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The case of Vicky Lynn Marshall (AKA Anna Nicole Smith).
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I had the occasion to bear personal witness to an extraordinary series of events that made a minor ripple in public consciousness, but which later went on to have a quite large impact on a variety of social fields with which many of us are interested. These include, in no particular order, US popular culture, wealth and political influence, extractive energy industries, US law, gender and sexuality, the role of the administrative state, the arts and philanthropy, and many others. The event in question started when my father, an appellate attorney in Los Angeles, took on the case of Vicky Lynn Marshall in a lawsuit over the estate of her husband, who had died some 10 years earlier. She was suing his adult son, her step-son, accusing him of having defrauded her out of money she claimed her husband had promised her while he was still alive. Mrs. Marshall, who herself is now deceased, was an internationally known model, celebrity and probably one of the very first reality TV stars. She is more commonly known by her stage name, Anna Nicole Smith. And her marriage to a man named J. Howard Marshall made a minor sensation given that Mr. Marshall was in his 90s when they married, while Ms. Marshall was only 19. Mr. Marshall was, at the time of his death, also one of the wealthiest men in America, a billionaire several times over. His money had been earned in the oil industry – he founded Marathon Oil – but later grew exponentially when he became business partners with Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, a privately held corporation whose value is unknown but estimated to be in the hundreds of billion of dollars. Most of the Marshall state remains tied up in Koch Industries, and its valuation is, likewise, hard to ascertain.
My father’s involvement in all this was, at least at first glance, seemingly above most of the fray. It had to do with a rather arcane, but seemingly well-settled matter of bankruptcy law. At the time, the stories of Mrs. Marshall’s money woes were known to the public – in fact she had agreed to star in one of the first ever reality TV shows, The Anna Nicole Show, because of them. The show became a surprise smash hit for the Lifetime Network, and, coupled with a Hollywood writer’s strike in the 1990s, helped spawn the slew of reality tv shows we know about today – from The Kardashians to the Housewives of [Fill in Wealthy Suburb/City Name Here]. But while Ms. Marshall’s show was running, she was simultaneously filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was in the context of her bankruptcy prcoeedings that her step-son, Peirce Marshall, sued her in his capacity as the beneficiary of his father’s estate, claiming that Mrs. Marshall had unduly influenced his father, in his dotage, to give her lavish gifts that the son wanted reimbursed to the estate. It was against this claim that Mrs. Marshall countersued her step-son, saying that on the contrary, he had defrauded her out of the money she had been promised by her now deceased husband, to the tune of around 40 million dollars. After years of legal wrangling, the Bankruptcy court found in favor of Mrs. Marshall, awarding her a substantial portion of the sum she claimed she was owed. Her step-son appealed, but lost again in Federal district court, who in addition to the sum Mrs. Marshall was awarded at the lower level court, awarded her an additional sum of nearly 400 million dollars. Of course her step son appealed this decision too, and it was at the stage when the case was before the Federal court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and then eventually before the U.S. Supreme Court, that my father became involved. My father would argue the case twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning the first time and losing the second. It was the Court’s majority decision in the second case, decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, that would result in what was a major reversal of long established precedents about the power and authority of federal bankruptcy courts to decide matters that, while related to the bankruptcy proceeding, are not themselves about bankruptcy. It was this question, which for various reasons plays into the concerns that conservative legal scholars and their libertarian backers that animated certain well-supported law professors committed to the dismantling of the administrative state to also weigh in – including several who teach at and are members of organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and the Olin Foundation, that are largely supported by the Koch Brothers and their allies.
Confused yet? Yeah, so are we.
There is lots more to tell to this story. And it involves strange experiences that my Dad had in the process of litigating this case that threatened his heretofore staunch belief in the integrity of the institution of US law as the best system we have to dispense impartial justice to any and every litigant that appeared before its courts, no matter what their public reputation might be, nor the amount of money and political power they can (or can’t) wield. But it also involves the fate of the New York City Opera, which had to close after its chief benefactor, David Koch, refused to keep it financially afloat because of its plan to open its season with “Anna Nicole” a show all about the sordid and tragic life of Anna Nicole Smith, including her ill-fated marriage to J. Howard Marshall. Or even the story involving the overdose death of Anna Nicole’s adult son, the legal battle over the paternity and custody of her daughter Dannilynn, the disbarment and later reinstatement of her personal lawyer (and frequent character on the Anna Nicole Show) Howard K. Stern, and many others.
So, if all this sounds like a Greek tragedy – or maybe a Dickensian one – well, we kinda feel that way too. And we are not the only ones who feel this way (hence the Opera and several documentaries made about her life). But more importantly we think there is something about this case that feels very much “of our moment,” which is what I think intrigues us most. Its also a challenge, we think, to our capacities as ethnographers and anthropologists, and we are not sure why. Maybe because it is so “close” to the moment we are living in right now that it is hard to get a handle on. Or maybe just because it is all so damn complicated. Either way, we think it poses a ripe opportunity to do some collective learning and, along the way, perhaps learn something about what ethnography and anthropology can be good for thinking through and with when grasping at the various complex social forces and interpretive commitments which we find ourselves caught in.
Let us know if you have any questions – or better, whether you are interested in sitting down for a face-to-face chat about this stuff and whether there is anything here we might pursue collectively as a shared research project.