sThree years after having her previous lawsuit against POW! Entertainment thrown out of court, Stan Lee’s daughter J.C. Lee has filed a new one against the company. Whereas the previous suit was an attempt to claw back the rights to her father’s name and likeness, this time around, Lee claims that her stake in POW! has been diluted by a series of “suspicious” transactions. The suit also alleges that Lee has not received payments under a previously-existing intellectual property agreement.
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The lawsuit claims that Stan and Joan Lee owned nearly 45% of the company when it was formed in 2001, according to Variety. J.C. Lee claims that a series of questionable transactions have left the Lee Trust (of which she is the sole trustee) with only 15% of the company. The suit alleges that Camsing International Holdings, the majority owner of POW! Entertainment, intends to sell its stake in the company.
While the suit does not stipulate to whom Camsing might sell it, Disney would be an obvious buyer, since they have invested significant money in acquiring the rights to use Lee’s name and likeness in media and at their theme parks. The alleged sale plans are what reportedly pushed Lee to seek access to business records from Camsing and POW!, which she says she never got.
Lee also alleges she is is owed money both for the sale of Stan Lee merchandise, and in the form of an annual salary in the amount of $125,000 that was negotiated by her father on her behalf.
Toward the end of his life, Lee signed over his name and likeness rights, as well as intellectual property rights to all of his creations, to POW!. There have been lawsuits, both between Stan Lee and POW! and later between J.C. Lee and POW!, over payments and terms. Stan Lee Media, Lee’s company before joining up with POW!, also tried and failed to sue Marvel in the 2010s to terminate the copyright transfers on numerous characters created or co-created by Lee.
In 2019, J.C. Lee sued to reclaim her father’s name and likeness, saying that her father had signed over the rights in perpetuity to Stan Lee Media. The legal theory was that after Stan Lee Media went out of business, her father never properly reacquired the rights before selling them a second time to POW!, but Judge Otis Wright wasn’t buying it. He sanctioned Lee and her counsel, finding that the case was both frivolous and filed for an improper purpose.
The Court sanctioned J.C. Lee in the amount of $1,000,000, while holding her legal counsel jointly and severally liable for $250,000 in sanctions. The sanctions were later waived on appeal, but Wright’s ruling in favor of POW! stood.
Since the start of her feud with POW!, Lee has alleged vague “criminality” on the part of the company, at one point trying to sever ties completely with the Chinese firm. Her suit sought to revive arguments made in a lawsuit that Stan Lee launched and then dropped in the last year of his life. When Camsing bought POW!, Stan Lee had claimed that POW! ownership and Camsing had conspired to steal his name and likeness. He later dropped the case without explanation.
In the last years of his life, after the loss of his wife and with his own health failing, Lee appeared to be surrounded by people and entities with competing and sometimes apparently criminal interests and agendas.
Various representatives for Lee spent months going back and forth with each other, with the police being called to his home at one point. Allegations of elder abuse surfaced not long before his death, and Lee himself appeared to be barely conscious at several convention appearances, with his agents and business partners keeping him busy in spite of what fans thought looked like exhaustion and poor health. His longtime business manager Keya Morgan was charged with elder abuse in 2019, the result of a nearly year-long look into allegations made against him before Lee’s death. Those charges ended in a mistrial, and a judge dismissed them in 2022.
Lee herself has been at odds with her father’s various business partners, and appears to have spent some of the time since he passed away trying to get more control over his affairs. In 2019, she sued Lee’s longtime associate Max Anderson.
