Major Legal Battles Loom Following Smith’s Death
Posted February 9, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Questions of paternity, a class action lawsuit, and a long-standing battle over an oil tycoon’s estate are all part of the tangled legal web Anna Nicole Smith leaves behind.
Smith was pronounced dead Thursday night after being found unconscious in her hotel room by a private nurse.
“It’s a really large legal quagmire,” admitted estate planning lawyer Christopher Cline, who compared the case to that of billionaire Howard Hughes. “I’ve never seen a case with more moving parts.”
To start with, there’s Smith’s still-undecided fight with the family of her late husband J. Howard Marshall II over his estate.
Smith had been fighting her stepson E. Pierce Marshall over the millions that stood to be inherited from Marshall II’s death. In a California federal court decision Smith was awarded $474 million, but that ruling was overturned. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently gave her another chance to present her argument.
Though E. Pierce Marshall died last year the family promised to continue the fight.
“The claims will survive to her estate,” said Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes, a South Texas College of Law professor.
“In criminal cases like we had with Ken Lay, where the defendant died, it was over … But in civil cases where the claim is for money, your estate and the heirs you have from the estate are able to continue the litigation in the name of the representatives of the estate.”
The eventual outcome in that battle will affect the future of Smith’s five-month-old daughter Dannielynn, who could inherit millions or zero.
The little girl is also at the centre of a paternity dispute involving Smith’s most recent mate, lawyer Howard K. Stern, and her ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead. Both claim they’re the father, and as if this case wasn’t strange enough, a third party emerged from nowhere to make a similar contention on Friday.
Prince Frederick Von Anhalt, the former husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, insists he’s the child’s dad. He claims to have had a decade long affair with Smith and the timing of the birth coincides with that relationship.
Stern is listed on the birth certificate as the father, and if it’s determined that Dannielynn is his, and that he was married to Smith – which may or may not be the case – he’d likely inherit Smith’s estate.
Family lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan believes Stern will receive custody of the child to begin with, since he’s listed on the birth certificate. Currently the baby is staying with a friend of Smith’s in the Bahamas.
“The paternity test should be expedited,” he said, “because if he is not the bio dad he has no rights to custody. But I predict there will be a will saying that Howard K. Stern is the father.”
Cline says that if Smith and the biological father weren’t married, and Smith didn’t leave a will, the father and child would most likely split the inheritance.
In a separate legal matter, there’s a pending class action lawsuit involving Smith and Trimspa, the weight-loss pill she advertised for. The suit claims the company’s use of the former model as its spokesperson was false and misleading.
If all that wasn’t enough to make an attorney’s head spin, there’s also the matter of Stern, who used to be Smith’s lawyer, may have drawn up a will and may even be the executor.
“By law, he can’t be both the executor and the beneficiary,” Kaplan said.
It’s one of hundreds of complications lawyers involved in the case are going to have to solve over the months to come.
At least Smith’s mother appears not to want any part of it – Virgie Arthur has said she won’t seek custody of her granddaughter, just that she wanted to be a part of her life.
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