Suit Unveils Late Tycoon’s Family Feud
In a lawsuit worthy of the venomous Ewing family of the TV show “Dallas,” Patricia Davis Raynes said her father, the late oil billionaire Marvin Davis, looted hundreds of millions of dollars from her trust fund.
Her 169-page complaint, filed in federal court in Los Angeles this week, contends that Davis systematically raided her money, set aside by her grandfather, to finance his businesses, to help his “two favored sons,” and to pay for his family’s “lavish lifestyle.”
Her father acted out of “greed, spite and malice,” Raynes charged, because she “dared to leave Los Angeles for New York to live her own life.”
Marvin Davis first built his fortune working as a wildcatter in his father’s Colorado oil business. He parlayed those earnings into billions by savvy real estate investments, at one point owning the 20th Century Fox studio, before he died in September 2004 at 79.
He and his wife, Barbara, were among Southern California’s most prominent philanthropists, devoting much of their attention to childhood diabetes and multiple sclerosis, diseases that affected their two other daughters.
“The family is both shocked and saddened by this action,” said Michael Sitrick, a spokesman for Barbara Davis.
“They are confident that claims in the complaint will be proven untrue and ... they are hard-pressed to understand her bitterness toward them, especially given the tens of millions of dollars she has received over the years,” he said.
Raynes, 53, is the eldest of the five Davis children. At one point she worked at Fox while her father owned the studio, prospecting for new movie projects.
She is married to Martin Raynes, a New York real estate investor who declared bankruptcy in 1991. Shortly after their wedding the couple bought a $10-million apartment in Manhattan and a $5.5-million waterfront home on Long Island and later acquired others. The bankruptcy forced them to shed several of these properties.
Raynes claimed in her suit that her father “exploited a special, confidential relationship” with her and that her mother and siblings failed to carry out their “fiduciary responsibilities” to her trust.
She accused family members of “self-dealing,” charging “improper and exorbitant expenses” to her trust, and improperly managing family businesses through such decisions as spending $2 million for the use of a corporate jet in 2002 and 2003. These decisions, Raynes charged, hurt the value of her trust.
The complaint noted that Marvin Davis had calculated Raynes’ trust alone earned profits of $170 million by 1995. Yet, she alleges, her father paid her “a monthly stipend that was considerably less than the interest that her hundreds of hundreds of millions would earn.”
In 2004, Forbes magazine reported Davis’ fortune was worth $5.8 billion.
