Paris Jackson Seeks Estate Fee Cut As $100M Request Fuels Dispute

Paris Jackson asked a Los Angeles judge to cut the fees paid to the people running Michael Jackson’s estate, saying John Branca had failed to provide complete financial records.

Her request would lower the rate from 15% to 10% of gross entertainment-related income for 2023, 2024 and each year afterward until a complete 2026 accounting was filed, according to Deadline.

“Executor has violated the Court’s April 24, 2026 order by failing to meet his own self-selected, and then extended, deadline,” her motion alleged.

Her lawyers said the 2023 records were incomplete and the 2024 submission was a placeholder. They also challenged proposed compensation above $100 million, which covered both the co-executors and the law firm Ziffren.

The estate rejected the demand in its Wednesday response. Its representative said the executors had waived executor compensation from the start and had never collected it.

The representative described their pay as “a separate, court-ordered management fee for operating the hugely successful Michael Jackson business,” according to Billboard.

The estate also said it had filed the 2023 and 2024 accountings. Its response put the due dates for the 2025 and 2026 reports six months and 14 months away, respectively.

Paris had already won a fight over legal spending this year. Judge Mitchell Beckloff rejected $625,000 in bonuses for outside law firms in a May 13 ruling, ABC News reported. Branca and co-executor John McClain had authorized those payments for work in the second half of 2018. She had objected to those payments in June 2025 when the executors sought court approval for the lawyers’ bills.

Their attorneys told ABC News they disagreed with the ruling but would respect it. They stressed that the bonuses went to outside lawyers and that none of the $625,000 had been paid to the executors themselves.

The estate’s business decisions have also faced objections elsewhere in the family. In 2024, Katherine Jackson lost an appeal seeking to stop a deal to sell half of Michael Jackson’s catalog to Sony. The transaction was valued at roughly $600 million. The court upheld the executors’ authority to make the sale under his will.

A hearing on Paris’ fee dispute was set for December 4 before Judge Mitchell Beckloff.