BATTLE OF WILLS
DA widow hits ma bid to see old version
The widow of Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson says her mother-in-law has no right to see the late top prosecutor’s old will while battling to have his revised deathbed version overturned.
Lu-Shawn Thompson’s lawyers charged in court papers this week that the older woman has no reason to know the contents of the old will because it’s already void.
Lu-Shawn Thompson and Thompson’s mother, Clara, have been embroiled in a battle over the late DA’s estate since his death from cancer last year.
Clara claimed in December court papers that her daughter-in- law manipulated the ailing DA into cutting Clara out of his newly drawn-up will.
But Lu-Shawn has testified under oath that her husband knowingly shredded his 2008 will, which included his mother, on Sept. 22, 2016, just 17 days before his death. He left behind a new will that gives the entirety of the estate to his wife and young children.
Clara’s lawyers filed papers last Friday demanding that Lu-Shawn be held in contempt for not turning over the 2008 document.
But Lu-Shawn’s lawyer, Lori Anne Douglass, argued in the new papers that her client is not obligated to turn over a copy of the “destroyed” will.
Meanwhile, the lawyer also had previously filed a motion to seal the courtroom and filings from the press but revoked that application Thursday before Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court Justice Diana Johnson.
Johnson has yet to rule on the contempt motion.
Clara, a retired NYPD cop, and Lu-Shawn have been at one an- other’s throats since the mother first filed suit claiming that her daughter-in-law spent money like “it was water” and that her son wanted to divorce her over her “unbridled spending.”
“Kenneth was so upset about Lu-Shawn’s behavior and indifference that he stated to me, emphatically, that he wanted a divorce,” Clara wrote not long after her son succumbed to cancer at age 50.
Ken Thompson’s sister, Catherine “Cinda” Adams-Gaskin, has said she referred the couple to a marriage counselor in 2012 and got a text from her ill brother last August saying: “Cinda, I have to divorce Lu-Shawn. She’s making my situation worse.”