by emad » Wed Sep 28, 2005 12:27 pm
Stripper's claim to tycoon's £900m fortune reaches the highest court<br>From Tim Reid in Washington <br> <br> <br>ANNA NICOLE SMITH, the former Playboy cover girl accused of being America’s most brazen gold-digger, will try to persuade the US Supreme Court next week that she should inherit millions of dollars from her late husband, a Texas billionaire who married her when he was 89 and she was 26. <br><br>The judges of America’s highest court, a more cerebral audience than the stripper-turned-reality TV hostess usually entertains, informed Ms Smith yesterday that they will hear her appeal over the disputed fortune of her late husband, the wheelchair-bound oil tycoon John Howard Marshall II. <br><br>The surgically enhanced Ms Smith has been embroiled in a legal battle for a decade over her late husband’s $1.6 billion estate (£900 million). The tycoon’s son, Pierce Marshall, along with most of America, accuses her of being a shameless gold-digger. <br><br>If the Supreme Court sides with Ms Smith, the 1993 Playmate of the Year stands to gain as much as $474 million, the amount to which a judge in 2000 said she was entitled. <br><br>Despite her initial victory, subsequent courts have overturned that decision, and Ms Smith, whose life has descended into a vaudevillian spectacle of weight problems and bizarre behaviour in recent years, has not received a cent from her late husband’s estate. The case has provided rich fodder for gossip columnists, but at issue for the judges is the more mundane question of whether federal courts have the right to overrule state probate courts. <br><br>Ms Smith, now 37, met her husband, a crippled, frail billionaire who nevertheless still delighted in the company of buxom women young enough to be his grandchildren, when she was a stripper at a nightclub in Houston. Mr Marshall was a frequent visitor. <br><br>They married three years later in 1994, with an age difference of 63 years. <br><br>It was a union that produced one of the most startling celebrity photographs of the 1990s: Ms Smith, 26, her chest recently enlarged to an eye-catching 36-inch DD, passionately kissing her betrothed, the grey-skinned, wheelchair-bound Mr Marshall, a man who was to live less than a year. <br><br>Since his death in 1995, Ms Smith and Pierce Marshall have battled fiercely over the estate. Despite not being named in his will, Ms Smith, whose real name is Vickie Lynn Hogan, claimed that Mr Marshall promised her half his fortune if she married him. But a Texas probate court ruled that the son was the tycoon’s sole heir, and owed Ms Smith nothing. <br><br>Meanwhile, Ms Smith continued to spend wildly. Tax bills also mounted up for the tenacre Texas ranch that Mr Marshall bought her. <br><br>She declared herself bankrupt in 1999, owing more than $10 million and pursued the inheritance money in the federal courts. She was forced to move with her then 13-year-old son to a small flat on the outskirts of Los Angeles. <br><br>In court, Pierce Marshall argued that her claims were absurd, not least because the marriage was never consummated. He also claimed that his father was senile when he married her. <br><br>Ms Smith accused the son of altering, destroying and falsifying documents in an attempt to stop her inheriting from the man she loved and called “Paw-Paw”. <br> <br> <br> Last December Ms Smith’s claim was thrown out by a federal appeals court in San Francisco. That court ruled that the Texas probate court’s original ruling should stand, and that the federal courts that ruled in her favour should not have heard the case. <br>In written filings placed before the Supreme Court yesterday, Pierce Marshall’s lawyer claimed that Ms Smith began her legal fight for her husband’s money even before his death. <br><br> <br> <br>Her lawyer argued that the tycoon intended to provide for her for the rest of her life. <br><br>Throughout the litigation, Ms Smith’s career has suffered. She was given her own reality show, The Anna Nicole Show, which focused on her private life, and her substantial weight increase. It was panned by critics. After losing five stone (32 kilos), she has since become a spokeswoman for a diet pill product. <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1801105,00.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/art...05,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br> <br> <br> <p></p><i></i>
