lynch—or anyone else—spends that much energy denying, must be true.
So what is Lynch’s major malfunction?
Aside from being a chronic alcoholic (our source told us that when he saw her two weeks ago she was too drunk to even carry on a coherent conversation) we have also learned that her older brother Jay was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic over 30 years ago, and also became homeless.
In any event, whatever happens in the continuing saga that is Kelley Lynch, it is sure to be interesting—so stay tuned folks.
