Relatives of the late New York heiress Huguette Clark have launched a challenge to her will, claiming fraud by its beneficiaries — her nurse, accountant and attorney — MSNBC reported Wednesday.
Clark, who died last year at the age of 104, signed a will leaving her nurse Hadassah Peri $35 million, and her lawyer Wallace Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler $500,000 each and control of a multimillion-dollar foundation. It cut her family out entirely.
In another will, signed just six weeks earlier, she left Peri $5 million, with the rest of the $400 million copper mining fortune going to Clark’s family.
This week, 19 members of Clark’s family filed an objection to the second will in Manhattan’s Surrogate’s Court.
The heiress “was not competent to make a will,” the family’s attorney John R. Morken said, according to court documents. “…she did not know the nature, extent or value of her assets, was not of sound mind or memory and was not mentally capable of making a will.”
Morken went on to claim that the will “was not freely and voluntarily made” and had been “procured by the undue influence” of Peri, Block and Kamsler, among other people.
Should the court find that Clark was not competent to sign the second will in April 2005, it would likely raise questions as to how she was competent to sign the first will — in March 2005 — which favored the family. However, if both wills are thrown out, under New York state law, the family stands to inherit everything.
Clark, whose father was the second richest man in the US in the early 1900s, died May 24, 2011 at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, where she had reportedly been staying since at least September 2010.