“Amy Winehouse died in 2011 and many of her possessions have since been sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds (Picture: Phillip Massey/FilmMagic) A friend of Amy Winehouse’s has said she believes the singer’s father, Mitch Winehouse, is suing her to ‘hurt me in any way he can,’ the High Court has been told. Amy”, — write: metro.co.uk
Amy Winehouse died in 2011 and many of her possessions have since been sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds (Picture: Phillip Massey/FilmMagic) A friend of Amy Winehouse’s has said she believes the singer’s father, Mitch Winehouse, is suing her to ‘hurt me in any way he can,’ the High Court has been told.
Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch Winehouse has denied ‘doing very well’ from the late singer’s death, but admits he’s ‘probably’ a multi-millionaire, the High Court heard previously.
Mr Winehouse, acting as the administrator of his daughter’s estate, is suing her stylist Naomi Parry and friend Catriona Gourlay for hundreds of thousands of pounds over claims they profited from selling dozens of items at auctions in the United States in 2021 and 2023.
Lawyers for Mr Winehouse told a trial on Monday that the two women did not inform him they were selling the items, and did not have the right to do so.
Parry and Gourlay are defending the claim, with their barristers stating that the items were either gifted by Winehouse or were already owned by them.
Ms Parry said: ‘Mitch is the grieving father of a woman I loved like a sister. I have tried hard not to be unfeeling.
Mitch Winehouse made the claim in High Court, which is hearing the case this week (Picture: JMEnternational/Getty Images) ‘But it is very difficult at this point in time not to believe that he is using these proceedings to hurt me in any way he can.’
Parry said, in her statement, that she met Amy Winehouse in a bar in Soho, London, in 2005 and the pair ‘hit it off immediately.’
She began working as the singer’s stylist the following year, before Ms Winehouse’s death aged 27 from alcohol poisoning in July 2011.
Ms Parry told the court that Ms Winehouse was ‘extremely generous’ and would regularly give away items to her friends and family, ‘particularly when she didn’t like something or was bored of it.’
She said: “’Between me, Amy and Catriona, generosity worked both ways. Amy would make gifts to us of things, but we would also do the same.”’
She continued: ‘As a group of tight-knit friends, the three of us would frequently swap and gift items of clothing, make-up and accessories and other things if we needed something or if we no longer wanted something.’
During Mr Winehouse’s evidence on Tuesday, the court heard he told The Sunday Times last year that he had gone to the police about the case to be told that proceedings in the High Court made it a civil case.
Asked if he was trying to make Parry and Gourlay out to be criminals, he said: ‘If they had stolen things they would be criminals wouldn’t they?’
One of the items being disputed is the last dress worn for her final performance in 2011 before her death (Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images) He accepted that he had no evidence that Parry or Gourlay had taken anything from a lock-up of his daughter’s possessions.
Beth Grossman, for Parry, asked: ‘These young women are not thieves and they are not dishonest, Mr Winehouse. They have always been honest to you.
”They sold items that they owned that you knew they owned and that you were going to sell and you have said this to journalists out of nothing more than petty jealousy, because they happened to make a bit of money at the auction and you brought these proceedings for nothing more than petty jealousy as well.
‘Do you have a response to that?’
Mr Winehouse replied: ‘Yes, you are wrong.’
Mr Winehouse said he thought the money from the auction in 2021 would be split between himself, Ms Winehouse’s mother, Janis, and the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
It raised about 1.4 million dollars (£1.05 million) for the estate, which Mr Winehouse said he was ‘disappointed’ with having kept a tally and believed the estate would be getting more than $2.0mil (£1.5mil).
Mr Winehouse believed the proceeds would go to him (Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images) Grossman asked whether it was his case that her client and Gourlay who were ‘living pretty much hand to mouth’ were putting items into the auction to benefit him and the foundation.
‘Yes that is what we assumed,’ Mr Winehouse said.
He also told the court that he believed ‘everything in the auction catalogue belonged to us’.
‘It was billed as a single seller auction,’ he added.
The court heard organisers called it as a ‘single-owner auction’, with Ms Parry’s barrister arguing that referred ‘to the celebrity, not the estate’.
