September 27, 2009
Is 'rich kid' behind Lavigne split?
By LINDA MASSARELLA -- Sun Media

Deryck Whibley, left, Brandon Davis, centre, and Avril Lavigne, right. (WENN.COM file photos)

LOS ANGELES -- Avril Lavigne is a smart, hard-working girl with a plethora of talent and a lot of fans who look up to her.

Brandon Davis, the American oil heir, is a ne'er-do-well rich kid with no redeemable traits that I have ever seen or heard of.

Inexplicably, the two are fast friends.

I first laid eyes on Davis at a black tie dinner his mother was hosting to raise money for a cure for Multiple Sclerosis in 2006.

Almost handsome, in a boorish way, I saw the kid chain smoke on a poor lady who sat incapacitated in a wheel-chair, cruelly and calculatingly blowing a line of smoke in her face, while his good-hearted mother, Barbara, gave a keynote speech up front.

His body language said, "my mother is making me come to this dumb charity thing so I'll show her."


Then all the stories: Davis publicly and disgustingly disparaging former actress girlfriend Lindsay Lohan by calling her "fire crotch"; Davis ruining his brother's wedding by throwing tables at guests; swaggering out of a liquor store and smashing into singer Pink's car, etc., etc..

Shortly after Lavigne married fellow Canadian Sum 41 musician Deryck Whibley and set up residence in Hollywood three years ago, I found it so impossible to believe photos taken of her and Davis, now 30 and still doing nothing with his life, in the back of a limo could be real that I actually thought the pictures were doctored.

Alas, it was true.

The young Lavigne got snookered into being the new pet of Davis and his crowd of other all-night-clubbing rich kids including Paris Hilton and has been hanging with them on and off since she moved here.

The New York Post reports Lavigne, 26, was partying hard with Davis in the French Riviera this summer before she got back to town and announced her split with the gentlemanly Whibley.

There have been, thankfully, no believable reports that Lavigne and Davis are romantically linked.

I'm still betting on Lavigne, though. She may have married too young (she was just 21; he was 26), but she's worked too hard and come so far to mess it up.

Sometimes a girl just has to get some partying out of her.

At the very least, all the drama will give her good song writing material.