A filmmaker is suing his ex-wife for allegedly duping him into believing for 17 years that a child was his daughter. Andrew Douglas, who directed the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror, is demanding back hundreds of thousands of pounds in child support.
He says Ameena Meer asked him to marry her after claiming she was having his baby. But the real father, according to the lawsuit, was another Briton she had been cheating on him with. Mr Douglas, who began his career in Lord Snowdon’s photographic studio, says in the lawsuit that he met Miss Meer in London in 1989.
She had commissioned him to take photographs of Salman Rushdie for a magazine interview she had organised with the writer.
Over the next three years the couple ‘had infrequent sexual relations’ when they met up in London, according to papers filed at Manhattan Supreme Court. Once pregnant, Miss Meer said she didn’t want a baby born out of wedlock because ‘it would cause great shame and disgrace to her parents, who were practising Muslims’.
The writer moved to London and married Mr Douglas in August 1992. But the couple split months after Sasha Douglas was born and Miss Meer took their daughter back to her New York home. In the court documents, Mr Douglas says he had little contact with Sasha until her tenth birthday and felt depressed about failing as a father.
Miss Meer, who has had two more daughters with her second husband, allegedly told the director that ‘a price tag was attached’ if he wanted to play any part in the girl’s life.
He said he paid nearly £450,000 in child support and tuition fees, gave Miss Meer £17,000 when she fell behind with her rent and handed out a further £6,500 for a new bathroom.
Mr Douglas’s relationship with Sasha is said to have improved after he moved to California but he said he became suspicious last summer when she asked him about his blood type...
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
