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Stern Seeks Inheritance for Dannielynn

Thu., Oct. 18, 2007 3:20 PM PDT by Gina Serpe

According to Howard K. Stern, where there's a will, there's a way...to establish an heir to Anna Nicole Smith's estate.

The late model's former lawyer and companion filed a motion in Los Angeles Superior Court Thursday seeking to establish her 13-month-old daughter, Dannielynn, as the sole heir to Smith's fortune.

As it stands, Smith's will was drafted in July 2001 and named only her son, Daniel, as an heir. The document was not updated in the five months between Dannielynn Hope Marshall Birkhead's birth on Sept. 7, 2006, and Daniel's death three days later, and the Playmate's passing last Feb. 8.

In his petition, however, Stern, the executor of Smith's estate, claims that "as a matter of law, Dannielynn is a pretermitted heir." In other words, although the little girl did not exist at the time the will was last updated, she is still in line to be an inheritor because she is Smith's offspring.

Stern states that "although [Anna Nicole] did not expect to have any children in the future, if she did, she wanted them to share equally in the trust created for Daniel." (View the motion.)

Should Stern's motion be approved, Dannielynn—currently in the custody of her father, Larry Birkhead—stands to inherit her mother's considerable estate. Dannielynn is also in line for hundreds of millions of dollars from Anna Nicole's late billionaire oil-tycoon husband, J. Howard Marshall. Marshall's family, however, has long challenged the validity of the inheritance and is still in the process of contesting the patriarch's estate.

Meanwhile, Stern scored a victory in another L.A. courtroom Thursday, as the judge in his ongoing battle with Gerald Wayne Johnson, the Texas doctor who is seeking to sell footage of Smith's 1994 breast augmentation surgery, denied a motion from the plastic surgeon's attorney to find that L.A. courts don't have jurisdiction in the case.

Stern's attorney, Bruce S. Ross, argued that while Johnson's practice is based in Texas, California had jurisdiction because the doctor attempted to disseminate the video footage in Los Angeles County.

Ultimately, though, Superior Court Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff denied the motion on the grounds that Johnson's attorney was not properly licensed to argue law in the state.

As a result, Beckloff left the door open for Johnson to bring the motion before the court sometime in the future, either after his current attorney, Gus Pappas, amends his license or Johnson finds a California-based lawyer to bring the objection.

For the time being, though, a preliminary injunction prohibiting the doctor from selling or in any way distributing the surgery footage still stands. Johnson was also ordered to hand over the original tape, along with any copies that have been made, to Stern.

Meanwhile, a third Smith-related hearing was due to take place in Los Angeles this morning. Attorneys for both the late spokesperson and TrimSpa, the diet pill organization she represented, were due in court for a status hearing on a lawsuit filed against the two parties concerning injuries allegedly caused by those who took the weight-loss drug.