Michael Jackson's Will Could Trigger Fight Over Estate

A 2002 will by Michael Jackson, which was filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, could lead to conflict over the singer’s assets between Mr. Jackson’s family and the executors he named in the will.

AP

The five-page document, dated July 7, 2002, gives the entire estate to a family trust, and names his mother, Katherine Jackson, as legal guardian of his three children and beneficiary of the trust. If she were incapacitated or died, then the singer Diana Ross would get custody of Mr. Jackson’s children. Mr. Jackson, who died last Thursday at age 50, left three children: his oldest son, Michael Joseph Jr., known as Prince Michael, 12; a daughter, Paris Michael Katherine, 11; and another son, Prince Michael II, 7.

Mr. Jackson stated that he had “intentionally omitted” Debbie Rowe, the mother of the two oldest children, from the will.

Before the will was made public, Mrs. Jackson had made it known days ago that she wanted control of her son’s finances. Burt Levitch, her lawyer, filed court papers here on Monday requesting that she be given control of Mr. Jackson’s financial accounts, his real estate holdings and his stake in the Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalog, which includes works of the Beatles.

• Slideshow: Selling Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, Piece by Piece

In the filing, Mr. Levitch acknowledged several wills might be found.

“It is possible that the court will have to review many wills and evaluate the competing claims of presenters of such wills,” he wrote.

In the will, which Mr. Jackson initialed 10 times by signing “M.J.” on the right margin, he named attorney John Branca and longtime friend John McClain as the executors, and they were the petitioners in Wednesday’s filing. A third person, Barry Siegel, was listed as a co-executor in the will, but the filing said that Mr. Siegel had resigned from the position in 2003.

Mr. Jackson gave the executors of the will full power over his financial matters, including the buying and selling of assets, the continuation of his “business enterprises,” and the selling, leasing or mortgaging of his property. The executors said they did not know the value of the estate, which was mostly in non-liquid assets, but estimated it at the time at more than $500 million.

The filing said the petitioners did not know the value of Mr. Jackson’s liquid assets, but reports in the last several days have put his debt between $400 and $500 million. According to the filing, Mr. Jackson’s assets included “non-cash, non-liquid assets, including primarily an interest in a catalogue of music royalty rights which is currently being administered by Sony ATV.”

Word that the will had been filed came amid conflicting reports about the funeral and public viewing of Mr. Jackson’s body. Several news outlets, including The Los Angeles Times, reported that the funeral would not be held at Neverland Ranch, Mr. Jackson’s estate about 120 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Although the family had sought a burial on the grounds, regulations restricting private burials could not be circumvented.

• Read Michael Jackson's Will [PDF]

Mr. Jackson bought the ranch in the late 1980s, naming it after the mythical land of Peter Pan, where boys never grow up. There, he surrounded himself with animals, rides and children.

He left the ranch — and the United States — after his acquittal on charges that he molested a teenage cancer survivor in 2003 at the estate after getting him drunk.

Mr. Jackson moved luxury cars, artwork, jewelry, costumes and other property off the ranch last year for an auction, but it never took place.

Mr. Jackson’s father, Joe, said on Monday that there would be no funeral until results of a private autopsy were available.

Before the results of this second autopsy were made public, however, a report surfaced that Mr. Jackson had asked a nurse three months ago for a powerful sedative, diprivan, that is used in hospitals, according to Cherilyn Lee, the registered nurse who had been working as a nutritionist with the singer. Ms. Lee said on the ABC program “Good Morning America” on Wednesday that she refused to find an anesthesiologist to give it to Mr. Jackson because it was unsafe.

Ms. Lee recalled her conversation with the singer three months ago, and what she told him: “The problem with you telling me that you want to be knocked out — those were his words — is that you might not wake up the next morning. You don’t want to do that.”

Ms. Lee said that Mr. Jackson responded: “No, my doctor told me it’s safe. It works quick and it’s safe, as long as somebody is here to monitor me and wake me up, I’ll be okay.”

Four days before Mr. Jackson died, she got a frantic phone call from an aide to Mr. Jackson asking her to come see him immediately.

“I could hear Michael in the background. ‘Tell her, tell her that one side of my body is hot, hot and one side is cold, is very cold.’”

Ms. Lee told the aide that Mr. Jackson needed to go to the hospital. “At that point,” she said, “I knew that somebody had given him something that hit the central nervous system because, that’s all he wanted was to sleep.”

CNBC spoke with Darren Julien of Julien's Auctions, which was originally hired to sell Michael Jackson memorabilia before a large auction was cancelled. As for the location of the missing memorabilia mentioned by attorneys for executors in today's court hearing, Julien said, "We can't disclose...Everything we're doing is in assocation with the family or MJ Productions."

This story originally appeared in the The New York Times