Jurors in the case of Brunei’s billionaire playboy prince won’t get to see any smut, but they’re getting to hear plenty of dirt.
The judge presiding over Prince Jefri Bolkiah’s big-bucks battle against his former legal advisers said jurors won’t get to see pictures of the life-size statues the prince had made of him having sex with one of his fiancées.
“There is no mention of those sculptures at all in this case!” Judge Ira Gammerman scolded the lawyers for Thomas Derbyshire and wife Faith Zaman, who’d repeatedly pushed for the admission of the XXX-rated statues of the prince in action.
“This case is not about sex. It might have been much more interesting if it was,” he said.
He’d also told the attorneys for the Derbyshires not to get into the prince’s ultra-lavish lifestyle because it’s “irrelevant,” and exploded at Zaman’s lawyer when he displayed a slide of some of the prince’s assets during his opening arguments.
The prince says the Derbyshires cheated him out of $7 million while representing him between May 2004 and November 2006. The Derbyshires are countersuing for the $12 million they claim the prince still owes them.
In her opening statement, Linda Goldstein, the lawyer for Prince Jefri’s companies, told jurors it was a fairy tale gone bad.
The pair, who had general powers of attorney to handle Jefri’s affairs in the United States, “were given an extraordinary position of trust. They abused that trust to line their pockets,” Goldstein said.
The Derbyshires contend they had authorization from the prince for everything they did.