Stan Lee's Daughter Hopes to Sever Ties With POW Owners

J.C. Lee, the daughter of comic book legend Stan Lee, announced today that Lee's estate will sever [...]

J.C. Lee, the daughter of comic book legend Stan Lee, announced today that Lee's estate will sever ties with the scandal-plagued Camsing International. Camsing, headquartered out of Hong Kong, is the subject of a fraud inquiry in China, and Lee says that she believes criminal behavior to be going on. The company purchased Lee's POW! Entertainment in 2017. In a statement, Lee told Variety that she decided to sever ties after learning of Camsing's "criminality." 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 agendas.

Besides Camsing, 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. At one point, some of Lee's blood was drawn -- perhaps against his will -- to be used in a special printing of a comic that would have had "DNA ink," an echo of something Lee did with KISS decades before. His longtime business manager Keya Morgan was recently charged with elder abuse, the result of a nearly year-long look into allegations made against him before Lee's death.

"I cannot tolerate, nor would he have ever tolerated, his name, likeness and rights of publicity be associated with such criminality — criminality that apparently was ongoing at the time Stan allegedly entered into a deal with Camsing and POW!," J.C. Lee said in a statement. "It is the Estate's position that neither POW! nor Camsing have any rights to Stan Lee's name, likeness or legacy."

Lee herself has been at odds with Lee's various business partners, and appears to have spent some of the time since he passed away in November trying to make sense of his affairs. In June, she sued Lee's longtime associate Max Anderson. Among the allegations that Lee's daughter has made in the last year or so is the claim that sexual harassment claims made against the aging comic book writer/editor -- he allegedly groped and made inappropriate comments to nurses taking care of him at his home -- had not been reported to her until they were already in the news.

In her suit, Lee is accusing Anderson and two more of her father's aids for manipulating him into abusive practices to profit off of the memorabilia business. For one specific example, she noted that her father made over $800,000 from an appearance at New York Comic Con, but Anderson raked in nearly $700,000 despite only being due to receive 10-to-25 percent.

It sounds like Lee's estate is now attempting to recoup losses from the end of his life, hoping they can get restitution from parties they believe to have been taking advantage of him.

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