Across this complex, fascinating terrain, American courts continue to follow the strategy of relational work outlined earlier: They match intimate relations with appropriate economic transactions and media, they distinguish similar relations from each other, and they often justify their distinctions by invoking hostile worlds doctrines. Although they maintain a distinctive legal classification of intimate relations and of valid evidence for those relations, they alter the rules in response both to changes in ordinary practices and to the rise or fall of more general legal doctrines.
Some legal disputes lie halfway between the law of engagement and the law governing commercial sex. Courts have difficulties with these cases, because they again must decide what relationship applies to the couple. A case in point is Deborah Vandevelde’s $3.5 million breach of contract suit against Thomas Colucci. According to forty — one-year-old Vandevelde, the two first met in 1999 when fifty-three — year-old Colucci, a wealthy Long Island businessman, approached her in a Madison Avenue cafe, offered her a ride home in his golden Mercedes, and sent her flowers the next day. After the relationship began, Colucci treated Vandevelde—then employed by Christie’s auction galleries—with an array of expensive gifts: Bergdorf Goodman furs, designer clothing, a Mercedes CL500, a penthouse apartment on Central Park South, and another luxury forty-eighth-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue, next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Vandevelde further claimed that Colucci asked her to sign a $100,000 a year contract offering her employment in one of his companies. The contract stated that Colucci owed her $492,000 for past “business services.” Their agreement, however, went far beyond business into a form of courtship, bordering on commercial sexual services. In a television interview, Vandevelde stated that she and Colucci, still married and the father of two teenage children, were engaged. He had promised to divorce his wife and had bought Vandevelde a Vera Wang wedding dress and an engagement ring at Graff. Vandevelde added that while their relationship lasted, Co — lucci “enjoyed unrestricted sex. . . while promising her financial security.” Colucci’s “appetite for sex” noted Vandevelde, “was insatiable” (Abrams Report 2002; Maull 2002). Two years later Colucci broke up with Vandevelde, accusing her of betraying him with another boyfriend. He stopped paying her rent. At that point, he denied Vandevelde’s account of their relationship. The two met, according to his testimony, through an escort service: “Ms. Vandevelde,” claimed Colucci in an affidavit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, “was the girl whom the escort service sent to my room.” He compensated her “affections and loyalty” with lavish gifts. Colucci further argued that their contract was an agreement to facilitate adultery, and therefore illegal (Maull 2002; New York Daily News 2002).
The judge in this case, Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse, struck a delicate balance between commercial and moral considerations. First, he separated Vandevelde’s breach of contract suit from a different suit for unpaid rent by the owners of the building in which Vandevelde lived. In the latter case, he ruled against Colucci, ordering him to pay more than $50,000 in back rent. Once again, we find courts making fine distinctions on the way to placing a couple’s relationship in its proper location within an available matrix.