The Coke Clause

Linda Lee — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:48:24 -0400

Banking, steel, oil, cocaine … Matthew Mellon is heir to a fortune built on the first three, and a victim of the fourth. And although he’s sworn off coke for good, when he wrote a pre-prenup with his fiancé, Noelle Reno, in the form of a business contract, they put in a clause saying that if he ever touched coke (or any similar drug) he would owe her $1 million. In cash.

Why don’t we think of motivators like that when we decide to give up carbs?

Now that the marriage is off, and she is not longer part of Degrees of Freedom, the brand of luxury cashmere knits they established together last year, she brought suit in Manhattan Supreme Court on July 18 to enforce the rest of the agreement. The suit describes what it calls Mellon’s erratic behavior.

They were engaged in Paris, in 2006. The first agreement they signed, in 2007, said she would get $1 million if their home in London was sold.

The drug clause was added in February of this year, in an attempt to protect her financial interests in their design company if he fell off the wagon.

Instead, she walked away from the company and the relationship in June, and she isn’t the first designing woman to decide that Mellon, despite his obvious charms at 43, was too much of a handful.

Her lawyers at Pryor Cashman told “The New York Post,” “Noelle devoted three years of her life to this company and this man and was left with nothing from both.”

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The Coke Clause