Mr Winehouse said he was ‘very, very upset’ after Grossman suggested he and the family ‘have done very well out of the family estate’.
‘Amy passed away and as her beneficiaries we benefited,’ he said. ‘I would not say we have done well at all.’
He accepted that he is ‘probably’ a multi-millionaire.
‘I’m very upset by what you said,’ Mr Winehouse continued. ‘Very, very upset.
‘I’m going to say this to you and the court… since Amy’s passed away my family has given over £4 million not only to the Amy Winehouse Foundation but to other charities as well.
‘When you say we have done very well it is not for personal greed. Our business is to look after, primarily, disadvantaged young people.’
Addressing the judge, he added: ‘My Lady, I apologise for that outburst.’
Henry Legge KC, for Mr Winehouse, said in written submissions that the items allegedly sold by the singer’s friends included a silk mini-dress worn by Winehouse in her final performance in Belgrade, Serbia, which Parry auctioned for $243,200 (£182,656) in 2021.
The singer lived in Camden, and shared a flat with one of the friends (Picture: Andy Willsher/Redferns) He said: ‘Ms Parry and Ms Gourlay deliberately concealed from Mr Winehouse the fact that they were auctioning the items consigned by them to the 2021 auction and that they were claiming ownership of those items.’
He continued that Mr Winehouse believed that all the 834 items in the 2021 auction catalogue were owned by the estate, but that the two women were ‘asserting ownership of over 150’.
The barrister also said that Parry was ‘instrumental in persuading Mr Winehouse to auction the estate’s items’, but did not tell him that she ‘stood to gain from his agreeing to do so’.
Legge said that after the singer’s death, Mr Winehouse was approached by Darren Julien, of Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles, in 2014 regarding an auction of her belongings, which Mr Winehouse initially declined.
Julien then contacted Parry, who indicated that she would be willing to sell ‘my collection’ in 2018, with Gourlay indicating she would be willing to sell items in 2019, Legge said.
Mr Winehouse then agreed to auction items in 2021, which raised around 1.4 million dollars (£1.05 million) for the estate, with 30% of the proceeds going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
The other was her stylist (Picture: Rob Verhorst/Redferns) But Legge said that Julien ‘did not take steps to correct Mr Winehouse’s obvious impression that all lots belonged to and were being sold by the estate’.
The barrister also said that Julien told Parry in a text message after the auction: ‘I do think he will go a little nuts when he realises all the big pieces were yours’.
He continued that both women then sold further items at a second auction in May 2023.
A hearing last July was also told by Mr Winehouse’s lawyers that Parry had sold around 50 items at the 2021 auction for around $878,183 (about £682,000), and Ms Gourlay had sold around 90 items, for a total of $334,113 (about £259,000).
Giving evidence on Monday, Mr Winehouse said: ‘I assume that, being so close, Amy would have given them some things, but 150 items, I just cannot believe it.’
In written submissions, Beth Grossman, for Parry, said that her client became Winehouse’s stylist in 2006 and stayed at her property in Camden, London.
She said: ‘Both defendants contend that the vast majority of the disputed items were in their possession from before Amy’s death in 2011, and in many instances from years before her death.
‘Moreover, each defendant alleges that a number of disputed items had, in fact, always belonged to them and had only ever been loaned by Amy.’
In written submissions on behalf of Gourlay, barrister Ted Loveday said that his client ‘believed, and still believes, that the sale of the items is “what Amy would have wanted”.’
He said that Gourlay met Winehouse in 2002 and was her flatmate from 2004 to 2005, with the earlier years of their relationship characterised by ‘sharing and swapping’.
Loveday continued that after 2006 and the release of Back to Black, Winehouse ‘increasingly gave away items’ to Ms Gourlay and others as part of ‘extravagant acts of generosity’.
The barrister also said that Mr Winehouse had ‘cobbled together’ his claim in a ‘thoughtless and uncritical way’, and that he was ‘more concerned with protecting his reputation and punishing Ms Gourlay and Ms Parry for some sort of, entirely imagined, slights’.
Loveday also said that while the case originally concerned 156 items, Mr Winehouse had ‘abandoned’ his claim to some.
The trial before Sarah Clarke KC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, is due to conclude later this week.
A version of this article was first published on December 8, 2025.
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