Von Bulow Suit Against Wife’s Son Dismissed

A federal judge on Monday dismissed Claus von Bulow’s $20-million countersuit against his estranged stepson, who has accused the Danish socialite in a civil suit of trying to kill his mother.

U.S. District Judge John Walker dismissed Von Bulow’s claim that Alexander Auersperg “perpetrated a fraud” by insisting Von Bulow tried twice to kill his wife, Martha (Sunny) von Bulow, who lapsed into an irreversible coma in December, 1980.

In a 30-page decision, Walker dismissed also a charge of malicious prosecution that Von Bulow had filed against his stepson, ruling that the statue of limitations for the claim had run out.

In Permanent Coma

A Rhode Island jury in 1985 acquitted Von Bulow, 60, of causing the seizures that rendered his wealthy wife comatose in 1979 and 1980 in her beachfront mansion in Newport, R.I. Sunny von Bulow, heiress to a Pittsburgh utilities fortune, recovered from the first coma, but doctors say the second one is permanent.

Von Bulow had been convicted of the charges in 1982, but the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the verdict two years later.

A few months after the second trial, Auersperg, 27, and his sister, Annie Laurie Auersperg Kniessel, 28, Sunny von Bulow’s children by a previous marriage, claimed in a $56-million federal civil lawsuit that Von Bulow had “sought to obtain assets worth millions of dollars by scheming to defraud and murder his wife.”