After 47 years and 11 NBA championships, the Buss family era of the Los Angeles Lakers is grinding to a drawn out, complex and ugly conclusion.
The family feud is heading to court after Jeanie Buss filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court trying to block her siblings’ attempt to sell their remaining 17.8 percent minority stake.
The franchise, built into a sporting juggernaut by their late father, Jerry, was left to his six children via a family trust when he passed away in 2013. But after selling their majority stake to Mark Walter last year, five of the six siblings have voted to sell their remaining shares to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger as part of their $12.5 billion takeover.
Things are now threatening to turn ugly, with Jeanie calling her siblings ‘devious’ in court documents obtained by the Daily Mail after allegedly being ‘blinded’ by their attempts to sell.
The 64-year-old took charge of the franchise as controlling owner after their dad’s death and is the only family member still involved as team governor – a position she will be forced to relinquish unless she retains at least 15 percent ownership.
And that is something she is not willing to give up without a fight, turning to the court as the process of tearing the Buss family name away from the franchise they built turns messy. A close observer has told The Daily Mail: ‘It’s definitely a lot of chaos. It’s probably not going to get sorted out anytime soon.’
Jeanie Buss is trying to stop her family selling their Lakers stake via a legal challenge
Jeanie (left) is the daughter of Jerry Buss (middle right), the Lakers owner who died in 2013
Jeanie Buss has a long-standing history with the franchise and took control from her father
A second source added: ‘Jeanie’s life has been the Lakers and she believed not only that she was going to be the Governor of the team until 2030, but basically forever, and now with the new sale trying to go through, things have drastically changed.
‘Her identity has been the Lakers and now all that is changing and causing a major rift with her family that she is going to battle for a long time.
‘The Lakers doing well goes back to her father, and if this sale goes through, and the Lakers take on a new identity and don’t win, Jeanie will feel that it would be on her legacy.
‘It’s going to be a wild next few months, lots of legal battles, lots of back door meetings but Jeanie is not going to go away silently.’
When Jerry Buss died back in 2013, a family spokesperson said: ‘The family has no interest in ever selling the team.’
But it has since emerged that even that initial statement did not tell the whole picture. After the franchise finally sold last year, the siblings revealed the idea of selling the team was discussed the moment that their father died and they took on control.
Jeanie was always considered the ‘swing vote’. Eventually, over a decade later and after years of turmoil, she swung.
But they asked no questions.
‘I really have no idea why Jeanie decided to do this,’ Johnny told ESPN after they sold up to Walter. ‘Truthfully, if she did have a reason, I didn’t want to hear it.
‘I have not talked to her. I have not discussed it with her. All I know is that she voted to sell.’
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The 64-year-old is now fighting against her siblings over a vote to sell their stake
Jeanie became the first female controlling owner to win an NBA Championship in 2020
And now, months later, more cracks have come to the surface, with five siblings now in dispute with Jeanie over their vote to sell their remaining shares in the team.
The in-fighting is now tearing the Buss family further apart than ever, at odds with their dad’s dying wish.
‘My dad, at the end of his life, wanted peace,’ Jeanie said in 2022. ‘He didn’t want disgruntled children complaining.’
For Jeanie, it appears letting go of the Lakers entirely is just a step too far.
‘If you’re Jeanie, this has been her life,’ says Daniel Starkand, managing editor of the fan site Lakers Nation. ‘There’s a lot of things about Jeanie that you can question, but one thing that you really can’t question is her love for the Lakers.
‘So I understand it from her perspective, but I also do think there is just a lack of an ability for her to read the room and realize that it is time to move on. It seems like everyone else realizes that except for her.’
But how did the Buss family get here? It is the story of a complex dynamic fostered by their playboy Dad and including a secret adoption, as well as allegations of a broken promise to his wife and ruthless family firings from those he left behind.
Another source who has closely followed the franchise called it an ‘unsurprising ending’ to the Buss siblings’ era of running the team that ‘has been defined by infighting’.
Jeanie fired her brother, Jim (right) from his role with the Lakers in 2017
Brother Johnny Buss ran for President as an independent candidate back in 2024
Johnny owns The Ice House Comedy Club and presented Jeanie with an accolade in 2023
The first wave of chaos started in 2017, when Jeanie fired her brother, Jim, from his role as the head of the Lakers’ basketball operations after he had faced widespread criticism.
His initial response was one of shock. He called his brother, Johnny, in disbelief, not even realizing that his sister had the power to dismiss him.
It sparked a major dispute as the brothers teamed up to try and remove Jeanie from the board of directors, the failed attempt leading to a court order confirming her control over the team that is now being used by her to object to the attempted sale.
Jim has since retreated from basketball, investing in various real estate projects and being involved in another of his passions, the thoroughbred horse racing industry. But his relationship with Johnny soured.
