Stevie Wonder is suing his ex-fiancée to evict her from his Hollywood Hills house: she has lived there rent-free since 1988, on a verbal agreement

Stevie Wonder is 76, has 25 Grammy awards and one house his lawyers can't get into. The soul legend has filed an eviction lawsuit at the Los Angeles Superior Court against his former fiancée Carmen Efferson. Since 1988 she has lived in his three-bedroom house on Oak Glen Drive in the Hollywood Hills - rent-free, on a verbal agreement.

For thirty-eight years that apparently bothered nobody. The trouble started in July 2026, when Wonder's lawyers asked to inspect the property to update the insurance policy. Efferson repeatedly refused to let them in. In a written reply to his attorney David Huff, she said she felt harassed.

What followed is a timeline anyone who has ever gone to court over a flat knows by heart. The insurance policy was cancelled on 4 August. The lawyer's office sent a formal eviction notice with a deadline of 27 August 2026. Efferson didn't budge. On 6 October came the final warning, with three days to comply. And now - court.

The suit asks the court to terminate the verbal agreement, return the property to its owner and award 600 dollars in damages. Six hundred dollars - a symbolic sum for a man with 25 Grammys on the shelf. The point is clearly not the money. The point is the key to the front door.

Wonder lost his sight shortly after birth, from retinopathy of prematurity, and has spent his whole career seeing the world through sound. A self-taught musician before he was ten, he was later married to designer Kai Millard. His biography is full of hits - and now also of a house he handed over on his word and, 38 years later, can't get back without a judge.

Who in the Balkans doesn't know at least one story like this - a relative or ex-partner who moved into someone else's flat "temporarily" and stayed for decades? A handshake deal is warmest while it lasts. And when it ends, it becomes the most expensive one.