Anna Nicole Smith Hasn’t Paid Her Lawyer’s
A Bahamian law firm that represented Anna Nicole Smith in the weeks following her son’s death in September has asked a court to freeze her local bank accounts until she pays her legal bills.
The firm, which cited a falling out with the former Playboy playmate and reality-TV star when it dropped her as a client in October, wants a restraining order on assets totaling $125,000 to cover the unpaid bills.
In an affidavit filed with the lawsuit on Dec. 6, attorney Tracy Ferguson said Smith “has a total aversion to paying her bills and that she will seek to avoid paying the fees by any means that occur to her, including by sending her money within this jurisdiction abroad.”
Among other assets, Ferguson said the 39-year-old Smith earned $1.1 million for photographs of a “love match `ceremony’” with her companion Howard Stern. People magazine bought pictures of the Sept. 28 exchange of nonbinding vows aboard a catamaran in waters off Nassau.
An attorney for Smith said she has been waiting for the law firm, Callenders & Co., to provide an itemized breakdown of the bill for $113,217.
“They’re correct that they haven’t been paid, but it’s also correct that they haven’t produced an itemized bill,” attorney Wayne Munroe said Friday.
Smith has filed a “breach of duty” claim against the firm for withdrawing as her counsel, and Munroe said that any damages would likely exceed the amount of her legal bill.
Smith, who gave birth to a daughter three days before her son, Daniel, died under mysterious circumstances at her hospital bedside on Sept. 10, said she was seeking privacy when she moved to the Bahamas. But a series of public disputes there have kept her in the headlines.
Pathologist Cyril Wecht, who performed a private autopsy on her son, told reporters in November that he had not been paid. Wecht said Friday that he received payment a week after going to the media.
Smith has also been feuding with a former boyfriend over the ownership of her waterfront residence in Nassau. G. Ben Thompson, a South Carolina developer, said he loaned her money for the $900,000 home but she has not honored an agreement to pay the mortgage.
Munroe said that Smith has purchased another home, on the southwestern coast of New Providence Island, but he did not know when she planned to move.
By Michael Melia
