The former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith won a victory in the United States supreme court on Monday in her fight to pursue a share of her late husband’s fortune.
In a protracted and wildly fluctuating case, the decision addresses an arcane issue of law concerning the jurisdiction of courts involved in the case.
Smith claims that her husband, the late billionaire J Howard Marshall II, promised her half of his estimated $1,6-billion estate. But his son has claimed that the $6-million she received in gifts was all his father wanted to give his young wife.
The two met in 1991, when Marshall was 86 and Smith was a 23-year-old dancer in a Houston bar. They married three years later. But Marshall died the following year, leading to a dispute between his son and his wife.
A series of decisions in Texas and then in a federal court in California saw Smith awarded $474-million from her husband’s estate. That figure was reduced to $88-million before a federal appeals court threw out the claim after ruling that the federal court did not have jurisdiction. The supreme court on Monday reversed that decision and the case returns to court in California.
”She’s extremely excited that we got this ruling,” said Kent Richland, an attorney representing Smith.
”This is another battle in a very long war,” Douglas Baird, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Chicago told The Associated Press.
The case went to the supreme court in February, when Smith, the spokesperson for a diet products company, dressed in black and wearing dark glasses, cried in court as the wishes of her late husband were discussed.
But the dispute has been at times vicious, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in delivering the court’s ruling. There were accusations, she said, that E Pierce Marshall had ”engaged in forgery, fraud, and overreaching to gain control of his father’s assets”, and that Smith had defamed her former stepson.
On Monday Pierce Marshall said the ruling involved a ”technical issue” and does not validate Smith’s claims.
”I will continue to fight to clear my name in California federal court. That is a promise that [Smith] and her lawyers can take to the bank,” he said in a statement issued in Texas. ”I will continue to fight to uphold my father’s estate plan and clear my name.” – Guardian Unlimited Â