After their honeymoon, the couple moved into the mansion on Stone Canyon, across from the Riviera Country Club. Sibba arrived in January 1989. As they had planned, they divided their time between Bel Air and Jeddah. Christine found it difficult to be away from her mother, who lived in California, and to share space with the larger Bin Laden family at Kilo 7, Ibrahim later said. To please her, he said, he bought beachfront land beside the Red Sea and broke ground on what would become a seaside estate worth about $3 million.
It was not long, however, before their marriage slipped into difficulty. Their quarrels persisted, and finally, late in 1991, Christine decided to move out of the Bel Air house and take Sibba with her. Ibrahim hired his own lawyers after she sued for divorce. As his brother Khalil had learned in 1990, when America in Motion had its troubles, Ibrahim was about to discover that American attorneys, once loosed, could rattle even a mellow man’s serenity.
“DO YOU KNOW what your assets are worth?”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea what your assets are worth?”
“No.”
Ibrahim sat in a Los Angeles conference room in the summer of 1992, answering deposition questions from Christine’s attorneys. The couple now seemed to be headed for a full-blown Los Angeles divorce trial; among other issues, lawyers for the two sides argued over how much income Ibrahim received, how his fortune might be valued, and what part of it Christine and Sibba might tap as alimony and child support. Christine’s lawyers found Ibrahim elusive on the subject of money. He said it was just not something he worried about or understood in any detail.
“Have you made any attempt to find out what your assets are worth?”
“Yes…I talked to my brothers who run the company. Nobody—nobody knows.”
“Which brothers did you talk to?”
“I talked to Yehia…Y-e-h-i-a…”
“Where is Yehia located?”
“Saudi Arabia.”
“What did you ask him?”
“How much each of them worth. How much each of—each one of us worth.”
“And what did he say?”
“It is hard to tell. He doesn’t know.”
“Did you tell him you needed to have the information to file with the Court in the United States?”
“No. I told that to my brother Khalil, and he told him.”
“And what happened?”
“Nobody knows. They don’t know.”
“…Mr. Bin Laden, other than what you have already stated, what attempts have you made to ascertain what your net worth is?”
“Just pick up the phone, and I talk to my brother, and to my knowledge, you see, I don’t know the work. I don’t work with them. I don’t know what they have, so what they send me, I assume that is what they—that is what they sent. I don’t know…”
“Do you know what your income is on a yearly basis?”
“It goes up and down. It is—it depends on the job we get. It is not like a salary, so I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, it depends on the job you get?”
“Like if the organization this year have jobs from the government, we have more roads. If we are doing good the profit will go up. If we don’t do good or if we don’t have a job, there is no profits.”
“What was your income for 1991?”
“I don’t know.”
“What has been your income so far in 1992?”
“The what?”
“What has been your income so far in 1992?”
“I have no idea.”
Michael Balaban and Christine’s other lawyers had particular difficulty believing that Ibrahim did not work at all, as he claimed, and, indeed, had never worked a day in his life. Under California divorce law, it was in Ibrahim’s interest to maintain during court proceedings that he did not receive any salary during the period of their marriage; if his income derived from assets he owned before he met Christine, it might be harder for her to win a large settlement.
“Do you know any of your brothers who don’t work at some job?” Balaban asked Ibrahim at one point during his deposition.
“Period—they don’t work at all, you mean?” Ibrahim asked.
“Exactly.”
“Yes.”
“Which ones?”
“Myself…”
“Well, give me a number, and then we will identify them.”
“Myself. Abdullah. Mohammed. Shafig…Abdullah Aziz…and some I don’t keep in contact with. I don’t know if they work or not.”
Balaban asked about his purchase of his Bel Air mansion during the early 1980s, before he met Christine; the price of the estate had been just over $2 million.
“How much cash did you pay?”
“I don’t remember, but some—around one million cash…No. More than that. I paid, maybe, one mill, six hundred.”
“Thousand?”
“Yeah, dollars.”
“Okay, so one million, six hundred thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get the cash?”
“From Saudi Arabia, from my brother, Yeslam.”
“Was that a loan?”
“No. He sold some of my stocks.”
“…And whose name was the house put in?”
“My brother in—my brother’s name.”
“Which brother?”
“Yeslam.”
“Why?”
“Because they told me if I put the house under my name, and then here, I have to pay income taxes if I own something.”
“Who told you that?”
“Some of my friends.”8
On and on it went, the lawyers probing, Ibrahim responding in a tone of genial indolence. Following the depositions, as their trial date steadily approached, the estranged couple filed dueling declarations about the collapse of their marriage and their daughter’s best interests.
Christine wrote that she felt trapped when she visited Saudi Arabia with Sibba. Ibrahim would disappear and “stay at the beach or go to one of his brothers’ houses…and if he did come home…he would eat and take a nap or eat and leave the house quickly.” During her stay in Jeddah during 1991, she wanted to go home to California, but Ibrahim “would not allow Sibba and myself to return to the United States.” Ibrahim took her passport and told her “that it was being held at the Bin Laden Organization’s office.” She needed Ibrahim’s signature to obtain an exit visa, and he refused, she wrote, telling her, “If you want to go home, you can go home, but Sibba is staying.” She now feared, she told the court, that if Ibrahim was permitted to take Sibba to Saudi Arabia as part of their postdivorce custody agreement, she might never return. During their quarrels, Ibrahim had told her “numerous” times that Sibba “would go to Saudi Arabia no matter what happens and no matter what the court orders.” Other members of the Bin Laden family had also told her that if Ibrahim took Sibba to Saudi Arabia, “he would not return her to me.”9
“I see very clearly the intention of Chris is to punish me by keeping Sibba from going to Saudi Arabia,” Ibrahim wrote in reply. He had “never tried to stop her from leaving” the kingdom; in fact, “I helped her to leave…One time we had an argument and she wanted to leave and I told her you could do whatever you want, she knows very well she could leave if she wanted to. The law a wife can’t leave without a husband’s permission applies on the Saudis only. The only time I take her passport is to get her an exit visa…She did not need any signature from me for her to leave.”