O
n a flight from
Ireland to New York
in June 2004,
Britney Spears
proposed to Kevin
Federline, a backup
dancer she’d been dating for about
three months. “We were a couple hours
into the flight and we’d been talking the
whole time, stuff about life, wanting to
have kids,” Spears told People magazine
shortly afterward. “All of a sudden, I
said, ‘What if you want to get married?’ ”
She was 22 at the time, and had sold 27
million albums with about $30 million
to her name, according to Rolling
Stone. She’d also been married before.
Six months earlier, Spears had spent 55
hours wed to a childhood friend after
making a 5.30am visit to a drive-
through chapel in Las Vegas. When
Spears’s management team heard
about her engagement to Federline,
they set her up with a wedding planner,
a jeweller – and Laura Wasser.
Wasser, 48, is a partner at the^
Los Angeles family law firm Wasser,
Cooperman & Mandles, which was
set up by her father, Dennis Wasser,
in 1976, and specialises in helping
multimillionaires and celebrities getmarried or divorced. She represented
Johnny Depp in his acrimonious
divorce from Amber Heard, where
opposing counsel accused her of
waging a “malicious war” to discredit
the actress’s claims of domestic abuse.
She was instrumental in keeping
details of the actor’s finances away
from prying tabloid eyes, and
engineered a settlement that kept
both parties out of court.
In September she was hired by
Angelina Jolie to manage her divorce
from Brad Pitt – their second
collaboration, with Wasser also
handling the actress’s divorce from
Billy Bob Thornton. Wasser wrangled
an amicable interim arrangement for
the couple’s six children that gave
Angelina sole physical custody and
Brad supervised visitation rights.
Wasser has a big smile and thick
brown hair that falls halfway down her
back. She’s petite but strong and looks
like someone who might have been an
aerobics instructor – which she was for
a while during college.
Along with Spears, Depp and Jolie,
Wasser’s client list includes Ryan
Reynolds (Scarlett Johansson), Drew
Barrymore (Will Kopelman), DeniseHOLLYWOOD
THE
WOMAN
What do Angelina, Britney and Kim have in
common? A-list attorney Laura Wasser
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Celebrity report