Prince has no peace, not even in the grave: less than eight years after the death of the Purple Rain artist, his heirs are again in court fighting each other in the latest installment of a long legal battle over control of the vast legacy of the Minneapolis singer. The complaint filed in a Delaware court pits two former associates against four of Prince's relatives for control of Prince Legacy LLC, one of two entities created in 2022 to manage the $156 million inheritance.
Primary Wave Music, which owns the other half, is not involved in the dispute reported by Billboard. Prince died in 2016 of an opioid overdose without leaving a will: a tragic irony for an artist who had fought tenaciously for control of his music during his lifetime. The uncertainty of the situation opened a Pandora's box of legal disputes that seemed to have been settled Solomonically in the summer of 2022 with a 50/50 division of the inheritance.
Now L. Londell McMillan, who was Prince's brief manager in the 90s, and Charles Spicer have sued four relatives — half-sisters Sharon Nelson and Norrine Nelson, niece Breanna Nelson and nephew Allen Nelson — who they say are trying to oust them from the company by violating an earlier agreement and causing enormous damage to efforts to "preserve and protect Prince's legacy." The two allege that the half-sisters attempted to sell their shares to Primary Wave, thus unbalancing the current split into equal parts between the two entities.
McMillan and Spicer say the Nelsons "lack any business and management expertise and have no experience in the music industry or how to negotiate high-level deals in this area." The two former collaborators therefore fear "irreparable damage" to the company's relationships and revenues, not to mention the fact that "the interference and intervention of the Nelsons is making it impossible to carry out the mandate of Prince Legacy".
Meanwhile, Prince's music continues to be a money-grinding machine: in November, a month after the release of the deluxe box set of Diamond and Pearls with a vast collection of unreleased 'from the vault', the singer's wardrobe went up for auction, whose creations are becoming a musical for the stage. A few days ago, producer Orin Wolf announced a new theatrical version of Purple Rain, the 1984 autobiographical film that made Prince a megastar and won him the Oscar for Best Original Song.
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