Nelson Peltz Files to Have His Daughter Nicola and His Wife, Claudia, Removed From Weddings Planners’ Countersuit

Nelson Peltz has filed to remove his wife, Claudia Peltz, and their daughter Nicola Peltz Beckham from a countersuit against him filed by wedding planners Nicole Braghin and Arianna Grijalba of Plan Design Events. PDE was the second of three wedding planners enlisted to coordinate the Palm Beach wedding of Nicola and her now husband, Brooklyn Beckham. 

Nelson had originally sued the pair, claiming that they failed to deliver on their contractual obligations. He allegedly let Braghin and Grijalba go after eight days, and is asking that they return the $159,000 deposit, half of what they would have been paid had they completed the job. The pair countersued, naming Claudia and Nicola in addition to Nelson in the suit. 

In this latest filing, filed in Miami-Dade County on Thursday morning and obtained by Vanity Fair, Nelson’s lawyers call the inclusion of his wife and daughter in the countersuit “meritless,” reasoning, in part, that Nicola and Claudia were not parties in the contractual agreement:

In a desperate effort to distract from their own failure to accomplish anything of substance in the short time they purported to act as replacement wedding planners pursuant to an alleged written agreement with Mr. Peltz, and only Mr. Peltz, Defendant PDE filed a salacious, meritless, and legally deficient third-party complaint against Mr. Peltz’s daughter, Nicola, and wife, Claudia.… Aware that its claim is frivolous, PDE shamefully attempts to falsely portray Nicola in an extremely negative light to entice the media and hopefully pressure Mr. Peltz to dismiss his well-founded claims against PDE. While this was tailor-made for the tabloids, it could not be further from the truth.

In short: Leave Nicola and Claudia out of this. Vanity Fair has reached out to PDE’s legal team for comment. 

A source close to the Peltz-Beckham family tells Vanity Fair, “Nelson is not a litigious man, he has not sued anyone in 15 years, but when it comes to his daughter, he will protect her always…he is a loving father who engaged in an…agreement with a group that couldn’t live up to the experience they sold him.”

“Despite the issues, they were able to pull off a once-in-a-lifetime wedding for his daughter,” the source adds.  

The two lawsuits have been picked apart and shared exhaustively, thanks to the details reported by British tabloid the Daily Mail and other outlets that obtained the court documents. Most of the issues seemed to arise from a wildly chaotic guest list (PDE took over the event from celebrity wedding planner Preston Bailey, and in text messages included in the reported court documents, the pair appeared to struggle with the RSVP system). 

In his suit, Nelson included texts from Nicola to show the alleged messiness of the proceedings. 

“Lewis Hamilton did NOT RSVP,” Nicola wrote, according to screenshots published by the Daily Mail, referring to Formula 1’s most well-known driver, “So explain why his names on the list please.”

“He cant come so explain why you said he rsvpd yes,” she wrote later, according to the screenshots. 

Grijalba explained that she was not familiar with the RSVP system: “Give me a sec because this system for RSVP it’s new to me, I haven’t got a chance to learn how to pull out the data.… I need time to do this. I’m going to take a moment [to] learn the app and send you the information, I hate looking like a fool but I hate the most not giving you what you need ASAP.”