The Battle for Jimi Hendrix

Tue., Jun. 29, 2004 12:25 PM PDT by Julie Keller

It's a courtroom experience for the family of Jimi Hendrix.

The guitar god's brother and stepsister are facing off in court over the distribution of his fortune. It is the latest in an ongoing series of legal squabbles over the rocker's estate and company, Experience Hendrix LLC.

Leon Hendrix claims that stepsister Janie has been lavishly frittering away money from Jimi's estate, and he has banded together with other family members in hopes of removing her from the helm of the company and having the money redistributed.

"Janie lived a very good life, but other beneficiaries haven't seen a dime," Robert Curran, the lawyer who is representing Leon Hendrix, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The case revolves around the final will of Jimi's father, Al Hendrix, who inherited all rights to his son's music when Jimi died in 1970.

Leon says Janie, who was adopted by Al when he married her mother in 1968, coaxed her father into writing Leon out of the will and putting her and her cousin, Robert Hendrix, in charge of Experience Hendrix LLC. (Leon and his six kids were included in the will until 1997--his father died in 2002).

Leon claims Janie and Robert have been blowing company money on such things as bonuses, home loans, cars and trips to luxury spas while shutting out other members of the family.

Leon is suing to remove Janie as boss and wants to have the will and trust made null and void then rewritten to include him. The case kicked off Monday in Seattle.

"This is about greed," Curran told King County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ramsdell in his opening statement. "Janie has lived a very, very good life. She travels the world first-class. Her family goes with her. They get picked up in limos. They stay in first-class hotels."

Attorney David Osgood, who is representing other members of the family, told the Post-Intelligencer that Janie, "since day one, has treated Experience Hendrix as an ATM."

Predictably, both Janie and Robert Hendrix say the charges are ludicrous. Janie reportedly rolled her eyes and glared at her stepbrother throughout the opening statements.

Their lawyer, John Wilson, told the court that "Al Hendrix never wanted Leon Hendrix to be involved in this business" and that he wrote the will exactly the way he wanted because he trusted Janie and Robert. Wilson added that some monies have been repaid and that the company will conduct an audit to see if more money should be paid back to the company.

He also says that the charges of frivolous spending will never hold up in court.

"There's complaint about expenses, there's complaint about compensation, but the one thing that you haven't heard a complaint about is that every single expense from the [beginning of Janie's management] until now has been recorded," Wilson said.

Wilson also said Al Hendrix's most recent will should be honored and that the family patriarch made a cognizant decision to leave Leon out of the will. (Leon's attorneys say Al was old and incoherent at the time of the will's revision.)

When Jimi Hendrix died at the age of 27 in 1970, he had released three albums and had a slew of unreleased tracks backlogged, which has kept his estate thriving for more than 30 years.

For 20 years after his death, the estate was run by a lawyer who sold many of the copyrights.

In the early 1990s, under Janie's influence, Al sued the lawyer to regain rights but put the company into debt. Janie says she is following her father's wishes by not paying off the other beneficiaries in the will until the debt is repaid, which should be around 2010.

The trial is expected to last six or seven weeks.