The wife still loves him, despite his teen-girl harem.
The five kids still love him. And they’re all waiting for him with open arms back home in Poughkeepsie.
“Lolita Lawyer” James Colliton is heading home from jail next week after admitting in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday to repeatedly bedding a trio of underage girls in the Midtown apartment he used on weeknights.
Two of the girls – sisters ages 13 and 15 – were being pimped by their own mother, prosecutors have charged in the shocking case.
“Oh, we’re just so happy he’s coming home!” Grace Colliton said tearfully after learning that, following his plea to statutory rape charges, her husband will likely be freed Oct. 11 after 19 months in jail.
“I know he never did this with these girls,” she said by telephone, moments after Colliton’s lawyer, Howard Greenberg, told her the good news.
“He just took this plea so he could come home,” she insisted, sobbing.
When he was arrested while on the lam in Canada after an international manhunt on the monstrous pedophilia charges last year, the story of Colliton’s sickening harem became front-page news.
Colliton, 43, was a partner at the most white-shoe of law firms – the 187-year-old firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore.
For six years, prosecutors charged, he kept a stable of girls, lavishing cash and gifts on them to keep them at the ready.
One of them, only 13 years old, even lived with him for a time – with her pimp mother’s blessing – at his pied-a-terror at Park Avenue and East 56th Street, prosecutors charged.
The pale-faced, nebbishy mergers and acquisitions attorney would then return home to the wife and kids on weekends.
Since his capture in March 2006, a raging war of accusations has been waged between Colliton’s prosecutors and Greenberg, his outspoken lawyer.
Prosecutors Rachel Hochhauser and Melissa Mourges have threatened to play tapes of Colliton in which he begs the sisters not to implicate him. He had as many as 10 girls in his harem, they charged.
The lawyer, in turn, threatened to call the sisters’ own mother to the stand as a defense witness, and sent private investigators to the girls’ neighborhoods and homes. That resulted in at least nine family members signing affidavits saying the girls were lying.
Asked if Colliton’s plea deal was so generous – he could have faced up to 25 years in jail – because the prosecution’s case was falling apart, Greenberg said, “You can draw your own conclusions.
“I’m not going to throw it in their faces after they’ve given him this good deal,” he said.
“It’s an empty victory on both sides,” he added, “Because each side had so much to work with.”
Elizabeth Wolff contributed to this story.