Paul McCartney may be the Beatle who'll probably live the longest, but he's also a big spoilsport – he's apparently bashed out a private divorce settlement with Heather Mills so nobody will ever find out if he got all stabby stabby with a wineglass on her.
According to reports over the weekend, Paul McCartney had nipped any hope of seeing him and Heather Mills screaming at each other in a divorce court in the bud with a £32 million private divorce deal. Tabloids screamed that the settlement earnt Heather Mills around £1,000 for every hour she was married to Paul McCartney, although that's not strictly true – that figure included a cash settlement as well as various pieces of Paul McCartney property plus the legal right to change the songwriting credits for Yellow Submarine to Lennon/That One-Legged Bird That McCartney Might Have Stabbed. However, Heather Mills has flatly denied these reports, and that means Stabbystabstabgate is back on.
The Paul McCartney/ Heather Mills divorce was meant to be one of the bitterest in history, wasn't it? It certainly looked like it was going that way a while ago – there were petty lock-changes and expensive lawyers, weird urges to fight from Rod Stewart and shameless cash-in T-shirts. More seriously, though, were the allegations that Paul McCartney beat Heather Mills up with a wine glass, creepily banned Heather from breast-feeding their daughter because "they are my breasts" and may have possibly beat up Linda McCartney too.
We don't know how true these rumours are, and for a while it looked like we never would – Paul McCartney bought the Linda McCartney 'abuse' tapes for £200,000 in November to hide those secrets forever, and it seemed as if he'd offered Heather Mills a divorce settlement of £32 million just to keep his private business to himself, as The News Of The World reported:
Heather Mills will pocket around £1,000 an hour for her four-year marriage to Sir Paul McCartney in a hush-hush divorce deal— that's about the same rate she charged as a hooker. Mucca, 38, has finally agreed a £32million cash and property out-of-court settlement… Heather will bag the 64-year-old Beatle's £4 million luxury Georgian house in St John's Wood, north-west London, AND his £6 million home in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.
While £32 million sounds like a lot of money, it's actually only estimated to be around 3% of Paul McCartney's fortune. But the divorce settlement has just been denied by Heather Mills' lawyer, who said:
"With regard to the article in yesterday's News of the World, we would like to state that there has been no offer made whatsoever at any time to our client and therefore no settlement has been agreed."
This isn't the first rumour of a divorce settlement, however. Back in December it was rumoured that Paul McCartney had agreed to pay Heather Mills $235 million, a figure which we'd have happily accepted if a) we were Heather Mills and b) the figure didn't turn out to be completely untrue. But even £32 million would have been a small price to pay for Paul McCartney to forget about Heather Mills forever and get on with the things he used to like to do, like singing songs into space and ending every charity concert ever with tedious 90-minute versions of Hey Jude.
All this news has left us worried, though. Now that Paul McCartney and Heather Mills seem to possibly want to end their divorce in a reasonable way, where are we supposed to go to get our bitter divorce kicks now? Australian girl from Lost, we're counting on you.
Read more:
Sister Stone says
Of course mills won’t settle – she’ll wring much more gruesome publicity out of a proper trial, and that seems to be what she’s after