Did Kobe Bryant's mom get OK to auction items left in his boyhood bedroom? Federal judge grants TRO
Kobe Bryant, pictured here with a Teen Choice
Award Surfboard he won in 2002. The surfboard
is one of the memorabilia items at the auction
house. Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
Just in time for Mother’s Day, basketball great Kobe Bryant is involved in a federal lawsuit against his own mother, who he says cleared out his former boyhood bedroom without his permission to obtain sports memorabilia for an unauthorized auction.
After a dispute developed, a New Jersey auction house filed a lawsuit in federal court in Camden earlier this month. It seeks court permission to go ahead with the auction, for which Pamela Bryant received a $450,000 advance, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
TMZ reports that the judge has issued a temporary restraining order, pending a court hearing on the issue of whether and when property left behind by a child who has moved away from his boyhood home is considered abandoned.
Among the items are Bryant’s high school uniforms and a Teen Choice Award Surfboard. Bryant asserts that he last saw the surfboard in his own home and does not know how it got to the auction house.
Pamela Bryant said her son told her the items belonged to her. But in a court filing, the Los Angeles Lakers star and his wife, Vanessa, say they asked his mother for memorabilia but were refused, the Inquirer recounts.
“Pamela Bryant agreed to return Kobe’s property, but stated that she had placed it all in storage because she had converted Kobe’s old bedroom into a toy room for our nieces,” Vanessa Bryant wrote.
Kobe Bryant says the items “have tremendous sentimental value for me, and I desire to hand down my well-earned memorabilia to my children.”
Bryant was drafted directly into the NBA from Lower Merion High School in the Philadelphia suburbs.
The Associated Press also has a story.
