Last week, Vanessa Bryant surprised everyone when she filed for divorce after a rocky 10 years of marriage to NBA Star Kobe Bryant. Now, her former step dad Stephen Laine is alluding to her being a ‘Gold digger’ and claiming she learned the rules from her spiteful mother.
According to Stephen, there is a reason Vanessa waited until the 10 year mark to file for the divorce
Her mother taught her well to wait for the ten-year mark [before divorcing]. In California … it’s considered a long term marriage and then she gets paid for life or until she remarries … just like her mother is doing to me.”
I have to pay her mom $1,800 every month and clearly they don’t need it. I have a six-year-old daughter and that money could be used toward her college fund or something … you’d think she’d care … but no, she’s spiteful.”
I guess Stephen forgot to add that he stepped out on Vanessa’s mom which ultimately ended their marriage 15 months after Vanessa married Kobe. So in a nutshell, she’s spiteful because he cheated! According to an article printed by the Sun Sentinel in 2004, Sofia [Vanessa’s mom] filed for divorce from Stephen after 12 1/2 years of marriage because she had learned that he was involved with another woman. Stephen at the time the article was printed, was currently living with the woman he cheated on her mama with and blamed the breakdown in the relationship on Kobe’s money.
He says that as Kobe and Vanessa lavished his wife with surprise gifts — a house full of furniture, a Mercedes-Benz S-500, $120,000 in cash, payment of phone, dental and credit card bills, payoff of their mortgage — he began to fear his wife’s respect for him was crumbling.
Vanessa’s step-grandfather, Robert Laine, put it this way: “All of a sudden, it wasn’t ‘What does Steve want for dinner?’ It was, ‘What does Kobe want?’ ”
In an affidavit filed with their divorce papers, Vanessa Bryant, then 20, theorized that her stepfather was “jealous” because the gifts she had given him — clothes, a computer — were less valuable than those she gave her mother. Not so, says Stephen Laine: “It was that I became insignificant.”
As far as the prenuptial agreement that was never signed, there is a story behind that as well.
Vanessa’s parents were said to have been hounding Kobe for dating their daughter who was still in high school and a minor at the time, so Kobe proposed to her on her 18th birthday (if he didn’t a statutory rape charge could have ensued). [Ironically, Vanessa’s mother had been laid off, had no money and the family filed for bankruptcy days after the announcement.]
He was an adult and she was only 17, and it was like, hey, wait a minute,” Laine said. It was like, here I am, going bankrupt and my daughter’s marrying Kobe Bryant.”
None of Kobe’s family (including his parents) attended the wedding and Kobe and Vanessa were going back and forth over the pre-nup for a few months before Kobe decided to just scrap it all together. According to Vanessa’s step father:
‘She just came home one day and said something to the effect that Kobe didn’t want a prenup — that he loved her too much” for one.’
