NEED TO KNOW
Paris Jackson’s attorneys claim Michael Jackson estate executors used a recent court filing to “mock and belittle her”
Paris’s attorneys said the ongoing legal battle is “painful” for her
She’s accused estate executors of abusing their roles for financial gain, which they have denied
Paris Jackson is continuing to speak out against those running her dad Michael Jackson’s estate amid an ongoing legal battle over the late star’s finances.
Paris, 28, filed a new legal document on April 6 accusing executors John Branca and John McClain of using their latest status report to “mock and belittle” her, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.
“This overlitigation is waste,” the filing says. “At nearly every hearing… Executors try to avoid the merits by characterizing Paris’s concerns as lawyer-driven or in service of some purported desire for media attention. Neither is true. This litigation is painful for Paris. It is a distraction from her own life and her own career.”
Paris is the beneficiary of Jackson’s estate along with her brothers Prince, 29, and Bigi, 24. She has accused Branca and McClain of abusing their roles as estate executors in order to pad their own pockets, which they have denied.
Paris Jackson; Michael Jackson
Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty; Michael Ochs Archive/Getty
Paris’s April 6 filing came in response to an 83-page status report filed earlier this month by the executors, which discussed a March 24 court hearing in which Paris’s legal team allegedly backed out at the last minute to an agreement reached by all parties.
The crux of the legal back-and-forth between Paris and the executors is a schedule for the latter to submit the estate’s annual accounting information. According to Paris’s filing, she had asked for “an efficient, transparent, and orderly process,” and accused the executors of “operat[ing] in the dark.”
Her new filing said the executors’ use of the media to “attack” her was “unacceptable,” and pointed specifically to a comment allegedly made by their attorney Jonathan Steinsapir that Paris was “strutting” into a March 11 court hearing.
“From the first day Paris dared to raise an objection, Executors have used her father’s money to attack her in the media,” the filing says. “Most recently, Executors put out the above-noted sexist comment that Paris was seen ‘strutting,’ and further patronized Paris by describing themselves as the ‘grown-ups,’ in contrast to a 28-year-old woman and her adult siblings.”
The filing continues: “These attacks may serve Mr. Branca’s personal interest in attempting to bully Paris into submission, but they have nothing to do with the merits of the litigation and are not in the interests of the Estate. The fact that Michael Jackson’s money is paying for these attacks makes them even more offensive.”
In response to the filing, Steinsapir claims to PEOPLE in a statement that Paris and her attorneys “are once again abusing the courts and the legal system by making a series of false allegations as part of a media campaign to distract from their legal setbacks and the inherent weakness of their case.”
Paris Jackson in Paris in October 2025.
Credit: Gilbert Flores/WWD via Getty
“The vast majority of her ‘claims’ have been either approved by her legal team or by the court in prior years’ accounting, but those facts have been routinely ignored by her attorneys,” he says. “Others are based on false or misleading information. To be clear, the estate and its executors have never given a single gift to anyone for any reason.”
Steinsapir adds that Paris has received $65 million in benefits and “stands to inherit many hundreds of millions more.”
Paris’s latest filing says she “hoped to work cooperatively to install a clear and simple order allowing payment on account where justified,” but faced roadblocks from the executors’ team.
Jackson was over $500 million in debt when he died in 2009, and the executors claim to have taken the struggling estate and turned it into a “powerhouse and a force in the music business.”
Paris has claimed in court filings that in 2021 alone, the executors pocketed more than $10 million in compensation from the “Thriller” singer’s estate, allegedly “more than double the amount distributed to any beneficiary from the family allowance.”
In January, the executors’ attorneys told a judge that they were owed $115,000 in costs and attorney’s fees. Their anti-SLAPP motion against Paris was granted in November.
Read the original article on People