William Shatner hopes to stop man who claims to be his son from his 'birthright,' the Shatner name
Space: the final frontier … to boldly go where no man has gone before! To file a name-change petition in court!
A Tampa, Fla., man is claiming that he is the lovechild of 87-year-old actor William Shatner, and is hoping that he can change his last name to match.
Peter Sloan has, for decades, claimed that the actor, famed for his work on Star Trek, is his father. However, Shatner, the father of three daughters, continues to deny it.
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Still, Sloan says he believes the Shatner name is his “birthright,” and filed on Jan. 14 to change his last name legally to “Shatner.” A week later, he received a cease-and-desist order from Shatner’s Miami attorney.
“They are trying to scare me,” Sloan, 62, told the Tampa Bay Times. “It won’t work.” Sloan thinks that Shatner and his attorneys may have been alerted because of his postings on social media. “Maybe they are watching me,” he said.
According to the outlet, Shatner worked with Sloan’s mother, the late actress Kathy Burt, in the 1950s, on Canadian television. Allegedly, they had a one-night stand in early 1956 in Toronto. Sloan was born the same year, on Dec. 9, and given up for adoption in New York.
Sloan reconnected with his mother in 1984, and she told her son that he could have been the child of Shatner or another man referred to as “Chick,” a law student from Montreal.
In a meeting organized by producer E. Arthur Kean, a friend of Sloan’s adoptive father, George Tilden Orick, Shatner, by Sloan’s account, admitted to being his biological father. However, he told Sloan he would never go public with that information.
According to the outlet, Sloan has been unsuccessful in persuading Shatner to take a DNA test. Sloan, who goes by the name “Peter Shatner,” has published a memoir titled The Search under the name, in which he details his hopes to meet his alleged birth father.
Sloan claims that he is not seeking a part of Shatner’s fortune, and no longer hopes to have a relationship with his purported father.
“I am Peter Shatner,” Sloan said. “No one can prove otherwise. If they want to, let’s get that DNA test.”
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