In a 1997 divorce in New York, Linda Graev was awarded a $2.5 million settlement, with her husband, Lawrence, paying her maintenance of $120,000 a year. The payments would continue for 12 years — as long as she did not remarry, or cohabit with someone for “60 substantially consecutive days.”

That larger number ($120,000 a year) should have made it easy to keep the smaller number (60 days) firmly in mind. But her husband, Lawrence Graev, a lawyer and, since 2000, the head of a private equity fund, claimed that in 2004 she and a boyfriend lived together for more than 60 days.

He argued that he, therefore, should no longer have to pay her maintenance.

The New York State Supreme Court cited New York case law, or precedent, saying that cohabiting involves not just living with someone but “sharing finances,” thus melding a couple’s lives together. The court decided, therefore, that Linda Graev did not cohabit.

Her husband appealed.

Earlier this week the New York Court of Appeals ruled 4 to 3 that the term “cohabiting” means many “physical, emotional, and material factors ... depending on the parties' intent.” Because the term was “ambiguous,” they said, the case should go back to state supreme court to determine what the couple’s divorce agreement meant by “cohabitation.”

The dissenting opinion was even tougher for the wife. The three dissenting judges said that she and her partner, who lived nearby, may have not commingled their finances, but they had “spent virtually every day and night together for over 60 days from June through August 2004” in her summer home. The dissenting judges held that her husband, therefore, should stop paying spousal support.

By all accounts the Divorce, Separation Support Group of Raleigh, North Carolina, is a terrific bunch of people, both men and women, at least 600 members, who meet once a week to give advice and help each other. The group was betrayed last January by a Fayetteville woman, Margaret Irene Haithcock, 51, who got $6,241 out of them by lying.

She came to the group and announced that she had a triple tragedy that had put her in debt. Her son had been killed in Iraq, she said, and she had cancer, and needed further treatments at Duke. Also, a fire had burned down her house and her letters from her son who was killed in Iraq.

The group, in response, held several fund raisers for her and actually had a memorial service for her son.

But it turned out that none of that was true.

An arrest warrant was issued in June, charging her with obtaining property by false pretenses. The warrant said that the claims of her illness and a dead son were offered only as a way to get money from the group. It took authorities more than two months to find her.

Haithcock, who is also known as Margaret H. Cooke, was arrested last month. According to records at the North Carolina Department of Corrections, she has a history of arrests and convictions dating from 1984 to 1990. She was imprisoned, most recently, for six months in 1990 on forgery charges. Other charges included credit card fraud, credit card theft, attempted forgery, and cheating on property services.

Haithcock/Cooke pleaded guilty on Thursday (October 9) to the charges, and has been ordered to repay the divorce support group. She was given three years of probation, fined $200, and ordered to undergo a mental health assessment.

Finally, she was told not to be in touch with the support group ever again.

What no one has made clear, however, is whether or not Haithcock/Cooke lied about another thing: Was she ever divorced?

Bad news for Las Vegas: one luxury condo will never get the “celebrity bump” expected from once having been a home to Hulk Hogan or his estranged wife, Linda Bollea.

Vegas has already had enough bad real estate news. Foreclosures are everywhere. There is an eight-month inventory of existing homes. Some 60 percent of the homes sold in July were owned by banks.

Into this scene came the brawling Hogans. When things were going better for the couple, and for Las Vegas, they had made a 20 percent down payment on a $4.2 million penthouse in a boutique condo hotel known as the Palms Place. In other words, before the building was completed, they put down $840,000 as a deposit to butt into a building that was being touted as a Vegas home to “hot young celebrities” like Eminem and Jessica Simpson — adding Hulk Hogan to that might seem to some people like a nightmare list of neighbors, rather than an incentive to buy. But this is Vegas, baby, Vegas.

Then the Hogan/Bolleas filed for divorce. Hulk Hogan wanted to get out of the Vegas condo rather than come up with the remaining $3.36 million. (They already had two homes in Florida.) Linda Bollea, on the other hand, wanted to go ahead.

The boring part: two courts, one in Florida, one in Nevada. Blah blah blah. One said they should go ahead, one said not.

The knockout blow: Hulk finally won. So no Vegas condo.

But it’s not like the Hogan/Bolleas will be getting the $840,000 back. Instead the Palms Place is keeping $640,000 as “liquidated damages.” Or in colloquial terms, “the price of changing your mind.”

That’s pretty much the standard in real estate deals gone bad. If there is no fault on the seller’s part, the buyer loses the down payment.

The attorneys’ fees were bad enough, but $655 in emergency in-house photocopying! In a 21-page petition filed in the California Superior Court last week, Britney Spears’s lawyers requested the approval of their legal fees. The hearing will be September 25 at 1:30 in Los Angeles County.

Any woman afraid to open an envelope from someone whose name ends in an Esq. will appreciate that this is one time when it’s good to have your dad running your life.

Since February, when Britney went off to a mental hospital for the second time, her father, James P. Spears, has been the Temporary Conservator of her person and a Temporary Conservator of her estate.

Her person seemed to be in fine shape over the weekend when she shined in silver while picking up three Video Music Awards. But her father, along with the lawyer Andrew Wallet, is also responsible for her estate, which means her money and her assets and her bills.

So her father has to paw through all the legal charges associated with her child custody issues as well as business matters. The lawyers fees for the entire divorce and custody battle will surely add up to one of the largest ever in the US. (There is always that case in Connecticut a year ago that ran up $13 million in legal fees. And a Canadian couple recently topped $1 million in legal fees.)

The petition that was just filed in the Spears case lists $248,625 for February through August already paid to the court appointed attorney Samuel D. Ingham.