Anna Nicole Smith's former attorney and companion filed papers Thursday
arguing that the late model's daughter is the sole beneficiary to her estate,
though the child is not mentioned in the will.
The will, drafted long before Dannielynn was born in September 2006, wasn't
updated before Smith's Feb. 8 drug overdose death in a Florida hotel at age 39.
Smith had intended to include her, Howard K. Stern said in papers filed in Los
Angeles Superior Court.
She told her estate attorney in the years before her daughter's birth that
"although she did not expect to have any children in the future, if she did, she
wanted them to share equally in the trust," according to court papers.
The will left all Smith's assets to her son, Daniel, who was her only child
when the document was drafted. He died three days after Dannielynn was born.
Dannielynn lives with her father, photographer Larry Birkhead, who was
established as her parent through DNA testing that settled a paternity dispute
with Stern. Stern is the will's executor.
Smith's assets were estimated at $710,000 when the will was filed in May, but
as the widow of Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, she had been fighting
Marshall's family for years over his estimated $500 million fortune. How much of
that money, if any, eventually goes to Dannielynn could depend on the outcome of
the legal dispute.
Also on Thursday, a Superior Court judge refused to throw out a preliminary
injunction barring a Texas doctor and his wife from releasing a 1994 videotape
documenting breast augmentation surgery for Smith.
The injunction was sought by Stern, who says Smith never consented to having
her surgery recorded and that the doctor, Gerald Wayne Johnson, sent a tape of
the procedure to a memorabilia dealer.
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