A bitter split between divorce lawyers has turned the offices of one of the city’s top matrimonial firms into a house of misery.
Norman Sheresky — who’s handled the breakups of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook, James and Marcy Gandolfini and Kay and Warner LeRoy — is suing his ex-partners David Aronson, Allan Mayefsky and Pamela Sloan for $26 million.
In the suit filed last year, Sheresky, 82, alleged that they reneged on a deal to make annual mortgage payments of $100,000 on his co-op and give him his usual cut of firm profits despite his reducing his caseload.
With the case still pending, Sheresky continues to work in his old offices at Aronson Mayefsky & Sloan at 485 Lexington Ave., even after his colleagues dissolved their partnership with him and stripped his name from their shingle.
“Saying it’s awkward is an understatement,” said a source. “Who’d want to go to a place every day where you’re suing the people? It must be very hurtful for him to go in there.” Another source said that Sheresky is “ignored by his colleagues,” that his secretary has been fired and that the firm stopped answering his phone line.
In a court affidavit filed last month, Sheresky says he’d like to move offices, but can’t. “I need a place to work, I need my office. It is a hostile, unwelcoming place, but I have no other . . . I have sought employment with other firms. Because of my age and health limitations, I have been unsuccessful.”
Sheresky says in the affidavit that he had to sell his co-op and move to a “small one-bedroom with my wife, two cats and a dog.”
Attorneys for Sheresky’s ex-partners have moved to have his claim dismissed. “My partners and I have no intention to comment upon what we view to be a purely personal matter,” Aronson told us. Sheresky declined to comment while the case is active.
“I feel bad for both parties,” said Raoul Felder, the high-powered divorce lawyer who has faced off against both sides. “You have to look at this with sadness.”