Meet the one relative who thinks late copper heiress Huguette Clark’s final charitable wishes should be honored — even if it means she loses out on a fortune herself.
The press-shy woman, who lives in lower Manhattan, is the only one of Clark’s 20 living descendants not suing for her share of the $300-million estate of the late lonely heiress.
Clare Albert thinks her numerous relations are actually being rude by making personal grabs for the dough — $45 million of which is slated to go to a philanthropic foundation. A Monet also has been bequeathed to the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
“I find the prospect of challenging my Aunt Huguette’s will to be disrespectful of what could be her true wishes, an impolite act not in accordance with my values,” Albert says in a new book about the famously reclusive heiress.
The book “Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune” — by author Bill Dedman and Clark relative Paul Clark Newell Jr. — is No. 7 on Amazon’s top 100 list, proving the public’s fascination with a wealth that rivaled the Rockefellers and Carnegies.
Born Clare Albert, and quoted under that name in the book, Clark’s 66-year-old half-grandniece now goes by Victoria Sujata.
Sujata does not agree with her 19 relatives that Clark’s will was a product of coercion by the multimillionaire’s employees.
“I do, in fact, believe that my aunt well understood how she was dividing up her wealth and that her final will represents her own intentions,” she says in the tome.
Still, while Sujata, a Harvard grad and author of Tibetan texts, is not after money, she hired a lawyer from a white-shoe firm to watch over the trial about whether Clark’s last will is valid.
The will was allegedly signed in a darkened hospital room by the guiding hand of a nurse in 2005.
Jury selection begins Tuesday.
The disputed will left the money for a foundation to be based at Clark’s sprawling Santa Barbara, Calif., estate Bellosguardo and the Monet to the Corcoran, as well as an estimated $34 million to Clark’s nurse and a total $1 million to her lawyer and accountant. An earlier version of the document named primarily her nurse and then family as beneficiaries by default.
While Sujata lives a comfortable life as the daughter of a German industrialist, — and as a Clark descendant generously gave more than $1 million to public schools as well as the San Francisco opera — her two siblings are still vying to win the proverbial Powerball.
Her great-aunt Huguette — the eccentric, doll-obsessed daughter of railroad baron, copper king and former US Sen. William Clark — was 104 when she died in May 2011.
Neither Sujata nor her lawyer, Karin Barkhorn of Bryan Cave, returned messages for comment.