McCourt divorce trial set to resume in Los Angeles with former Dodgers CEO’s testimony

McCourt divorce trial set to resume in Calif.

LOS ANGELES — Former Los Angeles Dodgers CEO Jamie McCourt contends she would never give away an ownership stake to one of baseball’s more storied franchises. She’ll now have to explain to a judge why she signed a postnuptial agreement that gives the team to her estranged husband.

McCourt is expected to take the stand Monday and resume testimony in her divorce dispute with Frank McCourt. At stake is the Dodgers, the stadium and the surrounding property, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon could find in favor of Frank McCourt, invalidate a 2004 postnuptial agreement by splitting the assets under California’s community property law or order the sale of the team.

Earlier this month, Jamie McCourt testified that a family attorney didn’t tell her before she signed the postnuptial agreement that she wouldn’t be a team owner if there was divorce. She called the idea of giving up her share of the Dodgers “preposterous.”

The trial resumes after a two-week hiatus in which the Dodgers seem in as much flux as their ownership: Dodgers manager Joe Torre announced last week he will step down at the end of the season, leaving a rookie manager in charge of a team that has struggled in the midst of the McCourts’ legal firestorm.

The trial has given glimpses into how the couple made decisions, how they spent their money and the ensuing fallout that landed them in a Los Angeles courtroom.

In asking for temporary spousal support, Jamie McCourt said she needed about $55,000 for personal expenses such as clothing and spent $180,000 to move a designer kitchen from their home in Massachusetts to Southern California. She noted it wasn’t uncommon for her and her husband to spend $1,000 a night at luxurious hotels.

The couple also spent $14 million to rip out tennis courts to build an indoor, Olympic-size swimming pool and other improvements at a palatial Holmby Hills home near the Playboy Mansion. They also bought a beachfront home in Malibu for $27 million three years ago that had a small pool, but it wasn’t suitable for “long-distance swimming,” she said in a declaration.

She was eventually awarded $225,000 a month and Gordon ordered Frank McCourt to pay more than $400,000 a month to maintain the couple’s six homes and a condominium.

Frank McCourt also said he was footing a $10,000 a month bill for his wife’s hair stylist after moving to Los Angeles in 2004, shortly after the team was purchased from Fox for about $430 million in a highly leveraged deal that he and his attorneys have said was risky.

In her brief testimony, Jamie McCourt countered that claim, saying that a financial analysis done before buying the Dodgers showed the opposite.

“I did not think it was risky,” she said.

Later, though, she said everything the couple had amassed in their nearly 30-year marriage was put toward purchasing the Dodgers, which appeared to be a challenging proposition.

During the trial, Frank McCourt testified he took out a $60 million loan on land around Dodger Stadium to pay for a “menu of houses.” Her attorneys also presented a business plan created for him that called for cutting Dodger payroll by 11 percent and 21 percent in 2005 and 2006, respectively.

Since the couple split last year, Frank McCourt has lived in a Beverly Hills hotel, attended the Super Bowl and spent thousands of dollars on clothes. He also kept two of his sons on the payroll at a combined annual salary of $600,000, despite one working at Goldman Sachs and another attending graduate school at Stanford University.

Peter O’Malley, whose family owned the Dodgers for 47 years, said last week that Frank McCourt should sell the team because it has lost its prestige in professional sports. A spokesman for Frank McCourt said the Boston transplant plans to eventually turn over the team to his four sons.