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Juanita Jordan

Juanita Jordan is a former model who has also worked as a loan officer for a bank, a real estate agent, and an executive secretary for the American Bar Association. Juanita Jordan is best known for her marriage to Michael Jordan, the famous basketball player.

Related Biography: Kevin Frazier

Juanita Vanoy Jordan was born on June 13, 1959 in Chicago, Illinois,

Career

Juanita Vanoy’s net worth is estimated at 170 million dollars. Juanita is the co-founder and chairman of the non-profit organization named Michael and Juanita Jordan Endowment Fund. Juanita serves as the vice-chairman of the foundation and has also supported several children’s health and educational organizations including The Sickle Cell Disease Association of Illinois and the Chicago Children’s Museum. Juanita admits to being inspired by the personal stories of Hillary Clinton, the late Jackie Kennedy, and broadcast legend Oprah Winfrey, citing them as "women who have gone through adversity and come out of it, maybe not unscathed, but without bitterness."

Relationships

Juanita was Michael Jordan’s first wife and they had two sons and a daughter during their relationship. The names of their children are Jeffrey Michael Jordan (born November 18, 1988), Marcus Jordan (December 24, 1990), and Jasmine Michael Jordan (born December 7, 1992). In 1984, Juanita met Michael at a restaurant called Bennigan’s in Chicago, Illinois. They went on a blind date that was set up by their friends. The couple got engaged in 1987, though they called off the engagement for over a year. Eventually, on September 2, 1989, the couple got married at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The couple was wed in a ceremony that took place at 3:30 a.m. The wedding lasted for only 10 minutes, both the bride and groom wore jeans to the ceremony. Michael gave Juanita a five-carat diamond ring, she gave him a three-carat ring in exchange.

Juanita was pregnant with Michael’s child long before they tied the knot. Their first child, Jeffrey Michael Jordan, was 10 months old by the time they were married. Michael Jordan at first contested his paternity of the child before the wedding, leaving Juanita in the position of considering filing a paternity suit against the presumed father.

Michael Jordan, then a prominent and rising star in the National Basketball Association, used to spend lavishly on Juanita and the kids but the couple faced challenges as well. Michael Jordan admitted to having an affair with Karla Knafel from 1989 to 1991. Knafel became pregnant in 1990 and alleged that the child was Jordan’s. She went public with the relationship, claimed Jordan was the father of her child and said the Bulls legend had agreed to pay her $5 million to keep the relationship quiet. A judge ruled that Jordan paying Knafel in return for her silence would amount to extortion and threw out the case in which she says she was owed $5 million. A DNA test also proved that MJ was not the father of Knafel’s child. Michael and Karla ended up settling the case for $250,000.

Juanita first filed for divorce from Michael in 2002, citing irreconcilable differences. The couple reunited shortly after the separation and Juanita withdrew the divorce petition. The coupled decided again a few years later to seek an amicable divorce, and the final decision was announced by the lawyers in December 2006. After three children and seventeen years of marriage, Michael Jordan and Juanita Vanoy decided to call it quits. Juanita was given custody of all the children and a settlement package worth $168 million dollars. making it the costliest celebrity divorce settlement at the time. It was $74 million more than what Jordan made during his playing career. Michael was awarded the couple’s 56,000-square foot mansion in Chicago, while Juanita kept their 8,000-square foot penthouse on Lake Shore Drive.

After the divorce, Juanita re-took her maiden name, Vanoy, and tried her best to remove herself from the eyes of the public and the media. She refused all offers from the media to talk publicly about her divorce as she had a lot of plans and wanted to use the time to focus on her children. In 2007, Juanita bought a new six-bedroom mansion in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. She paid 4.7 million dollars for this new home. Juanita listed her penthouse, the house received in the separation settlement, for sale for 5 million dollars in 2012. The 8000-square-foot triplex penthouse on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which takes up its building's 39th and 40th floors plus its roof space, eventually sold in 2014 for 3.2 million dollars; Juanita, who retained her real estate license from her days as a real estate agent, represented herself in the sale. Juanita said at the time that although she was in a good place financially and was not desperate to sell the property, at the same time all her kids had grown and moved out, and she did not want to be alone in the big penthouse.

Juanita said that she retained a very good connection with Michael after the divorce. She said "Divorce was certainly new to me. I had to learn that you have to communicate. That it's not about you or your ex-partner. It's about making sure the children are all right." But when asked about Michael becoming a father again in 2014 with his second wife, the Cuban model Yvette Prieto, she said Michael had not mentioned to her that he was going to marry his longtime girlfriend, she said. "Mostly our conversations are about the children.”

In 2013, a woman named Pamela Smith filed a case against Michael that alleged that he had had an affair with her during the time that he was married to Juanita. Smith also alleged that she became pregnant with Jordan’s child at that time, and gave birth to her son, Grant Pierce Jay Jordan. The child was 17 years old when Pamela filed the case. Pamela Smith challenged Jordan to take a paternity test and wanted full custody, child support, coverage of medical expenses, and also his last name for her child. Michael firmly denied this relationship with Pamela. Juanita did not comment on this case. A judge ordered Pamela Smith to pay Jordan's legal bills after he asked the court to penalize Smith for making the false claims. The judge handed down the ruling on July 19, 2013, stating Smith knew the 17-year-old wasn't Jordan's when filing the suit

Juanita did not have any publicly known romantic relationships after her separation from Michael. It was said that she concentrated on being a part of her children’s life than starting her life again. In an interview in 2013, Juanita described her goals after the divorce: “I wanted to simplify my life. I got off boards, I downsized the way I lived. I had to because I wasn’t going to be in a huge house. I really looked forward to the basic things: my children and my good friends."


Quick Facts
Net Worth 2020: 200 million
Net Worth 2021: 200 million
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Last Modified: Jun 26 2020
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