Richard Gere was part of the celebrity exodus of 2024, only his move wasn’t a direct response to the election. His wife, Alejandra Silva, is from Spain, and they were already planning to relocate to be closer to her family. At the time Gere said of his wife, “she gave me about seven years here, so we’re going to spend some years in Madrid with her family.” That’s a lovely, fair sentiment, and makes me think of another husband who’s overdue to spend 20 years in Slovenia. Anyway, what I didn’t realize was that the Connecticut home Gere sold for just under $11 million last October, was previously owned by Paul Simon. I also didn’t realize that Gere and his family didn’t ever really move in? At least that’s what Simon’s daughter Lulu alleges, along with the fact that Gere’s 2024 sale of the home to developers was a violation of the conditions of Gere’s 2022 purchase of the property. Lulu is making no bones about her feelings on how Gere has taken care of (or not) her childhood home:
“Just in case anyone was wondering if I still hate Richard Gere — I do!” Simon wrote in an Instagram story posted on Tuesday.
The singer, 30, claimed that the Golden Globe-winning star vowed to “take care” of the 31.8-acre estate in New Canaan as part of the conditions when he purchased the mansion in 2022.
“He bought my childhood home,” Simon said. “Promised he would take care of the land as [a] condition of his purchase. Proceeded to never actually move in & just sold it to a developer as 9 separate plots.”
The daughter of the Simon & Garfunkel hitmaker didn’t go into details about the alleged agreement.
Lulu, who has just over 2.5K monthly listeners on Spotify, continued her social media rant when she posted an edited photo that showed her old childhood pets surrounding an image of Gere.
“I hope my dead pets buried in that backyard haunt you until you descend into a slow and unrelenting madness,” Simon captioned the post.
…Both the 16-time Grammy winner Paul Simon and Gere, 75, took a loss during their separate sales of the 8,800-square-foot mansion.
The “Sound of Silence” singer and his wife, singer Edie Brickell, bought the home where he “recorded many of his hit albums” for $16.5 million in 2002, according to Town & Country.
In 2019, the couple tried to sell the Georgian-style estate for $13.9 million. The asking price fluctuated for three years until the “Chicago” star purchased the estate for $10.8 million in 2022, The Post reported.
The main home has six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, three powder rooms and multiple fireplaces.
The property also featured a separate 2,400-square-foot guest house, a pond, a pool and a courtyard.
Gere had planned to turn a portion of the property into a farm, according to Realtor.
After owning the property for only two years, Gere and his wife, Alejandra, took a slight loss on the property and sold the house in an off-market deal to real estate developers for $10.75 million in October 2024.
If taking care of the estate and not selling to developers really were conditions of the 2022 sale to Gere, I have a couple questions: were these conditions verbal or in writing, and if in writing, then why aren’t the Simons suing? Ultimately, as this case shows, I think it’s hard to retain any control or say in a home… that you’ve sold. It’s not yours anymore! On the other hand, homes, especially childhood ones, are emotional places. So what do we think — is this righteous indignation on Lulu’s part, or her just not letting go? I never really got upset when my parents sold the house I grew up in, but that might have been because they were so upset over the fallout of the sale that I felt I had to keep my sh-t together so at least one of us was steady. (Here’s a tip they learned the hard way: don’t hire your realtor from the line you’re standing on to order a cheeseburger. I’m not even joking.) I gotta hand it to Lulu, though, cause “I hope my dead pets buried in that backyard haunt you until you descend into a slow and unrelenting madness,” is an EPIC burn. Not quite “Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping,” but a biting poetry of its own, nonetheless.
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Photos via Instagram/Lulu Simon and Page Six and credit Getty