Anna Nicole Smith, the former stripper, Playboy bunny, Guess jeans model and reality TV star, is fighting for the $474 million inheritance of her 90-year-old late husband, oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II. He was 89 and she was 26 when they wed in 1994, and she claims he promised her millions but that his scheming son, E. Pierce Marshall, sliced her out of the estate like an overripe melon.
A long legal war has so far netted Smith not a dime of Marshall's money. An initial $474 million award was reduced to about $89 million, then thrown out altogether by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The appeals court said that a Texas probate court's decision that the oilman's son was his sole heir should stand. The appeals court's ruling was based on its contention that California had no jurisdiction in the case. It's that aspect of the ruling that Smith is challenging, and which the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear in a case that will likely begin arguments early next year.
