Newspapers: Scaife fund filings shouldn’t be sealed
Trustees fight release of papers
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday filed a legal memorandum seeking to preserve public access to a coming round in the court fight over a Scaife family trust fund.
Jennie Scaife and David Scaife, the daughter and son of the late billionaire publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, plan to amend their objections to the actions of three trustees who controlled the fund, created in 1935.
One of the trustees, PNC Bank, has asked that the amended objections be sealed from public view and wants Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Kathleen A. Durkin to review them privately with the parties’ attorneys in her chambers.
Attorney Frederick Frank, representing the Post-Gazette and Inquirer, countered that “much of the legal advice received and attorney-client communications already have been made public by the trustees’ own actions” in attaching them to earlier filings in the case. Because the trustees are defending themselves by saying they followed the advice of their attorneys, Mr. Frank wrote, that advice should be part of the public file.
If the documents are to be discussed in the judge’s chambers, the newspapers’ attorney should be present, subject to an agreement to keep the contents confidential, Mr. Frank wrote.
Attorneys for the son and daughter filed on Monday a memorandum alleging “that David and Jennie were intentionally kept in the dark and not told about the 1935 Trust” despite advice to the contrary from the trustees’ attorneys.
The children’s attorneys opposed PNC’s bid to seal the amended objections, writing that the three trustees have produced 100,000 pages of documents, and have marked all of them as “confidential,” in abuse of agreements between the parties.
PNC, attorney H. Yale Gutnick and James M. Walton managed the fund, from which Richard Mellon Scaife withdrew $450 million over 20 years, largely to support the TribuneReview newspapers.
Any balance would have gone to the publisher’s children, but the fund was empty upon his 2014 death.
The Post-Gazette and Inquirer have intervened in the case, contending that it is of public importance and the filings should be presumed to be accessible.