On May 4, 2013, when she was 87 years old, Harper Lee sued her former literary agent Samuel Pinkus, alleging that he tricked her into signing over the copyright for her 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird to him. According to the complaint:
For virtually all the time since the publication of her famous novel, Harper Lee was represented in her literary activities by Mackintosh & Otis (“M&O”), which sought to advance her interests as is appropriate for a literary agent. Unfortunately, when M&O’s principal, Eugene Winick, became ill in 2002, his son-in-law, Defendant Pinkus, took the opportunity to divert several M&O clients to a new company that Pinkus controlled, Veritas Media, Inc. (“VMI”), and then engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80 years old with declining hearing and eyesight, into assigning her valuable TKAM copyright to VMI for no consideration.
M&O filed its own suit against Pinkus about a month later, seeking almost $780,000 in owed money.
Lee suffered a stroke in 2007; in the years afterward, she lived in an assisted living facility, where Pinkus would bring papers for her to sign, until she “finally gave orders that the management of the facility was not to permit his entrance.” She had no idea, according to the suit, that she had signed away the copyright to her famous novel.
“Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see,” the complaint goes on. “He also knew that Harper Lee and her sister (and lawyer) relied on and trusted him. Pinkus abused that trust and took advantage of Harper Lee’s physical condition and years of trust built at M&O to engineer the assignment of her copyright in a document that did not even ensure her a contractual right to income.”
In answer, Pinkus argued that he had acted in Lee’s best interest. “Ms. Lee’s assignment of the Mockingbird copyright specifically retained to her ‘all rights to any revenue, financial benefit, royalties, or any benefit whatsoever derived from the exploitation of the Property, now or in the future.’ The inconvenient real facts make for a much less interesting story,” read a motion that was filed on Pinkus’s behalf.
The two parties settled in September 2013; the details of the settlement were not disclosed.
