Priscilla Presley on grandkid allegation: ‘Irrelevant’ if she has relatives in Florida
Yesterday, Priscilla Presley answered the newest version of Brigitte Kruse’s Orlando breach of contract lawsuit with a motion to dismiss the suit, and once again argued that she has virtually no real connection to the state of Florida and should not be subject to the court’s jurisdiction.
Of course, we were especially interested to see how she was going to respond to Kruse’s allegation that one thing that definitely ties Presley to Florida, and motivated her to look into moving there recently, was that she has a previously unidentified grandchild there with Elvis Presley.
The allegation appeared in paragraph 12 of Kruse’s second amended complaint, and here is that paragraph in its entirety…
12. Presley has deep personal ties to Florida. Her late daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, lived in Florida, in addition to a grandchild (the grandchild of Elvis and Presley), who still resides in Florida as of today. Presley's cousin, who currently lives with her in California, also has a residence in Florida. In January 2023, Presley signed a five-year lease for residential property in Orlando, Florida, with the intention of finding and owning a permanent home in Florida. Presley was shopping for a permanent home in the Palm Beach area. Presley demanded that her belongings be moved to Florida, where they were stored for her at no cost to help her get the move started.
In the motion to dismiss that Presley filed yesterday, this was her response specifically to that paragraph:
It is simply irrelevant whether Presley has relatives who live or own homes in Florida or whether Presley made a couple of personal visits to Florida
That, friends, is what Woodward and Bernstein in the movie All the President’s Men would refer to gleefully as a “non-denial denial.”
Priscilla Presley did not deny that she has a grandchild living today in Florida, but says instead that it is “irrelevant” to her assertion that has no real ties to the state and should not be sued there.
Um, wow.
Of course, this gets us no closer to an official identification of the grandchild in question, but we think it’s awfully interesting that Presley did not deny the allegation by saying that it was untrue.
As for what she does say in the 22-page motion (with another 153 pages of exhibits attached), Presley’s attorney Jason R. Dormark denied that the occasional visits that Priscilla makes to Florida for things like personal appearances (which we pointed out recently) do not constitute enough of a connection to the state for her to be sued there. For one thing, they say, she apparently doesn’t make much money from those events.
Over the years, Presley has participated in a few publicity and other events in Florida (which she also attends across the country), but she does not personally derive any significant annual revenue from Florida.
Which is a little ironic, because the reason that Priscilla first entered into business with Kruse at the end of 2022 was to help her get more money out of her celebrity. But once things started to look up, Kruse alleges, Priscilla dumped her and the companies they had formed.
In her motion to dismiss, Presley paints a picture like the one she’s describing in her elder abuse lawsuit against Kruse in Los Angeles: That Kruse and others were trapping Priscilla in a scheme to take her independence from her.
Brigitte Kruse and her co-conspirator, Kevin Fialko unduly influenced, cajoled, and defrauded Presley—who has been a California resident for decades—into making Kruse a trusted advisor, trustee, and attorney-in-fact, and purportedly giving Kruse and Fialko a majority and controlling interest in the rights to use Presley's name, image, and likeness (in perpetuity). Kruse and Fialko absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then preemptively sued Presley in Florida when they knew the gig was up.
And while Kruse and Fialko were luring her into this trap, her attorney writes, she was signing documents that put her under no obligation to actually do anything in Florida. She was just a California resident with her name on documents that formed the basis for companies that were actually based in Delaware. And even if she signed those documents in Florida, she had been lured there by Kruse to do so and for nefarious ends.
We’ll be interested to see how Kruse responds to those allegations. But what we’d really like to get is more detail on what Kruse knows about Priscilla’s involvement these days in Scientology, and more about that grandkid.
Which, Priscilla did not deny having.
Juicy.
Shawn Holley explains to court her part of Danny Masterson juror contact
The day after the LA District Attorney’s office filed a motion last week asking Judge Charlaine Olmedo to conduct a hearing and consider sanctions against Danny Masterson’s legal team for repeated and unwanted contacts with members of the jury that convicted the That ‘70s Show actor and Scientology celebrity last year, defense attorney Shawn Holley filed a declaration explaining her own interactions with those jurors.
Yesterday, we described three emails that were sent to the court by jurors who were confused that the defense team had somehow obtained their contact information.
The first was sent to the court on July 5, 2023, a little over a month after Masterson was convicted and the trial ended, and it was from the jury foreperson. She told the court that Holley had somehow found her information and contacted her, and the juror wanted guidance from the court about whether she was prohibited from talking to the attorney.
We looked back in our notes from jury selection, and they indicate that the juror who eventually was chosen as foreperson, juror #15, had said she worked in an administration job at a local institution of higher learning. This was enough information, apparently, for Holley to find the foreperson and reach out to her.
