WWW- MRS. Smith is going to Washington. The decade-long legal battle by boobalicious blonde Anna Nicole Smith over the estate of her late billionaire husband has made its way to the nation’s highest court.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the one-time Playboy pinup’s appeal over her share of the estate of J. Howard Marshall II sometime early next year, reports The Post’s Lukas I. Alpert.
The 1993 Playmate of the Year-turned-reality-TV star has been engaged in a brass-knuckled fight with Marshall’s son, E. Pierce Marshall, since the Texas oil tycoon died in 1995 at the age of 90.
The pair met in 1991 when Anna Nicole – then Vickie Lynn Hogan – was working as a topless dancer in Texas.
She became a favorite of the wheelchair-bound baron 63 years her senior who gave her millions in jewelry, paid for her cosmetic augmentations and repeatedly asked her to marry him. She agreed in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89.
At stake is an eye-popping $474 million, which a federal bankruptcy judge awarded the sex-obsessed siren in 2000. The figure was dropped in 2002 to $88.6 million on appeal.
But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw it out altogether in 2004, saying federal courts have no jurisdiction over the rulings of a state probate court – in this case, one in Texas that had found in Pierce Marshall’s favor.
Anna Nicole accuses Pierce of destroying key documents before his father died, illegally taking control of the estate and writing her out of the will. He paints her as a drug-addled bimbo who took advantage of his father’s poor health to get at his money. They have even battled over what to do with the elder Marshall’s ashes.
Smith insists her husband intended to provide for her throughout her life. Her lawyer, Ken Richland, accuses the younger Marshall of a vindictive smear campaign, saying that he “devotes nearly half his brief to manipulating the record to cast [Anna Nicole] in a bad light.”
Marshall vows to fight the case tooth and nail. “This is one small step in a process and we intend to prevail so my father’s wishes can be honored,” he says.