Leonard Cohen’s children and heirs, Lorca and Adam Cohen, have accused the late musician’s former manager Robert Kory and his attorney of forging a false version of Cohen’s trust, according to the filing obtained by TheWrap.
According to the filing, Cohen’s daughter, Lorca Cohen, has alleged that Kory replaced a section of the trust that named Lorca, Adam and the musician’s ex-girlfriend and fellow musician, Anjani Thomas, as successor co-trustees of the Trust, with a forged “phony” section that named Kory as sole first successor trustee while Lorca and Adam were shifted to second trustees.
The motion seeks confirmation that Kory is not, in fact, a rightful trustee and to replace Kory as the trustee in place of Lorca and Adam, as well as the order for Kory to compensate Lorca and Adam with the financial gain he undertook while acting as trustee.
Following the legendary musician’s death in November 2016, the motion states that Kory executed an “Acceptance of Appointment as Sole Trustee” of the trust while failing to provide notice to Lorca and Adam that they had the right to receive the terms of the trust.
Under a year later, Lorca participated in a series of email exchanges with Reeve Chudd, who previously served as Cohen’s estate planning attorney and at the time was acting as Kory’s attorney, regarding the trust. During these interactions, Lorca alleged that Chudd “made excuses about missing documents,” even stating he was “willing to go to the Probate Court and sign an affidavit explaining what in legalese is called a ‘scrivener’s error regarding the Trustee success.”
When Lorca’s attorney, Andrew M Katzenstein, confronted Chudd about the discrepancy, Chudd responded that he “really f—ed up” and explained he had made a “scrivener’s error,” admitting that he had not intended to revoke the trustee succession provision in place of the new version.
Several years later, in April 2021, Chudd notified Lorca and Adam’s attorneys claiming that, in 2016, Cohen had allegedly decided that his children were “not suitable to be trustees” and asked Chudd to “draft a document that would replace them with Kory.”
It was not until August that Lorca’s new attorney Adam Streisand discovered there were two different versions of the trust, and at the time of filing, Kory had yet to distribute the assets of the trust to Lorca and Adam.
Kory did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
