Victim's Attorney: Sullivan's Estate Could be Drained Before Trial

Money, abuse and a team of sharp-dressed attorneys are at the heart of an elaborate civil suit, whose beginning and end are tangled in a pile of legal spaghetti.

Months after litigation began with a motion for a new trial in a probate hearing that gifted millions to alleged pedophile John Edward Sullivan’s criminal defense attorney, a victim of the deceased has come forward with his own claim to the fortune, citing years of sexual abuse and the promise of riches as supporting facts of his stake in the estate.

The lawsuit began on Sept. 19, 2014, when the victim’s mother, Courtney*, sued John Stacey Young, Sullivan’s sole beneficiary, for punitive damages in excess of $1 million for past and future mental anguish, the physical pain of sexual assaults and other effects spurred by the long-term abuse of her son, Jerry*, at the hands of the 77-year-old multi-millionaire.

Since then, the case has been tied up in the courts, and as lawyers move toward trial, the estimated $4.5 million liquid estate is rapidly dwindling down to comparative pennies. Nearly $2 million of the funds were dispelled by Young before the court appointed a temporary administrator on Jan. 13, and an estimated $750,000 has been doled out since as a penalty to the taxman.

With lawyer’s fees—already estimated to be at or over $50,000—nipping at the remainder, one attorney for the plaintiff, Houston-based Hank Stout, has expressed concern that by the time a jury is seated, the once voluminous liquid estate will have run dry.

“We’ve got a young man. There’s no dispute that he’s a troubled youth. We believe he’s [mentally unstable],” Stout said of his client. Over 1,000 pages of medical records have been requested and obtained in the past few months, a crux of both cases, and as the discovery phase drags on, the lawyers disagreed with each other on how long the fact-gathering portion of litigation should be allowed to continue and who has been providing what.

Larry Bale and Michael Deadman have only been involved in the lawsuit since the end of January, when Courtney and Jerry sued Deadman as the temporary administrator of Sullivan’s estate.

Prior to January 2015, John Young was the subject of the lawsuit, as Sullivan’s handwritten will named him as the sole beneficiary. A pending will contest case in a county probate court and new criminal charges alleging Young and Sullivan’s bail bondsman, Ray Zapata, forged the will for their own benefit added turbulence to the cases, and requests to appoint and administrator were fulfilled by judge Bock Jones when he signed an order on Jan. 13 naming Deadman as the admin.

When Bale and Deadman responded to the lawsuit in February, zero discovery had been done, Bale told Jones on Wednesday. The defense, therefore, is significantly behind the plaintiff in trial preparation, and contends that some of the records requested haven’t been made available.

“What you’ve given us is the tip of the iceberg,” Bale stood behind the defense table facing Stout to his right. He said there are at least eight to nine psychiatric hospitalizations from the plaintiff beginning at age 7 that the defense needs to consider, and until those records are acquired, he won’t be able to determine if he needs expert witnesses or if records will suffice.

Emphasizing the billing hours of lawyer’s time, Stout told judge Jones, “I’m opposed to writing a blank check to these lawyers to bill the estate…”, reiterating the concern that mounting attorney’s fees would drain the accounts and eliminate the need for a trial to determine the right to relief.

“You’re worried about the money,” judge Jones interjected. “That does not dictate discovery.”

Both standing now, the attorneys quarreled over who would ultimately obtain the records, which were relevant and what has been made available thus far. Bale expressed that he’d prefer to acquire documents himself, asserting that the ones Stout turned over to him in the past were not the ones he really cared to see, and noted how long the list of doctors could be.

The plaintiff, Jerry, had been in foster care as a child and saw doctors in cities such as Lampassas, San Antonio, Round Rock and Brownwood. Bale contended that upon receiving and reviewing those records the likelihood of further doctors emerging was high, and tracking those down would take time.

Stout, maintained that his office had successfully obtained over 1,000 pages of records from numerous doctors over the span of a few months and told Bale he could do the same. His problem, he said, was not with the acquisition of records, but with the time Bale requested to do so, preferably near the end of the year as opposed to Stout’s suggested Sept. 1.

“Our case in a nutshell is that our defendant was sexually assaulted by an older man as a minor. That he was paid by that man,” Stout said, standing behind the self-described “table of justice”. That he was promised money and real estate when that man died.

But Jerry’s sexual abuse pre-dates Sullivan.

According to documents filed with the case, Jerry, 23, was sexually abused by his father at 8 years old, ultimately leading to his removal from the home and his father’s conviction for indecency with a child sexual contact.

Records from Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) detail behavioral problems, aggression and sexually inappropriate behavior exhibited by Jerry while he was in foster care, resulting in his psychiatric hospitalization at River Crest and other hospitals over a span of several years.

While the plaintiff’s case centers on repeated sexual abuse and physical, emotional and psychological damage incurred as a result of his relationship to John Edward Sullivan and Sullivan’s promise to reward him with ample compensation after his death, the defense questions the motivation behind Jerry’s involvement in the relationship.

When DPS investigators entered Sullivan’s home on March 26, 2014, Jerry was asleep on the couch. At that time he was 22 years old, and a nude photo of him was seized among other items, which was estimated to have been taken between February 2009 and February 2010. The uncertainty of the date provides a very narrow window that could put his age at the first provable instance of abuse at either 16 or 17 years old.

The question raised by the defense then becomes, are Jerry’s current mental issues the result of what the defense purports was his consensual relationship with a 77-year-old man, or are they the result of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of his father. That’s why, Bale said, it’s relevant to pull psych records from the plaintiff’s childhood.

As the lawyers continued discussing records and timelines, the judge interrupted, turning to a woman seated at his left and asking if there is a jury week in December. Jones then expedited the scheduling, closing discovery on Oct. 5 and setting the week of Nov. 30-Dec. 4 as trial week.

“I hope this is workable,” he said, “but I just don’t see any other way to do it.”

Before concluding the hearing, the attorneys took up a few more matters of contention and came to a close less than an hour after starting. The next hearing will be pre-trial, scheduled for Nov. 19. 

For a full list of articles on the Sullivan case, the case against Ray Zapata and John Young or the probate case, click here.