Johnson V Johnson

Description for JOHNSON V JOHNSON by Barbara Goldsmith: With the extraordinary investigative acumen and sensitive narrative skills that informed her best-selling LITTLE GLORIA...HAPPY AT LAST, Barbara Goldsmith now gives us the most sensational case of a contested will in American history---weaving a hypnotic tale of vast wealth and moral corruption. When J Seward Johnson, the pharmaceutical heir, died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven, his six children (each of whom was already in possession of an immense fortune) were outraged to learn that he had willed his entire $500 million estate to their stepmother Basia---a woman forty-two years Seward's junior, a Polish refugee who had once worked as a chambermaid in his household. They came to believe that Basia had used undue influence to "enchant" their father, prying his fortune away from him and turning him against his own children. They wanted "justice". The legal battle that followed spawned a seventeen-week-long trial, th