A former home health aide on Tuesday undercut claims that the late Hudson News magnate Robert Cohen was a mentally incapacitated invalid when he disinherited his granddaughter Samantha Perelman.
Luis Santa testified in a New Jersey courtroom that his employer fired another caretaker who fell asleep on the job, fluttered his eyelids to ask for a shot of vodka in his juice, and negotiated a $1,500 loan to the nurse during the last two years of his life.
Robert Cohen died in February 2012 at age 86.
Samantha Perelman, 23, is the only daughter of Revlon billionaire Ronald Perelman and the late Page Six gossip columnist Claudia Cohen.
She claims her uncle James Cohen pushed his Parkinson’s-addled father to write her out of a $600 million inheritance after Claudia died of cancer in 2007.
During cross-examination by James’ lawyers the nurse testified that Robert Cohen — when he could not speak — gave commands through a nodding and blinking system.
Perelman argues that her grandfather was too ill to understand changes he made to his last will, that erased hefty bequests to her including $25 million and a Palm beach estate.