What began with a disagreement over the management of a Palm Beach County tennis center has snowballed into a request to assert punitive damages against a major insurer over allegations it helped steal DNA from Marvel Entertainment’s chairman and CEO, and his wife.

Marvel’s Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter has accused an in-house attorney for Chubb & Son Inc. — a division of Federal Insurance Co. — of scheduling a deposition in a defamation lawsuit with the aim of secretly taking DNA from water bottles and papers that Perlmutter and his wife Laura had touched.