Phil Collins' Ex-Wife Is Raising Eyebrows With New Marriage

Phil Collins has endured plenty of ups and downs in his marriage to Orianne Cevey. The legendary British musician met the Swiss native in the early 1990s, when she worked as his translator during a tour through her home country, according to Page Six. Collins tied the knot with Cevey, who's 23 years his junior, in 1999, making her his third wife. The couple soon welcomed two sons together, Nicholas, born in 2001, and Matthew, born in 2004, but the marriage began to falter a few years later, ultimately ending in 2008, The Guardian reported. Collins and Cevey settled for a whopping $47 million, marking a record in the United Kingdom for a celebrity divorce, People noted.

But their story didn't end there. Collins and Cevey reconnected seven years later, when the musician moved to Florida, where his ex-wife had been living with their sons to be close to Nicholas and Matthew, according to Rolling Stone. A year after his move to Miami, Collins revealed he and Cevey were giving their family another shot, he told Billboard in January 2016. "I'm actually back with my third wife — I haven't really talked about it. We've been together for a while, and nobody's noticed," he said.

Their second attempt at a relationship wouldn't last, though. This time around, the union ended with a bit more scandal, with Collins taking Cevey to court, Metro reported in 2020. The couple's breakup continues to make headlines, with Cevey turning heads over her recent husband. 

Orianne Cevey wed Thomas Bates in Las Vegas in 2020 — a union that Phil Collins was unaware of, the Daily Mail reported on April 19. Citing court papers, the outlet noted Bates, a male escort whom Cevey met on a website named Cowboys 4 Angels, moved into Collins's Miami home while he was on a tour across Europe. Upon finding out about it, Collins went to court in an attempt to evict Cevey and Bates from his home, Metro reported in 2020. Cevey previously criticized Collins for throwing her out of the home. "It was my house as much as his house," she told The Sun, suggesting the former Genesis singer acted out of rancor. "And when he found out I got married, he got super mad and that was it."

But the relationship between Cevey and Bates, who described himself as a "sexy intellectual" on the website, also didn't last. Cevey announced their divorce in December 2021, Page Six reported. "I believe the emotional distress of the COVID quarantine caused me to act in ways and do things that were out of character," she wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post.

Their ongoing divorce battle quickly turned vicious, with Bates accusing Cevey of threatening him with physical violence, the Daily Mail reported. "Wife, who has a ferocious temper, threatened Husband with bodily harm (by cutting off his private parts) when he asked for his clothes and personal property," court papers read. Yikes.