In 1997, when Joseph Healy bought a $500,000 condominium on West Cooper Avenue, he put girlfriend Carmen Brannen’s name on the deed. They’d just attended the Food & Wine Classic, and he was feeling romantic. He gave her a card: “Sweetheart, our first purchase together. How exciting.”

Healy said he meant it as a “confirmation of our relationship.”

Now, a decade later, an Aspen jury is sorting out the other end of the relationship. They must decide why Brannen walked away from a Feb. 12 deal in which Healy was to give her $300,000 for her share of the condo they bought for $447,000.
Healy is suing to enforce the deal. Brannen is still living in the unit, and her lawyer, Gary Cohen, suggested Healy didn’t have the decency to talk to her before posting an eviction note last fall.

The case is framed around the Aspen condo, but the jury is hearing a lot more, as Brannen’s lawyer seeks to portray Healy as manipulative and punitive. Judge James Boyd is struggling to limit the arguing. He told Cohen, out of the jury’s earshot, that he didn’t want the panel swayed to view Healy as simply a rich man from Florida.

But he said he’d let the jury hear some of the fruits of Cohen’s research when it reconvenes Friday. Evidence of behavior outside the case is often excluded, he said, but it can be admitted if it raises questions about credibility.

Brannen wants to void the deal she made with her former boyfriend two months ago to return her ownership to Healy for $300,000 so she can re-open negotiations, Cohen said. Healy’s lawyer, John Case, has portrayed the incident as strictly a breach of contract. He urged Boyd to limit a “fishing expedition into the relationship” that rummaged back seven years in the courtroom. The pair earlier disputed and settled the finances of their relationship, he said.

Both in their mid-50s, Healy and Brannen met on a job in 1992 in Ft. Myers, Fla. He was an insurance broker. She was an interior decorator. He became successful enough to put his net worth at $3.6 million by 2001, in documents in which he appeared to value the Aspen condo at $780,000. He listed his share as $390,000, implying that Brannen owned half. They also owned property in Telluride worth over $2 million. She was on the deed, while he paid the mortgage, Healy testified.

In Aspen District Court on Thursday, Brannen’s attorney argued that the relationship was more than a romance — that it included a “business relationship” as well. He suggested while grilling Healy that her stake in his property — whatever it was — came in exchange for her decorator services.

Healy’s lawyer ridiculed that notion when it arose over the Telluride property.

“Is he telling us an interior decorator did $1.3 million of work on vacant land in Telluride,” Case exclaimed to the judge while the jury was away. “Doing what? Trimming trees?”

Healy said he didn’t think about how to classify Brannen’s ownership. He put her name on the Aspen deed, he said, “to state my commitment to the relationship.”

“It’s the giving part of me,” he told the jury.

Healy disputed Cohen’s contention that the property he owned on Sanibel Island, off the coast of Fort Myers, appreciated from $2.7 million to $5.7 million from 1997 to 2000, partly because of Brannen’s work as a decorator.

“You’re saying Carmen had nothing to do with the increase?” Cohen quizzed Healy on the stand.

“It was the real estate market,” Healy bristled.

Boyd’s admonishments about improperly swaying the jury haven’t stopped Cohen from selectively raising past documents in an effort to sully Healy. He accused the millionaire of keeping from Brannen a 2001 attempt to reduce alimony to his ex-wife (not Brannen, who never married him) by pegging Brannen’s stake in his Telluride property at $1.2 million.

He also got the judge to let the jury hear evidence that Healy allegedly double-crossed Brannen, telling her he needed her off the Telluride deed in order to get financing, then failing to add her name again, as he’d promised.

Healy disputed those assertions, claiming Brannen wanted her name off loan documents so she wouldn’t be liable for it.

Information from: www.aspendailynews.com

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