Sparring After Bell Rings on Relationship

Saying goodbye is the hardest thing...

Singing pugilist Oscar De La Hoya and his former fiancee, model Shanna Moakler, sure are breaking up ugly. Last month he filed a lawsuit seeking to kick Moakler and her parents out of his gated Bel-Air pad. He claimed they’d locked him out and were throwing parties and stinking up the place with cigarette smoke.

Now, she’s fighting back with a multimillion-dollar palimony suit. Her court papers, filed in Santa Monica, charge that De La Hoya was a hard-drinking philanderer who promised her a lifetime of security, but instead used her and their toddler daughter to prop up his golden boy public image.

His suit says the couple broke up in August. Hers says the bust-up occurred in September, when she turned on the television and saw him holding hands with another woman at the Latin Grammy Awards. This humiliation, Moakler contends, was followed up by a visit from De La Hoya’s lawyer, who informed her she’d been dumped.

Moakler, a former Miss USA, says in her court papers that she “sacrificed” a promising career as a model and actress to play house and care for her daughter with De La Hoya. Her court papers say he didn’t like it when she worked and wasn’t around to cater to his needs.

As recently as July, the suit says, De La Hoya wrote Moakler that “God wants us to share our lives together and take care of one another, trust each other, take care of our daughter, work together so we are strong and powerful. Look, mama, we are young and what I want to do is build an empire with you.”

By November, Moakler charges, the billing and cooing had turned to threats. She says he warned her he could be “very cruel” to people who cross him, adding that if she sued, she’d “regret it.”

What a difference a few months makes. So much for going the distance.

De La Hoya’s lawyer, Stephen B. Espinoza, denies the allegations, saying he’s confident that Moakler’s suit will eventually be thrown out of court.

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BUMPER CARS: “Boogie Nights” star Mark Wahlberg has been sued in Los Angeles Superior Court over a car accident last year near the Beverly Center. Maurice and Melissa Levy seek unspecified damages for injuries they say they received the Dec. 14, 1999, collision.

No comment from Wahlberg’s reps. But it looks like Marky Mark would have been better off leaving his ride in parky park.

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THE DARK SIDE: The downside of fame is the way it can draw the unbalanced--all the way from Ohio. While everyone was talking this week about Gwyneth Paltrow’s stalker, a woman also was pleading no contest in a Malibu courtroom to stalking former Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose.

At the Airport Branch courthouse, a judge convicted Dante Michael Soiu, 51, of Ohio, of stalking Paltrow, declared him insane, and ordered him sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital. He allegedly sent hundreds of letters, e-mails and packages to the star, who testified that she was “very fearful” of him. He also hung around outside her parents’ Los Angeles home, despite repeated requests that he leave.

Meanwhile, at the courthouse-by-the-sea, Karen Jane McNeil, 39, also of Ohio, admitted violating a court order by sending Rose letters from jail, where she’d been sent a year ago after violating her probation in a 1997 stalking case involving the rocker. This time, McNeil appears headed back to Ohio, where she’ll be ordered to stay at a psychiatric hospital for the next three years. In the past, she has managed to get onto Rose’s property a half-dozen times, once by following a gardener through a gate. Once inside, she found Rose inside the house, playing the guitar. She reportedly believes Rose communicates with her via telepathy.

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CIAO FOR NOW: The Court Files is growing up and moving on. After three fun-filled years in the Times’ Metro section, we are sliding over to Southern California Living, where we will appear more often and under a new name. We’ll still feature celebrity lawsuits, along with other adventures of the rich and famous. We wish we could tell you more, but we can’t. At least we didn’t show up at the Latin Grammys with somebody else or send in the lawyers to say it’s over.