Phil Spector's Children Have Varied Accounts of Their Childhoods

With the Dick Wolf-led Netflix docuseries, Homicide: Los Angeles, we’re finally getting an inside peek into Phil Spector. Phil was a popular musician who rose to prominence in the early 1960s as a musical act and producer, considered the first “auteur” of the music industry. But his life behind the scenes wasn’t as beloved.

Rumors of gun-waving and violent threats overshadowed his decades-long career when he was convicted of actor Lana Clarkson’s 2003 murder and sentenced to 19 years in prison. But before he went behind bars, Phil actually had five children, so where are they now?

As we learned later, Phil had a lot of dodgy skeletons in his past. He married Annette Merar in 1963, the lead vocalist of the Spectors Three. He even named his record company after her called Annette Records, but they divorced in 1966. While they were still married, Phil started an affair with Ronnie Bennett, who was the lead singer of the Ronnettes.

Phil and Ronnie married in 1968 and adopted their first son, Donté Phillip Spector. Ronnie also took Phil’s last name and was henceforth referred to as Ronnie Spector. Later, Phil adopted twins Louis Phillip Spector and Gary Phillip Spector for Ronnie for Christmas.

“It was, ‘Here’s some kids, Merry Christmas,’” Ronnie told Vice in 2013. ”I got a set of twins for Christmas! I couldn’t handle it. It was way over my head. I had an adopted son already home and then to get five-and-a-half-year-old twins—it was a big box.”

Ronnie shared that Phil used adopting kids as a way to keep her with him. In her 1990 memoir, Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts And Madness, Ronnie alleged that he “imprisoned” her in his mansion, psychologically tortured her, forbade her to perform, and forced her to give up their kids because he threatened to hire a hitman to kill her.

Unsurprisingly, the adopted kids didn’t have the best childhood. Gary and Donté shared with the Daily News in 2003 that Phil “kept them captive.” Donté explained, “For years, we were just caged animals to be let out for Dad's amusement.” Gary added, “I was blindfolded and sexually molested. Dad would say, 'You're going to meet someone,' and it would be a 'learning experience.’” Now, Donté would be around 44 years old, while Gary and Louis would be 47.

By 1974, Phil’s divorce from Ronnie had been settled, so he moved on to other women. By 1982, he had been in a steady relationship with Janis Zavala, who he never married and little is known about. The couple had biological twins Nicole Audrey Spector and Phillip Spector Jr. Sadly, however, Phillip Spector Jr. passed away in 1991 of leukemia.

Phil died in 2021 in the prison hospital with a $50 million fortune to leave behind to his four surviving children. While little is known about where Gary, Louis, and Donté are in 2024, Nicole remains a public figure because of her journalism career, during which she’s worked with the New Yorker, NBC, The Atlantic, Vogue, Reductress, and more.

During Phil’s 2007 murder trial, Nicole testified in support of her father, to prove that he was right-handed. But at 24 years old, “[Nicole] described [Phil] as a doting, involved father and their relationship as wholesome as a family sitcom,” according to a CNN report of the trial. It’s possible that Phil had kept his dangerous self away from his daughter, but we’ll never truly know what happened.

Homicide: Los Angeles is now available to stream on Netflix.