LOS ANGELES — With the potentially record-breaking $2 billion sale of the Los Angeles Clippers hanging in the balance, a trial beginning Monday will focus on whether Donald Sterling’s estranged wife had the authority under terms of a family trust
LOS ANGELES — With the potentially record-breaking $2 billion sale of the Los Angeles Clippers hanging in the balance, a trial beginning Monday will focus on whether Donald Sterling’s estranged wife had the authority under terms of a family trust to unilaterally negotiate the deal.
Shelly Sterling struck a deal to sell the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer after Donald Sterling’s racist remarks to a girlfriend were publicized and the NBA moved to oust him as team owner.
In order to do so, she had two doctors examine her 80-year-old husband and they declared him mentally incapacitated and unable to act as an administrator of The Sterling Family Trust, which owns the Clippers.
The terms of the trust say incapacitation can be determined by two licensed doctors without ties to the family who are specialists in their field. A trustee must cooperate with such exams.
The judge must find that Shelly Sterling acted in accordance with the trust and that the deal still applies — even though the trust has since been revoked by Donald Sterling — for the sale to proceed.
Donald Sterling’s attorneys say that his wife “blindsided” him and he submitted to examinations under false pretenses. They allege there was undue influence in the doctors’ findings, and that the exams and letters regarding his mental capacity were defective and incomplete.
They say that if he’d been properly informed, he would have participated at a more convenient time instead of being pulled out of legal meetings.
“He would have also eaten properly and have been well rested for the examinations and focused on taking the exam with the full and complete understanding what it was for and the serious nature of the exam,” they wrote in filings.
But Shelly Sterling’s attorney, Pierce O’Donnell, said that Donald Sterling voluntarily went to take scans of his brain and there was no requirement to remind Donald Sterling, who is an attorney, or his legal team of the trust’s conditions.
The trial will also focus on the question of what happens to a deal that hasn’t been closed once a trust is revoked. Donald Sterling revoked the trust on June 9 — weeks after Shelly Sterling negotiated the deal with Ballmer.