Johnny ran for President as an independent candidate in 2024. He has since kept a low profile, focusing on his business ventures. He took over the historic Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena in 2023, and revealed he wasn’t speaking to Jim. At the same time, he was pictured presenting Jeanie with an accolade at the venue.
‘Jeanie really matured in the last two years, to a point I’m really proud of her, but it doesn’t mean I’ll talk to her much,’ Johnny said.
And earlier this year, he admitted that he has only spoken to Jeanie ‘four or five times’ since their dispute. ‘And that’s sad,’ he added.
While there have been occasional Thanksgiving family gatherings and encounters at Lakers games, the topic of the basketball franchise has become a sticking point. The other pair of brothers, Jesse and Joey, became integral to act two of the family conflict. There is more than a 20-year age gap between the younger half siblings, born from Jerry’s relationship with Karen Demel.
Joey (left) and Jesse (black hat) were both fired by the Lakers, Jesse claimed last November
Jesse (right) was being groomed for decades in the organization by his father before he died
Joey, pictured with wife Nicole, has launched a new venture with brother Jesse within sports
They were being groomed by their dad to play a long-term role in the Lakers and keep things in the family. They spent more than 20 years with the organization, with Joey the Lakers’ alternate governor and vice president of research and development and Jesse rising to become an assistant general manager.
Then, last November, after the team had been sold to Mark Walter, Jeanie had other ideas.
‘She’s fired everyone,’ Jesse said at the time.
‘Dr. Buss’ idea was for Joey and I to run basketball operations one day,’ he added. ‘But Jeanie has effectively kept herself in place with her siblings fired.’
The firing appeared ruthless, given Jesse was dealing with unspecified illness, which has impacted the last few years of his life. He cited ‘lack of communication’ with his sister as he was ‘combating various health issues’ that left him receiving immunotherapy treatments.
Two years earlier, he had married Sarah Jordan in a lavish and intimate wedding at their LA home in 2023, featuring Lil Wayne and Carbone, and the couple share two young sons. He is now focused on a new business with brother Joey, after they launched Buss Sports Capital, an ‘investment firm aimed at identifying acquisitions and partnerships across the global sports landscape.’
They fired a thinly-veiled shot at Jeanie and the family in their unveiling just three months before being fired. ‘I look forward to working with my brother, Joey, for the next 50 years and hopefully this is something that can live through our children,’ Jesse told ESPN. ‘That’s what our dad would have wanted.’
In December 2025, the LA Times reported they had held preliminary talks over investing in the Athletics as the Major League Baseball team moves to Las Vegas. Despite promising ‘not to compete with our interests in the Lakers or the NBA’, recent reports suggested they are pursuing NBA Europe ownership.
Through all the drama, sister Janie, two years younger than Jeanie, insisted earlier in the year her elder sister ‘doesn’t have a mean bone in her body’ as she empathized with her necessity to make difficult decisions.
Having said that, the relationship between the two sisters was also burnt. When Jeanie fired the remaining siblings in 2025, Janie also made way. She was 62, nearing retirement and, according to ESPN, pleaded: ‘Please let me resign.’ Janie later admitted her agony at her fate and saying the pair had not spoken since, as of the start of this year.
‘I don’t think my dad would be happy with the way things just went down,’ Janie later said. ‘Not at all.’
Janie Buss, the youngest sister, also worked behind the scenes at the Lakers organization
Lee Klose (right) was Jerry Buss’ secret first child with JoAnn but was given up for adoption
And the drama all traces back to the seventh and oldest blood relative, not part of the Buss family. In December 2018, a woman named Lee Klose wrote to Jeanie and revealed she had been the secret first child of dad Jerry and first wife, JoAnn.
It turned out she had been given up for adoption after being born in 1953 as the future billionaires did not have the financial resources to support her. Her existence was kept private from the later children, Jeanie later said at the request of her father.
It has been claimed that JoAnn made her husband promise he would never have kids with anyone else. He agreed, but then had sons Joey and Jesse with Karen Demel. Their birth reportedly left JoAnn, mom to the oldest four siblings, heartbroken.
Johnny Buss told ESPN earlier this year that ‘the Lakers were the tension point in the family.’ But there is now near-unanimous agreement on its fate, with five siblings against one in the fight with Jeanie to remove her as the final piece of the family jigsaw she dismantled after her father’s death.
‘I think that Jeanie is probably still viewed the most positively of the siblings,’ long-standing Lakers reporter Harrison Faigen says. ‘But her favorability has definitely started to fall.
‘I think it would be hard for me to not believe that (Jerry) would be a little bit sad by how this is ending.
‘There’s a lot of complicating factors, but I think that like any father, seeing how the sort of complicated nature of this trust ended up causing so much infighting in his family… I do wonder if he would wish that he had worded the trust in a different way and was less focused on forcing the siblings to stick it out together.’
The Daily Mail has contacted an attorney for Jeanie Buss for comment.
