"Send a Thank-You Note, Not a Lawsuit!" — Hollywood Heavyweight Marty Singer Torches Paris Jackson's Legal Team Over Michael Jackson Estate Battle

Hillary Michael · World · Nov 12, 2026

Veteran Hollywood attorney Marty Singer has a blunt message for the lawyers suing Michael Jackson’s estate on behalf of Paris Jackson: you should be thanking John Branca, not attacking him.

The statement landed like a legal grenade on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, when Marty Singer—the veteran litigator whose client list has included Michael Jackson himself, Tom Hanks, and Leonardo DiCaprio—issued a blistering defence of John Branca, the co-executor of the Michael Jackson estate. “It is outrageous that Paris Jackson’s attorneys have been filing these Petitions going after the Michael Jackson Estate,” Singer said. “They should be thanking John Branca for what he has done for the beneficiaries of the Estate as the manager of the Jackson business”.

Singer’s argument is built on numbers that are difficult to dispute. When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, the estate was reportedly $500 million in debt** and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Under Branca’s management, it has become a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Forbes recently estimated the estate’s value at **more than $2 billion, with its latest triumph being the Branca-produced biopic Michael, which became the first biopic in history to gross $1 billion worldwide**. Singer noted that the beneficiaries—Paris, Prince, and Bigi—have already received **$200 million, with hundreds of millions more expected. “This is a case of no good deed goes unpunished,” Singer added.

But Paris Jackson, now 28, sees a very different picture. In a petition filed on October 29 in Los Angeles Superior Court, she asked a judge to order the transfer of $600 million** into the Michael Jackson Family Trust, which benefits her and her brothers, Prince, 29, and Bigi, 24. The filing argues that the trust has remained unfunded for **more than 17 years** after her father’s death, despite the estate holding approximately **$850 million in cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2024. Paris’s lawyers have accused Branca of using his control over distributions to “deter them from checking his abuses,” and her representative told TheWrap that the estate was “deflecting from its own incompetence,” arguing that partially funding the trust was something Branca “had the ability and obligation to do long ago”.

The estate has fired back with its own explanation. A representative told TMZ that “Ms. Jackson’s counsel is well aware that the Estate is prevented from fully funding the philanthropic giving and individual trusts for the beneficiaries until several legal hurdles have been removed”. Chief among those hurdles is an ongoing dispute with the Internal Revenue Service, which initially sought approximately $700 million in taxes and penalties from the estate—a figure the estate says has been reduced by a court ruling but remains unsettled. The estate has also denied withholding or reducing payments to the children, calling the accusation “a complete fabrication”.

The legal sniping between the two sides has been escalating for months. Estate attorney Jonathan Steinsapir told Us Weekly in August 2025 that Paris’s “new set of attorneys” had “no meaningful experience representing clients in the entertainment industry,” and later accused Paris and her legal team of making “a series of false allegations as part of a media campaign to distract from their legal setbacks and the inherent weakness of their case”. Paris’s team has had at least one significant win: in April 2026, retired Judge Mitchell Beckloff ordered that $625,000 in bonuses paid to outside attorneys be returned to the estate, finding the payments insufficiently justified. But the same ruling acknowledged the executors’ financial turnaround, describing the estate as having been “teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in June of 2009” before becoming “the financial powerhouse that it is today”.

The broader battle also includes Paris’s challenge to more than $109 million in combined compensation for the executors and legal counsel for 2023 and 2024, as well as questions over private-jet travel and other estate spending. Branca has dismissed the objections as “the same hollow complaints” and called the fee motion “completely without merit”.

For Singer, the math is simple: Branca took a bankrupt estate and built a generational fortune for Michael Jackson’s children. For Paris, the math is equally simple: the trust her father created for her has sat empty for seventeen years while the executor collects his fees and flies private. Judge Beckloff is scheduled to take up Paris’s petition on December 4. Until then, the only thing certain is that the King of Pop’s fortune will remain a battlefield—and that Marty Singer believes the other side should be writing thank-you notes instead of legal briefs.