Jeanie Buss believes her siblings want her gone. In a filing lodged in Los Angeles Superior Court on Saturday, the Lakers governor accused her siblings of a “cloak and dagger” campaign run through the media, telling the court the entire episode “is their own false flag operation.”
The filing is the latest escalation in a civil war inside the Buss family thirteen years after Jerry Buss died and left the Lakers in the hands of his six children, with Jeanie installed as the controlling trustee.
A $12.5 billion deal with one obstacle
Mark Walter bought a majority stake in the Lakers in 2025 at a $10 billion valuation, with Jeanie staying on as governor under a side arrangement. Walter has since agreed final terms with Josh Kushner and Bob Iger on a sale that would value the franchise at $12.5 billion, with Kushner as the incoming majority owner and Iger running the day-to-day operation.
The Buss family trust still holds 17.82 percent of the team. Five of Jerry’s six children voted in August 2025 to sell that remaining block to the Kushner-Iger group. Jeanie refused to join the vote and challenged its legality.
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The NBA requires a team’s governor to hold at least 15 percent. If the trust sells, Jeanie’s title goes with the shares.
Siblings call her position “deep irony”
Her lawyers argue she is simply executing the mandate her parents wrote into their trusts. The filing points to a 2017 court order that required her co-trustees to preserve her controlling position.
“The conflicts that ensued after Dr. Buss’s death were sadly inevitable, and no doubt intensified given that Dr. Buss chose his daughter over four sons to be his successor,” her lawyers wrote.
Jim, Johnny, Joey and Jesse Buss, together with their sister Janie, filed earlier this month to have the petition dismissed. They say they exercised voting rights that the trust document gives them as beneficiaries, and that it is Jeanie who is confusing her own interest with the family’s.
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“There is deep irony in [Jeanie] alleging that it is [Joey and Janie] who are putting their self-interests first,” their October 16 filing states, arguing that she is trying to subjugate “rights expressly granted to the beneficiaries” to her own position as controlling owner.
Each sibling would collect an estimated $371 million from a full sale of the remaining stake. Jeanie would collect the same, but lose the title her father handed her.
The matter is scheduled for a hearing at Los Angeles Superior Court on December 8.
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