Tom Petty's wife and daughters are fighting over his estate: 'We don't sell out'
Tom Petty’s daughters and wife are fighting over the management of his estate.
Dana Petty, the late rock star’s second wife, filed a petition filed in Los Angeles County court on Tuesday claiming that Petty’s two adult daughters from his first marriage, Adria and Annakim, are making her job as directing trustee of his estate impossible, according to The Blast. Her goal, she says, is to put a new operating agreement in place that includes hiring a new manager that has the authority over any "significant decisions" made regarding Petty's assets. She also wants decisions to require a consensus between the three women to keep them from overriding her.
Dana called out Adria, a filmmaker, specifically and accused her of abusive behavior. She claimed Adria’s “erratic behavior has made it exceedingly ... difficult to carry on business and has threatened the Trust’s business dealing” with Petty’s managers, record labels and former bandmates, the Heartbreakers. She also claimed that Adria and Annakim held up the release of a posthumous Greatest Hits album by vetoing and overriding “virtually every decision,” and that Adria derailed the release of a 25th anniversary reissue of Petty's 1994 solo LP Wildflowers after intervening and rejecting “an enormously important and lucrative offer” of $1 million without consulting Dana.
For her part, Dana, who married the “Free Fallin’” singer in 2001 insists “she has gone above and beyond to seek to work cooperatively with Tom’s daughters” from his first marriage to Jane Benyo and to treat them “as family.” However, “sadly, they, and in particular Adria, have repeatedly demonstrated their resentment over their father’s love of Petitioner and her role in his life.”
Later in the day Tuesday, Adria filed her own petition claiming her and her sister’s “efforts to participate in the management” of their father’s music “have been resisted” by Dana, “who has claimed to be the sole authority over the management of his music. She is also alleging that Dana conspired to push them out of decisions by failing to distribute Petty's "artistic properties" into a LLC (limited-liability company) as stipulated in Petty's will. She claims she and her sister have been left out of "marketing, promotional, and artistic considerations" around Petty's posthumous album releases.
With her family making headlines, Annakim, an artist, broke her silence on social media. Along with a photo of her dad on stage, she wrote, “We don’t sell out. No vampires 2019.”
In the comments, she posted the hashtag: “I go by my father’s will.” She also reiterated her “no vampires” remark and added “no TMZ,” which did a story on the drama playing up claims the daughters have been attacking the Heartbreakers.
Last month, in an interview with Billboard the sisters talked about stewarding Petty’s legacy — and working side by side with the Heartbreakers.
“They're our uncles," Adria said of Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. "We're all dealing with chaos; our world just exploded when [Petty] died. We're all a bit shell-shocked. But they've been amazing — and the other members of that team that were around for a long time, too. I'm extraordinarily proud of them for the amount of worked they've dived headfirst into with us."
Adria added that after the release of the greatest hits album, “Personally I'm hoping we're not releasing anything for a little while so we get a chance to digest what happened. We have such a rich archive; We want to follow the spirit and the ethics our father believed in and be real decent about how we steward this really huge gift he gave us."
Petty died in October 2017, just days before his 67th birthday, of an accidental drug overdose.
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