Family Law

Pennsylvania Woman?s Divorce of David Lee Roth is News to Him

By ckramer

Jo Ann Fonzone, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been attempting to divorce former Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth for the last four years. The seeming hang-up in the case? Roth’s representation claims that he?s never been married to her.

According to an article in The Morning Call, the David Lee Roth case is but one of nearly two dozen lawsuits that Fonzone, representing herself as attorney each time, has filed since 1997. In all, 18 defendants have found themselves implicated in her complaints, lawsuits and appeals in federal and county courts. In addition, the filing fees for many of these cases have been waived by the courts, because Fonzone can’t afford them.

Fonzone has been successful in two of the cases that she has presented.
Fonzone, 51, claims to have met Roth at New York University in the late 1970s. She also claims that she married him in 1983.

The story gets a bit more strange, as she claims that at the time Roth went by the name Cary J. Woods. According to court documents, Fonzone did in fact graduate from NYU in 1980, and there was a Cary J. Woods there as well, whose birthday matched the one that Fonzone listed for him in her lawsuit, who graduated in 1979.

Fonzone claimed that she was unaware that the person that she married was David Lee Roth until 1993, even though she had gone to a Van Halen concert in Los Angeles during her marriage. She thought, according to her suit, that Roth was an entertainment agent working with the William Morris agency.
“He’s the master of disguise,” she said of Roth in an interview.

Fonzone goes on to claim that Roth abused her during their relationship, and that he stole money via identity theft. According to her, Roth stole her Social Security number and used it “to gain a $50 million credit line.”

Apparently Fonzone has attempted to send divorce papers to Cary J. Woods, who is a filmmaker and who has worked for the William Morris agency in the past. That agency represents Van Halen, as well. Woods did not reply to The Morning Call’s attempts to contact him.

Fonzone says that she does not have any pictures of herself with David Lee Roth, or a marriage certificate because she left them in California in 1993 when she departed.

Roth’s publicist, Elaine Schock, said that she was dubious whether Roth and Fonzone had ever met, despite Fonzone’s claims. Schock called Fonzone’s claims “as false as you can get. If you are in the industry, this will happen to you.”

Schock also said that the birthday reported by Fonzone is not Roth’s, and that, to her knowledge, Roth, who goes by his birth name, has never been married. Roth, she also said, wouldn’t have been able to attend NYU in the late 1970’s as he was touring with Los Angeles-based Van Halen.

This is not the first time that Roth has been in the news without actually being involved. Schock said that the police in Canada once claimed to have saved the singer from a peanut allergy attack. It turned out to be a David Lee Roth impersonator, however, rather than the real singer.

Full post as published by The Divorce Blog on May 13, 2010 (boomark / email).