Another battle over a celebrity estate just got settled. The son of the late R&B icon Teddy Pendergrass was challenging the singer’s widow for control over the estate. But a suburban Philadelphia judge decided Pendergrass’s wife will retain control. Theodore “Ted” Pendergrass II tried to submit a “fraudulent” will dated May 2009. And Montgomery County Orphans’ Court Judge Stanley Ott called his testimony “wholly lacking in credibility.”
“We believe the proponent’s tall tale was hatched when he learned he was being disinherited by his father …,” Ott wrote.
The trial lasted eight days, during which Pendergrass II claimed a new will was executed by his father at a secretly arranged meeting on the side of a road in Delaware on May 24, 2009. And that the new will named him executor and beneficiary of his late father’s estate. But the judge questioned whether the paralyzed musician, who had a driver and used a specially equipped van, could have left his home that day without his nurses to finalize a such a will.
Nurses who cared for Pendergrass on May 24 “stated definitively that the decedent did not leave the residence at any time on the afternoon in question,” the judge wrote. The judge ruled that the will dated in March 2009 and giving Joan Pendergrass most of the estate will stand, reports The Huffington Post.
According to witnesses, the singer wanted his wife to control his estate and that he removed his son from his will “because he was disappointed in him,” states court papers.
According to court documents, Joan Pendergrass, an executive manager of an athletic shoe company, met the singer in 2006 and they were married two years later.
“The estimated value of the estate has not been revealed. The battle was unique because it didn’t deal with traditional items such as bank accounts and property but with royalties and the music legend’s legacy and the use of his name,” reports Mainline Media News.
Teddy Pendergrass was paralyzed in a Philadelphia car accident in 1982 and died of colon cancer in 2010 at age 59.