A year later, on July 22 and September 16 of this year, the court received alarmed-sounding emails from jurors who had not wanted to be contacted by the defense team and complained to the court about it. One of them described being approached as they were doing yardwork in an unsettling encounter.
Both of those more recent emails, we will note, referred not to Shawn Holley, who was a trial attorney for Masterson, but instead to representatives of Masterson’s appellate attorneys. (Masterson was sentenced on September 7 last year to 30 years to life in prison. His legal team’s appeal brief is due on Thursday at California’s 2nd Appellate District Court.)
On September 17, Judge Olmedo issued a ruling that the defense could have no further contact with jurors except through the court itself.
On Wednesday last week, the DA’s office filed their motion asking for an evidentiary hearing and possible sanctions over the unwanted approaches. (We are still waiting to hear if there’s a date set for that hearing.) The next day, on Thursday, Shawn Holley submitted a declaration to explain her July 2023 interactions with three jurors that she says were not unwanted in any way. We obtained a copy of her declaration yesterday evening.
In the sworn statement, Holley does not address the more recent approaches made by Masterson’s appellate team.
Here is Holley’s declaration in its entirety.
DECLARATION OF SHAWN HOLLEY
I, Shawn Holley, declare as follows:
1. I am an attorney duly admitted to practice before this Court and a partner with Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir LLP. I, along with Philip Kent Cohen, was trial attorney for DANIEL MASTERSON. If called as a witness, I could and would competently testify to all the facts within my personal knowledge except where stated upon information and belief.
2. In or around early July 2023, I sent an email to the foreperson of the jury in the Masterson trial, asking if she would be willing to speak with me about the trial. Her email address was easy to locate online, given the information she provided in open court concerning her place of employment.
3. The foreperson replied to my email very shortly thereafter. In her email, she indicated that she had emailed the court clerk to ask if it would be permissible for her to speak to me. The foreperson further indicated that, in response, she had received an email from the Court notifying her that there was no prohibition against her speaking with me. On that basis, the foreperson emailed that she would meet with me on two conditions: that we meet in person and that I agree not to record our conversation. I agreed to both conditions and we met for lunch in Santa Monica the following day.
4. During our lunch meeting, the foreperson was friendly, cordial and forthright. She concluded our meeting by telling me that she believed that some of the other jurors would also want to speak with me. She indicated that she would speak with them and let me know which of the other jurors would be willing to speak with me. Thereafter, the foreperson contacted me to let know about two other jurors who were willing to meet with me. She further advised that they had given her permission to provide me their cell phone numbers so that we could schedule times to meet.
5. I contacted the two jurors via cell phone and made arrangements to meet with them (separately). I met with both jurors at restaurants which they selected at times convenient to them. Both jurors were cordial and pleasant. The two jurors and the foreperson all indicated that I was welcome to contact them again if I had follow-up questions and/or wanted to meet again.
6. I am confident — based on my interactions with the jurors and their willingness to speak to me — that none of the three jurors with whom I met consider — or ever considered — my contact with them to be unwanted, harassing or otherwise improper. To the contrary, they each provided me their cell phones numbers (without my requesting them); texted and spoke with me on the phone; met with me at restaurants and times of their choosing; and offered to speak or meet with me again if I needed to.
7. Other than what is outlined above, I have had no unwanted contact or interaction with any of the other jurors.
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.
Executed on this 14th day of November, 2024, at Los Angeles, California.
Shawn Holley
As for Danny’s appellate lawyers, LA Times reporter James Queally spoke to Masterson’s attorney Eric Multhaup, who acknowledged that his investigators had reached out to the jurors more recently…
Multhaup confirmed one of his investigators approached a juror at their home on Sept. 15 and “comported herself in complete compliance with [the California] Code of Civil Procedure.” He disputed the idea that jurors’ identities were meant to be kept secret, arguing Olmedo’s ruling only hid information contained in “the forms that the jurors fill out relating to their jury service.”
Between Holley’s declaration and Multhaup owning up that it was his investigators approaching jurors, we’ll see if Judge Olmedo still wants to have a hearing to get to the bottom of things.
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The appellate lawyers are bound by the courts previous injunctions. The End. They can go through the court and get access to the jurors, but they can't do that on their own. As for the 'easily identifiable identity', I call bovine excrement on that lie. The court should smack down hard on that lie.
As for the Presleys, I wonder when the tabloids will be jumping on that? The contract was signed in Florida, so why the bother? Maybe a federal court should have been used? Delay and obfuscate are not just $cientology sacraments.
Some confusion here: Why would the jurors complain to the court about contact and yet, according to Holley's statement, openly talk to her? Something doesn't smell right. Besides that, I'd like to know what could possibly be discussed so the appeal has a different outcome.