Anna Nicole Smith, aka Vickie Lynn Marshall, is one of my heroines, and not just because she's a former Playboy model who inherited $500 million from a law professor who invested wisely in oil and a beautiful young woman.
I defended a young woman who had relationships with men seventy-years or so her elder, and their families were sore. Sore enough to join with the police and DA to foment a murder investigation, by poison, for money, in which the theory was that she murdered four elderly men to get at their estates. The police dug up four bodies. Not from some field or forest, but from cemeteries where they'd been buried after dying attended deaths under medical care in hospitals. Anybody can make a murder case if the body is buried in a shallow grave and has signs of trauma. But our DA was more ambitious than that. Well, as they say, any DA can prosecute someone who is guilty, but it takes real prosecutorial talent to convict the innocent.
Truth to tell, my client did marry one old-timer and collected his house and a handy pile of cash on deposit in his bank account when he died three weeks later, but this was quite explainable of course. They'd been together for awhile, he had no family, and didn't want to see his home and cash escheat to the government. So he provided for her, knowing he was dying. Very nice, I thought.
The police and DA thought was smoke, however, and went looking for the fire.
Unfortunately, the smoke turned out to be window dressing by the time yours truly worked his magic.
So my client, after enduring two years in jail on murder-conspiracy charges, three of them, in fact, was freed when they were dismissed after a cross-examination of the medical-examiner who admitted he found no evidence of poison (in the form of unprescribed heart medicine) despite previous claims which he admitted were mistaken, the result of faulty testing on his part.
But it bothered me that family members of the ancient gentlemen were irate that my client, young, attractive, and a delight for the old-timers to be around, was dissed as a scheming gold-digger.
Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn't. But the point is that the only person who who had a right to care, was the old guy, and he didn't, in each instance. Not one of them was under any legal disability, such as a conservatorship, when he became attractive to the young lady. It's not a crime to grow old. You do not automatically become disabled from thinking and having needs and wants, as you grow older. There is no cut-off age beyond which you are presumed incapable of entering friendships or making gifts. If someone wants to have you committed or conserved, they're supposed to bring the matter to court and seek an order. Of course the young friend may not be given notice, but that's another question for some other day.
Having decided that it's okay for young women to relate to old men if that's what they both want, each for their own reasons, what business is it of the law's to question their judgment?
Young women have been making deals with older, more powerful men for a long time.
These deals may not be favored by the tellers of fairy tales, but it does seem to be fairly common in the world.
When elderly Filipino farm workers came to California in the 1920s, they were lonely after many years work. So they sent home to the Philippines for picture brides, young women in their twenties having little in the way of prospects at home. Brides in their twenties married retired pickers in their seventies. She took care of him, and he left her his bank account, after which she was able to marry someone younger if she wished. Not a scandal.
Because Anna Nicole Smith, aka Vickie Lynne Marshall, inherited so much, and the late Prof. Marshall's son got nothing, there's a fight, not only between the parties, but between the federal and state court systems over who gets to rule on the case. Which brings the matter before the Supreme Court today.
Dahlia Lithwick, of Slate, and a Stanford Law grad who also happens to be one of the best law writers on today's scene, has a report, here.
Note her characterization of the argument advanced by the attorney for the disinherited son, which seemed to Ms. Lithwick as one of those M.C. Escher staircases that recurves back onto itself and goes nowhere, as a lot of legal arguments seem to do. It's just that I've never seen this analogy made before and I like it a because I like it a lot...