Diet doctor and £85bn heiress in custody war

Lionel Bissoon and Elizabeth Johnson with baby William

29/03/2008
By Tom Leonard in New York
The Telegraph (UK)

The flamboyant and privileged lifestyle of one of America's richest heiresses has been laid bare in a custody battle she is fighting over a Cambodian orphan.

Elizabeth "Libet" Johnson, 57, an heir to the £85 billion Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals empire, has been portrayed by a former boyfriend as ruthless, deceitful and predatory, using her enormous wealth to get her way.

The less than flattering portrait of a Manhattan socialite who once owned a 20,000sq ft apartment on Central Park has been provided by Lionel Bissoon, a Trinidadian-born celebrity weight-loss doctor with whom she was romantically involved.

The pair have been fighting for nearly three years over a five-year-old Cambodian boy whom both claim to have legally adopted, with the case leading to accusations of "legal kidnapping" and extortion.

This week, in Manhattan's state appeals court, Miss Johnson appealed against a judge's decision to revoke her previous judgment in the multi-millionaire socialite's favour.

Miss Johnson, whose grandfather, Robert Wood Johnson built his company into a pharmaceutical giant, has remained silent outside court, but Dr Bissoon, 47, has been happy to highlight her alleged faults.

He has pointed out how she had five husbands before she was 40 and claimed she has been romantically linked with many other men, including the singer Michael Bolton and the hairdresser Frederic Fekkai.

Dr Bissoon, who wrote The Cellulite Cure, became romantically involved with Miss Johnson in 2003. At the time, she was one of his patients. He says she began inviting him to her apartment in the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

Valued at one point at £31 million, the property was so big that she had considered installing a basketball court and a pool.

Dr Bissoon admitted that life with her had its attractions - jetting in her private plane between her various homes, including one in the ski resort of Vail and her farm in Millbrook, upstate New York.

Within months they were talking about adoption and, later that year, Miss Johnson found an orphan called Rath Chan in Cambodia, where she was involved in setting up an orphanage.

Temporarily getting round a US ban on adopting Cambodians, they brought the boy to New York on a medical visa in August 2003. He was given a £50,000 trust fund and two nannies, and installed at the Johnson apartment. However, by the following summer, the Bissoon-Johnson relationship was virtually over.

Miss Johnson, who has four grown-up children, told him that she intended to adopt the child on her own. Mr Bissoon initially agreed but changed his mind after the heiress banned him from seeing William following a row at her apartment.

Two years ago, a judge named Miss Johnson as the child's mother but revoked her order last year, citing the heiress's "substantial, material misrepresentations".

The judge was unimpressed to learn belatedly that Miss Johnson had failed to disclose that she had originally tried to adopt the boy with Dr Bissoon, and that he had actually adopted William first, in Cambodia in 2004.

Miss Johnson had also not disclosed that she had recently been treated for a drinking problem.

The four-judge panel has reserved its judgment.

Uncertainty for an Orphan [from Cambodia] Claimed in Two Adoptions

October 12, 2007
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
The New York Times (USA)

In the summer of 2003, an heiress with a flamboyant lifestyle decided to devote herself to saving Cambodian orphans.

While she was in Cambodia, starting an orphanage on the Mekong River, she became enchanted with a toddler known as Rath Chan — “rath” means “orphan” in Cambodian.

Now Rath Chan, renamed William, is caught in a dispute between the heiress, Elizabeth Ross Johnson, and Lionel Bissoon, a celebrity weight-loss doctor with whom she was having an affair. They are no longer a couple, but both claim to have legally adopted the child.

Yesterday, a judge invalidated an adoption Ms. Johnson obtained in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court a year and a half ago, because of adoption papers in Cambodia, including a revised birth certificate naming Dr. Bissoon the boy’s father, according to Dr. Bissoon’s lawyers. The judge, Kristin Booth Glen, is the same judge who initially granted the adoption. She allowed the child to stay with Ms. Johnson.

The judge has ordered her decision sealed. But Dr. Bissoon’s lawyers agreed to talk about it because, they said, it was extremely rare for an adoption to be vacated.

Bonnie Rabin, one of Dr. Bissoon’s lawyers, said the judge had found that the adoption in Manhattan had been “procured by fraud,” because, among other things, Ms. Johnson failed to tell the court that Dr. Bissoon considered himself the child’s father.

