The Truth Show BLOG

Weaponizing custody cash as prenup bans big divorce payday

KEVIN COSTNER’s estranged wife, Christine Baumgartner, is hell-bent for leather to shoot holes in her prenup with the Yellowstone star cowboy and get away with a monster chunk of his $500 million fortune — leaving his $80 million payout to first wife Cindy looking like peanuts, insiders dish.

The 49-year-old former model and handbag designer is also ripping the lid off the family’s secrets, mammoth finances and lavish spending — publicly embarrassing her moneybags 68-year-old husband of 18 years. A source says Christine is cleverly using their three children — sons Cayden, 16, and Hayes, 14, and daughter Grace, 13 — as a weapon in her demands, claiming they’re entitled to 60 percent, a mind boggling $300 million, of the family fortune!

“She is using their children as a battering ram against Kevin,” the source says. She focuses on the kids in her divorce demands, and it’s a shrewd way of getting Kevin to pay through the nose. Kevin looks like a deadbeat if he doesn’t pony up. Christine’s filing already makes the Dances with Wolves dude look like a cold-hearted brute saying that instead of breaking the divorce news together, as she requested, Costner brutally told our three children over a 10-minute Zoom call without me present from his Las Vegas hotel room.

In her bombshell court filing, she reveals Kevin earned a whopping $19.5 million last year while the family expenditures ran $6.6 million. His expenses included $800,000 in charitable donations, $261,000 in employee pay, $238,000 in medical expenses, and more than $500,000 on gardening services!

Meanwhile, the beauty he met when she was 18 and married at 24 is demanding a whopping $248,000 a month in child support. Baumgartner insists it’s actually “less than the amount needed to maintain the children in their accustomed lifestyle,” which she claims is $332,264 a month, according to papers, which also concede the state guideline would be about $150,000 a month. As revealed last week, the divorce could quickly get super ugly over rumors of cheating. Kevin, who already has a 27-year-old love child, Liam, from an affair with Pittsburgh Steelers football heiress Bridget Rooney, has been vehemently denying buzz that he knocked up a crew member on the set of Paramount’s hit Western series Yellowstone, slamming the chatter as “total BS. Meanwhile, the actor recently forced tech entrepreneur Daniel Starr, 42, to move out of the beachfront guest house he rented for $64,000 a month on Costner’s $145 million Santa Barbara compound because of Christine, say sources. Starr reportedly became close pals with the beauty, says a source, adding they “hung out a lot” and she would “come into his house almost daily.”

While Starr denies any hanky-panky and insists he was always a gentleman, at some point Christine soured on him and Kevin forced him to move, adds the source. And as reported last week, Costner is furious with his estranged wife for refusing to move out of their massive seaside estate as required by their 2004 prenup.The bull-headed actor claims he’s honored his side of the pact by coughing up a total of $1.4 million as soon as the divorce documents were filed, including the $400,000 he gave her at the start of the marriage. He’s offering $30,000 per month for a rental house, $10,000 in moving costs, plus paying a boatload of child support bills and a $200,000 cash deposit on a new home. But first Christine must move and she refuses, saying: “I believe Kevin’s goal is to get me to tap into this money (the $1.4 million designated by the prenup) so he can argue that I’ve waived my right to challenge the Premarital Agreement.” Christine believes she was a great wife and a caring, loving mother throughout their marriage, and she shouldn’t be tied to an agreement that she believes doesn’t hold water after nearly 20 years,” says the source. She believes Kevin is worth more than a half billion dollars, and that he, not her, blew up their marriage by neglecting her and their family — and he’s going to have to pay for that. Meanwhile, Kevin can’t believe he’s facing another massive payout once again even with a prenup, says a friend. He knows now he’s in for a very ugly divorce and he fears it’s going to damage his reputation forever.