Leonard Cohen's heirs accuse former manager and lawyer of infringement [EXCLUSIVE]

Leonard Cohen's children and heirs, Lorca and Adam Cohen, have filed a motion accusing the legendary author -composer-performer the former manager, Robert Kory, and his legal representatives forgery and asking the court to remove him from the role of trustee, to compel him to hand over the assets of the estate and to return the money he has earned from his activity in this role.< /p>

The motion, which follows a probate motion filed last fall, cites a deposition in which Kory's former lawyer admits to removing a page from the trust signed by Cohen after the singer's death and replacing it with one stating that Kory is the primary trustee - a crime.

He quotes Kory as blaming the infringement on his former lawyer, Reeve Chudd, whom he claims to have "modified a document without anyone's knowledge"; the motion says Kory's claims "are credulity proof." In the past, Kory has blamed "scribe error" for the discrepancy between drafts of Cohen's trust documents. He noted that he had invested a tremendous amount of time and energy to generate returns for the estate that made Adam and Lorca "enormously wealthy". A trial is scheduled for March 29 in Los Angeles.

The motion seeks court confirmation that Kory is not a trustee and has no not entitled to act in that capacity, and that Lorca and Adam Cohen take over the trust and be reimbursed for the money Kory earned while acting as trustee.

At the heart of that revenue is a 2022 deal, brokered by Kory, in which Hipgnosis Songs has acquired the rights to 278 of the songs and derivatives written by Cohen for an amount cited in an earlier court document of $58 million, including songs such as "Hallelujah", "Suzanne", "Bird on the Wire" and d 'others; the lawsuit states that Cohen was "dying and heavily medicated" when he signed an agreement in July 2016 that gave Kory a 15% commission on such a sale.

Cohen died in November 2016 at the age of 82, after a battle with cancer.

As quoted in the motion, Kory claims that he has not viewed or read the documents of trust before signing them; the heirs say that even if true, it is further evidence that he is unfit to be a trustee. The petition also claims that Kory backdated a document allowing him, as purported trustee, to stage and profit from an exhibit and book of Cohen's drawings, poetry and other ephemera at the Museum. of Fine Arts of Ontario, claiming that the trust only owned the materials, when in fact they belong to the heirs and the trust. He also claims that Kory paid himself and others, including his son, hundreds of thousands of dollars to store and maintain Cohen's archive. The exhibition opened in December and is expected to last until April.

While the two parties have been involved in litigation for several months, the information and admission concerning the false document is a new development. The petition accuses Kory of wrongfully entering into businesses and business agreements on behalf of the Trust without the consent of Adam and Lorca; to refuse to provide Adam and Lorca with material information regarding these transactions; of misappropriating assets belonging to an entity controlled by Adam and Lorca and transferring those assets to the Trust, and refusing to distribute assets of the Trust worth tens of millions of dollars to the heirs' trusts "in order to continue to get rich wrongly".

The lawsuit cites Chudd, Kory's former attorney, from a deposition filed by the attorney of the Cohens, Adam Streisand, which includes the following exchanges:

Q. Now, Leonard Cohen did not sign this version of the Leonard Cohen Family Trust restatement; okay?

A. That's right.