A federal appeals panel has ruled that the heirs to Marilyn Monroe’s estate did not inherit the rights to her publicity because she was a resident of New York, where such rights are not recognized posthumously.
Calling the dispute a “textbook case for applying judicial estoppel,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found on Aug. 30 that the estate’s heirs could not claim that Monroe was a resident of California when she died in 1962 because they had maintained for decades in other court proceedings that she had lived in New York.