The judge ruled that Dr. Bissoon had adopted William first, in a “full and final” adoption in 2004 in Cambodia, which Ms. Johnson had ignored when she adopted the child in New York, the lawyers said.

Last night, Ms. Johnson issued a statement through a spokeswoman, Marcia Horowitz, saying she was devastated by the judge’s decision. “The surrogate court’s decision setting aside an adoption that the court had granted last year ruptures my relationship with my son, whom I have loved and raised since infancy,” Ms. Johnson said.

She said that the decision ignored the “deep bond” between her and the child, and that she would immediately appeal.

Ms. Horowitz said the child, now almost 5, would stay with Ms. Johnson during the appeal.

Robert S. Cohen, Ms. Johnson’s lawyer, declined to comment yesterday. But during court proceedings, Ms. Johnson’s lawyers argued that there had never been a Cambodian adoption, that if Dr. Bissoon had arranged anything, it was only permission from the Cambodian government to adopt the child. They said that whatever he did, he did to help her adopt the child, and that he challenged the New York adoption only because he wanted money. Ms. Rabin acknowledged that Dr. Bissoon had asked Ms. Johnson for child support.

Dr. Bissoon said he did not want to take William away from Ms. Johnson, but wanted joint custody. “I’m the only father he has,” Dr. Bissoon said after learning of the judge’s decision. “I want him back in my life.”

He said he had not been allowed to see William since December 2005, when, he said, Ms. Johnson “staged” a fight with him and threw him out of her apartment at 1 Central Park West, in the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Ms. Johnson’s spokeswoman denied that Ms. Johnson had provoked a fight. “They parted ways,” Ms. Horowitz said.

Dr. Bissoon said the prospect of seeing the child again was “a thrill,” but added that he was somewhat bitter. “When you think of what we’ve gone through, not sleeping, sometimes not even wanting to go to work,” he said, “I guess the best nights I’ve had is the nights I would dream about him.”

Ms. Johnson and Dr. Bissoon became romantically involved in February 2003, Dr. Bissoon said. A month earlier, he had been profiled in People magazine as the doctor who helped the singer Roberta Flack lose about 40 pounds through mesotherapy, a treatment that involves injections of medications.

Ms. Johnson, now in her 50s, had been married five times, had four children of her own, led a jet-setting life as a socialite, philanthropist and traveler, and had been romantically linked to a string of celebrities, like the singer Michael Bolton, the hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai and Jerome Jeandin, a chauffeur at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. She is the great-granddaughter of Robert Wood Johnson, a founder with his brothers of the pharmaceutical empire.

Dr. Bissoon, 46, is an osteopathic doctor with offices on the Upper West Side, in Los Angeles and in West Palm Beach, Fla.

On a trip to Cambodia in June 2003, according to an affidavit filed by Dr. Bissoon in Surrogate’s Court, Ms. Johnson called him to announce, “I found your son.” Although they had never discussed adoption before, he said in an interview, she told him that the boy, Rath Chan, looked just like him.

She was working to establish her orphanage, Golden Children, on a 17-acre site east of Phnom Penh. According to an Internal Revenue Service filing, Golden Children had assets of $8.8 million in 2005. The filing lists Ms. Johnson as president and the socialite Anne Bass as vice president.

Cambodian adoptions were growing in popularity around the same time. But Ms. Johnson was not the best candidate there because of her age and the fact that she already had children. In addition, the United States had restricted the immigration of Cambodian infants because of concerns that they might be sold.

Dr. Bissoon said the immigration problem, along with opposition by Ms. Johnson’s family, had led to an elaborate plan for him to adopt the baby in his native Trinidad. But the plan fell through, he said, because Trinidad frowned on adoptions by single fathers.

The baby was brought to the United States for medical reasons, according to Dr. Bissoon, who said he went on to file adoption papers in Cambodia and to put his name — but not Ms. Johnson’s — on the baby’s revised Cambodian birth certificate.

After the romance ended in the summer of 2004, Dr. Bissoon continued to visit the child at Ms. Johnson’s apartment three to six days a week, he said, until Ms. Johnson banished him in December 2005. She then went on, he said, to adopt the child in New York without telling him.

Dr. Bissoon said he had not seen William since he sneaked into his preschool on his birthday in January 2006. But he said he did not think the boy had forgotten him. “Children don’t forget that easily,” he said.