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Mr. Dynamite's Little Mister?
Papa may soon get a brand new heir.
James Brown's longtime companion, Tomi Rae Hynie, has selected a lawyer to serve as a special guardian for her son, James Brown Jr., during court-overseen DNA testing to determine whether the boy is indeed the Godfather of Soul's biological child.
Hynie filed a petition with a South Carolina court requesting that Charleston criminal attorney Stephen M. Slotchiver be appointed the five-year-old boy's custodian while the paternity test is carried out using DNA taken from the elder Brown last month.
A message left with Slotchiver was not unreturned. A hearing to approve the appointment is expected to take place later this month.
Hynie—a former backup singer for Brown who claims to be the music legend's fourth wife—sued Brown's estate Feb. 1 seeking legal footing as the "omitted spouse." Hynie and her son were not named in Brown's will, which divvied up the singer's possessions, including cars, clothes and jewelry among his six adult children. The will was signed in 2001, before Junior's birth and before Hynie and Brown swapped vows in a disputed ceremony.
Should the tests prove conclusively that the James Browns are blood, it would bolster Hynie's argument that she and the boy are entitled to half of Brown's vast fortune.
The elder Brown died on Dec. 25 of congestive heart failure at the age of 73, leaving behind a tortured legal legacy that has spawned lawsuits and delayed his burial.
After lavish public funerals at Harlem's Apollo Theater in Harlem and the James Brown Arena in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, and a private memorial service for close friends and family, Brown's body was placed in a climate-controlled room at his mansion in Beech Island, South Carolina. It was later transferred to an undisclosed location for two months.
All the while, his estate's trustees hammered out the details for a final interment at a mausoleum at the Beech Island residence, which his family is hoping to convert into a Graceland-style museum as specified in his will.
But with construction continuing on his tomb, the family decided to have Brown's remains temporarily placed in a crypt at the Beech Island home of one of his grown daughters. In mid-March, nearly three months after his death, Brown was interred there.
While she battles to be legally established as an heir, Hynie is also backing Brown's six adult offspring in their maneuvers to have the estates trustees removed.
The family claims the three trustees, led by Brown's longtime lawyer, Buddy Dallas, "mismanaged and otherwise dissipated" his assets, allegations which Dallas and cohorts denied.
Although he declined to remove the trustess, Aiken County Circuit Court Judge Doyet Early assigned a special administrator to oversee the handling of the estate.
Nonetheless, the Brown-related docket got a little smaller this week. The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to reinstate the sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by a former publicist who claimed the late entertainer raped her at gunpoint in 1988 while she was working for him. The case was dismissed in 2005.
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