Katy Perry’s Long, Weird Convent Property Battle Might Be Headed to the Vatican
Photo: WireImage.
Katy Perry will finally have her convent—unless the Pope intervenes, that is. On Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times, a jury awarded Perry, who has been in a long fight to buy an eight-acre estate and convent in Los Feliz, $1.57 million in legal fees to be paid by restaurant owner Dana Hollister who also now owes the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles $3.47 million as well. But Hollister, who has been attempting to buy the same estate for years, told The Hollywood Reporter that she’s not giving up, and she’s taking this case all the way to the Vatican.
Hollister told T.H.R she is “using back channels in Rome to appeal to the Vatican and Pope Francis with her $30 million offer” on the Waverly Drive convent, also known as the Earle C. Anthony house. She claims she was sold the property by a group of nuns who live there, but whom a judge determined in March had no right to sell the property. Hollister and the nuns now claim to be asking the Vatican to say it’s theirs to sell, after all.
This saga goes back three years; Perry first tried to purchase the property in 2014 when her efforts were thwarted by Sisters Rita Callanan and Catherine Rose Holzman, the two nuns who were selling the convent to Hollister. Callanan and Holzman belong to Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the nonprofit that is listed as owning the land, but the sisters have not lived there since 2011.
The battle over which party had the right to buy the convent continued until March 2017, when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Perry had the right to purchase the property. The archdiocese argued that the church oversees the nuns’ nonprofit and sided with Perry in the sale.
But in the California courts, things aren't so simple. As the LAist reported in April 2016, a judge invalidated the sale of the property to Hollister, which paved the way for Perry to buy it. In October 2016, a panel of state appellate judges reversed the ruling, once again putting the decision—and Perry—in limbo.
In March, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stephanie Bowick ruled in Perry’s favor. Bowick said that though Hollister had already closed the sale, “no consent [from the L.A. Archdiocese} was obtained before the close of the sale,” rendering it “invalid.”
“There is no question that Dana Hollister knew what she did was wrong and willfully did it anyway,” the archdiocese’s lawyer, Kirk Dillman, told the L.A. Times on Friday. “It is not nice to mess with the Holy See and that was what she was doing.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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