Lonely heart sues matchmaker for $3.3m

This is the way love goes in Beverly Hills. You pay a match-making service to find you a multi-millionaire "soulmate", as the euphemism has it.

You decide you don't like the people you're being set up with. So you sue - alleging psychological damage and demanding millions in compensation for your distress.

That's precisely what happened to Anne Majerik, a 60-year-old widow who hooked up with the most expensive dating service in the world in an effort to meet a well-heeled gent to ease her into her dotage.

This week she emerged the big winner, after a jury awarded her US$2.1 million ($3.3 million) for her trouble.

The case was quite the showdown, pitting Majerik against feisty former Miss Israel, Orly Hadida, who claims responsibility for countless matches made in "heaven" - or, more accurately, the Beverly Hills Country Club - over the past 25 years.

Majerik claimed that, despite promises of three years of introductions to "extremely successful and highly educated, charismatic, kind, down-to-earth romantics" with a net worth running into the tens of millions, she was hooked up with one unsuitable man after another until the dating service simply stopped returning her phone calls.

She paid a staggering US$50,000 for the initial service, and ended up more than doubling that amount to take part in what she was told was a "money-back guaranteed billionaire search with international men having estates worth up to US$50 million".

One man she dated, she alleged, was presented to her by Orly's firm as an international banker, but he turned out to an interpreter who just happened to work in a bank.

Majerik's nemesis - known to her clients simply as Orly The Matchmaker - had a very different take on events, saying Majerik was unreasonable, unpleasant and out to bilk her from the get-go.

Her lawyer accused Majerik being a "serial matchmaker suer" who had her fun and then decided she didn't want to pay for it.

After they reached their decision, jury members made clear they found both parties to the dispute appalling in their own way.

One juror told the LA Times the panel wanted to hit Orly with US$20 million in damages, but couldn't bear the thought of so much money going to Majerik. They asked if they could send the cash to charity instead, but were told that was not an option.

Orly's lawyers intend to appeal, but the fabled matchmaker - listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive in the world and frequently profiled in newspapers and magazines - may well have taken a crippling blow to her reputation anyway. The jury heard of possible ethical lapses.

"I give a 100 per cent guarantee that we'll find your soulmate," she once told an interviewer. Clearly Majerik, for one, no longer believes her.

- INDEPENDENT