The outrageous brother of the Sultan of Brunei has finally learned humility — he wants to bar a Manhattan jury from seeing statues that portray him having sex.
Lawyers for Prince Jefri — a notorious high-flying and hard partying playboy — have asked the judge overseeing his upcoming civil trial against his former attorneys to ban the jury from seeing pictures of the “erotic statues” he kept on his $11 million Long Island estate.
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PHOTOS: PRINCE JEFRI’S STATUES
Mark Cymrot, the lawyer for the British attorneys, said there are four statues in all, which Jefri had commissioned from renowned artist J. Seward Johnson. One depicts the prince, another is of one of his fiances, and the other two are “graphic” depictions of them having sex.
“They make me blush,” Cymrot said.
He maintains they’re important pieces of evidence for his clients, who Jefri says swindled him out of millions while working for him between 2004 and 2006. The married lawyers, Thomas Derbyshire and Faith Zaman, say they were faithful employees, and the prince is stiffing them on the cash he owes them for their work.
Jefri isn’t as well off as he used to be — his powerful brother sued him for allegedly looting close to $15 billion while serving as Brunei’s finance minister, and blowing the cash on necessities such as $750,000 Jaguars, an Airbus jet, a Sikorsky helicopter, gold plated toilet brushes, harems, and a yacht the ladies’ man named “Tits.”
The case eventually settled, and as a result, Jefri has had to give up his interest in some of the family’s holdings around the world, including the New York Palace hotel, the 28-acre Long Island estate and an estate in Las Vegas.
In court filings, Jefri says the jury doesn’t need to hear about all that. He wants Judge Ira Gammerman to bar evidence regarding the “alleged embezzlement,” his wealth, and his personal life, including how many wives he has.
“As a Moslem, Prince Jefri was entitled to have multiple wives and families, and he did so,” his filing says. “However, polygamy is offensive to many Americans, and trial testimony about Prince Jefri’s personal life may be prejudicial to him.”
The pictures of the statues should also be excluded because “jurors easily could be offended by [their] erotic nature” and “express their anger as prejudice against Prince Jefri,” the prince’s papers say.
Cymrot said that the statues were still at the Long Island estate when the pictures were taken bolster his clients’ claim that Jefri’s purported sale of the property — in which they allegedly profited — was bogus.