Michael Jackson’s daughter wants the man who runs his estate paid less, and she is making the case with a court timetable and a missed September deadline instead of a family grievance.
Paris Jackson has worked out that the surest way to question what a man is paid is to check when he handed in his homework. Her new motion in her father’s probate case does not dispute the size of the Michael Jackson estate or the story of how it was saved. It goes after the dates on the paperwork, and asks that each late or thin filing carry a price.
For a beneficiary taking on the people who run a celebrated fortune, this is the clever route. Arguing that a rescuer is overpaid means arguing with the rescue. Arguing that he missed a deadline he chose himself means arguing with a diary, and diaries rarely retain good lawyers.
The motion, which Deadline has published in full, asks retired judge Mitchell L. Beckloff, the referee appointed in the case, to cut compensation to the co-executors for 2023 and 2024 from 15 per cent of the estate’s gross entertainment-related income to 10 per cent. Paris wants the lower rate to run on through every later year until a complete and accurate account for 2026 reaches the court, and she wants her own lawyers’ fees and costs covered. Its title, a motion to reduce executor’s compensation for delay in estate administration, does much of the arguing before the first page.
The number that put the filing on every entertainment site is a long one. According to Rolling Stone, Paris says John Branca sought $109,219,648 in combined compensation for 2023 and 2024, covering himself, his lawyers and the late co-executor John McClain. TMZ reported the same request with the cents attached. Neither outlet has published how the sum divides between executors and lawyers, and the estate’s position is that the executors waived executor compensation at the very beginning and have never taken any. They are paid, it says, through a separate management fee ordered by the court.
So the headline phrase “executor fee” is the one part of the story both sides would quarrel with.
A rescue that sends its own bill
The executors’ case for themselves begins in 2009. Rolling Stone reports that Branca’s lawyers credit him with turning an estate carrying more than $500m of debt into an enterprise valued at roughly $2bn. That valuation is the executors’ own figure, not an independent one, but the transactions behind it are on the record.
Most of them involve Sony. In 2016 Sony bought out the estate’s half of Sony/ATV, the venture built on the ATV catalogue Jackson acquired in 1985, in a deal that netted the estate $750m. In 2024 Sony Music Group closed on half of Jackson’s publishing and recorded masters at a valuation that Billboard’s sources put above $1.2bn. Katherine Jackson, Michael’s mother, appealed that sale, arguing it would “violate Michael’s wishes”. The court upheld the executors’ power to sell.
That is the trouble with paying the minders a share of gross. Every catalogue deal, every licence and every new outing for the old songs enlarges the base on which the percentage is worked out. An executor who has turned a debt into a business can say, with a perfectly straight face, that the business is his justification. An heir cannot very well reply that she would have preferred the debt.
The opening request, all those years ago, was modest. In December 2009 Branca and McClain sought the statutory fee on the first $25m of the estate, which TMZ put at $188,000, plus “extraordinary” fees that were not then quantified. Seventeen years on, the request in front of the referee runs to nine figures and the estate it relates to is unrecognisable. Both facts are true at once.
The better the rescue, the larger the invoice and the harder it becomes to complain about either.
Deadlines he chose himself
The motion is built around one day in the diary, 15 September 2026. An order of 24 April 2026 set the timetable for the accountings. According to Rolling Stone, Paris alleges that Branca missed his own self-selected deadline for complete 2023 and 2024 accountings, and that the documents he did file were incomplete or “nothing more than a placeholder”. Her motion adds that the deadline had already been extended once before it was missed.
Anyone who has filed a tax return in the closing hours of 31 January will feel a brief pang of fellow feeling. It passes quickly, because HMRC chooses its own dates and the executor, on Paris’s account, chose his.
Her lawyers write with the bluntness that probate allows. Rolling Stone, which obtained the 12-page motion, quotes them as saying that “the gap between executor’s level of compensation and his persistent incompetence is intolerable” (Rolling Stone). Incompetence is their allegation, and the estate rejects it.
The word that travelled furthest was “offensive”, and it has travelled some distance from where it started. Billboard quotes the filing describing the executor’s filings as “particularly offensive”, in a sentence that goes on to say those defective filings include the compensation request itself. The insult is aimed at the paperwork and what the paperwork asks for. Rolling Stone’s headline folds the word and the man together, which makes for a livelier headline than the motion strictly supports.
The estate’s reply was brisk. A spokesperson told TMZ that “It is an understatement to say that this motion is completely without merit” (TMZ). The estate’s representative says the 2023 and 2024 accountings have already been filed and that the reports for 2025 and 2026 are not yet due. Paris’s side maintains that the earlier submissions were incomplete. Speaking to Billboard, the estate dismissed her request as senseless and repeated that Branca waived executor compensation from the start and is paid only a court-ordered management fee.
Paris’s spokesperson, speaking to Deadline, said simply: “Enough of the smoke and mirrors.”
Strip away the adjectives and the hearing will turn on something almost clerical, namely whether a document lodged with the court counts as a complete account. It is a question a referee can answer from the file in front of him, which is precisely why her lawyers chose to ask it. A deadline you set yourself is the hardest kind to disown.
A referee who has ruled once already
The motion goes to a referee who has found for her before. Beckloff’s order, signed on 29 April 2026, sustained Paris’s objection to $625,000 in bonuses paid to three outside law firms for the second half of 2018, which Billboard reports must be returned. The same order told the estate to withhold 30 per cent of attorneys’ fees until payment is approved. It barred attorney bonuses paid on account without the written consent of every beneficiary or an order of the referee or court, and it set 15 September 2026 as the deadline for fee petitions covering 2019 to 2024. Rolling Stone reported that Beckloff credited Paris as the “catalyst” for that requirement.
The estate’s lawyers said they disagreed with the bonus ruling but would respect it, and stressed that none of that money went to the executors. It remains the only ruling in the record, and it concerned lawyers’ bonuses, not the executors’ own pay.
The quarrel is older than this week’s headlines. Paris objected to the lawyers’ bonus payments in June 2025, when the executors asked for the bills to be approved. In October that year the executors told the court she had received approximately $65m in benefits from the estate. In November she answered that no accountings had been provided for 2022 to 2025.
Branca and McClain separately asked for $115,000 in legal fees from her. In most families the heir sends the lawyer’s bill to the estate; here the estate’s minders sent one to the heir.
The cast has also thinned. John McClain, a co-executor since 2009, died in May 2026 at 71, leaving Branca as sole executor. The motion still speaks of the co-executors, because the years in dispute are years they ran together and McClain’s share sits inside the reported request. Paris, 28, is a beneficiary alongside her brothers Prince, 29, and Bigi, 24.
What she wants from the referee is five percentage points for as long as the accounts stay incomplete, plus her costs. Nothing in the motion asks him to undo a deal or to second-guess the Sony sales, and the estate’s valuation is left alone. It is an old principle of inheritance that the people paid to look after a fortune should be able to say what they did with it and by when, and it works without anyone needing to raise their voice.
Beckloff hears the motion over Zoom at eight in the morning on 4 December. Punctuality is expected.
