(Credits: Far Out / Harald Krichel)
Fri 28 November 2025 16:45, UK
Back in the day, there were some pretty scurrilous tabloid rumours about Richard Gere that almost certainly weren’t true, but gained traction nevertheless. I think there might have been something to do with former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, but I’d need to double-check that. Regardless, that was many years ago and I hadn’t really heard anything bad about him until this year, when of all people Paul Simon’s daughter went in on him hard.
When you picture Gere, you have that smiley, silver-haired, handsome chap in mind from Pretty Woman, or maybe the suave, naval-suited office worker rescuer from An Officer and a Gentleman. What you don’t really have in mind is a greedy maniacal property developer, intent on ruining childhoods at all costs in the pursuit of filthy lucre, but that’s what Lulu Simon would have you think.
Why might that be? Well it turns out that the Oscar-winning Chicago actor bought her Dad Paul’s house in Connecticut a while back, the home where she grew up in fact, and when he did so he apparently made some promises about looking after it properly, the kind of thing we all do when we buy something from someone, even though we don’t really mean it and once they’ve sold it it’s none of their business anyway.
But then this year, he reportedly sold the 1930s mansion to a developer who wants to knock it down and make flats out of it, which has got her very upset, so she put a photo of Gere, the house and the news story up on Instagram and wrote “Hate! Him!” next to it.
She added: “Just in case anyone was wondering if I still hate Richard Gere – I do! He bought my childhood home. Promised he would take care of the land as condition of his purchase. Proceeded to never actually move in & just sold it to a developer as nine separate plots :).”
Now in Simon’s defence, it isn’t just her that’s upset at Gere’s antics, because preservationists are also up in arms about it and are trying everything they can to block the demolition. But they probably aren’t quite as… menacing as Simon is about it, which is a shame, really, because she has a colourful, movie-related line in insults. Especially if you imagine her old man’s delicate, folky acoustic music playing in the background while you read them.
She rounded off her post by telling Gere: “I hope my dead pets buried in that backyard haunt you until you descend into a slow and unrelenting madness.”
Now, in case you’re not quite sure what she’s referencing here, it is, of course, Pet Sematary, the Stephen King book that most people now know as a movie, in fact, two movies, the 1989 original and the remake thirty years later, with a couple of sequels scattered in between. One thing we can say about the ‘80s version is that it is way, way scarier than you might think – although it is primarily about pets coming back to life to scare the owners, it is actually genuinely terrifying. Richard Gere isn’t in it, but presumably if he was he would just tear the house down and get apartments built instead.
Either way, Gere is a practising Buddhist, so it’s not likely he’s going to engage in a full on war of words with the Simons, especially since Paul definitely prefers the sound of silence.
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