A transsexual who allegedly manhandled her South African heiress mom had her lawyer rough up the 84-year-old woman yesterday.
Diane Wells’ lawyer, Mel Sachs, has grilled Constance Joyce Cheney for five hours over two days about her claim that Wells, 52, had grabbed her arm so hard it broke.
Cheney testified at Wells’ trial in Manhattan that Wells “was annoyed” because she had declined to cut her other two children out of her will and name Wells the sole beneficiary to her multimillion-dollar fortune.
“I’m exhausted,” Cheney said after Sachs’ lengthy cross-examination, in which he asked her repeatedly about a number of documents and checks that she said she couldn’t remember.
Cheney testified from her wheelchair and was clearly uncomfortable as the questioning dragged on. But that didn’t seem to upset her prodigal son-turned-daughter, who spent a good portion of her mother’s testimony sucking on hard candy, fidgeting in her chair, looking around the courtroom and playing with her hair.
In several sometimes-heated exchanges, Sachs suggested that Cheney injured herself and pinned the blame on her daughter at the behest of her son, James – who, Sachs maintains, is the sibling who’s really trying to gain control of the mom’s finances.
When he asked her about her “long history of bipolar disorder,” Cheney snipped, “Is that what this is about? I thought it was about how my arm was broken.”
Sachs kept asking the mom about massive amounts of money she’d paid to her son over the years.
She said she couldn’t remember giving her son any money – and that she didn’t know he’d filed a lawsuit against Wells on her behalf.
In between, Sachs’ questions, Cheney hummed The Beatles’ classic “When I’m 64” to amuse herself.