You don't take your own siblings to court over the family business unless the family stopped being a family a long time ago.
That's the part of this Lakers story nobody in the league wants to say out loud. On August 26, Jeanie Buss filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court to block her five siblings from selling the family's remaining stake in the team. A hearing is set for November 5. Until a judge rules, nothing here is settled, and both sides have a real legal argument. But the lawsuit itself says something no press release can spin away: the Buss family unity story was always thinner than the banners hanging in the rafters.
The 'united' family that keeps ending up in court
Read the two statements side by side and the crack is obvious. The family first said it had "decided as a family to sell the remaining Buss Family Trust shares to the Bob Iger group," adding it was "time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can." Then, after Jeanie pushed back, the five siblings put out a follow-up insisting Johnny, Jimmy, Janie, Joey and Jesse "remain united in that decision."
When you have to announce publicly that you're "united," you're not. Jeanie's name is missing from that list of five. This is a family trust splitting five-to-one among the siblings, or two-to-one among the co-trustees, fighting over fiduciary duty in Los Angeles Superior Court.
This is a sequel, and everyone involved knows it
Jeanie's own filing tips its hand. It opens by quoting Yogi Berra: "It's like déjà vu all over again." She's talking about 2017, when her older brothers Johnny and Jim Buss appeared to try to oust her, a fight that ended with Jim stepping down as a trustee and a court ruling that her co-trustees were obligated to keep her as the Lakers' controlling owner.
Nearly a decade later, she's back in the same building making a version of the same argument. If a family needs a probate judge to referee ownership of its crown jewel twice, the ownership was never stable. It was managed. There's a difference.
And it kept fraying even after the money came in. After the sale of the controlling stake to Mark Walter closed in October 2025, Jeanie's side cleaned house. Joey was out, so were Jim and Johnny from their team roles, and Janie was near retirement. One team official put it bluntly to ESPN: "She fired everyone." The only Buss left with the team was Jeanie, the governor since Jerry Buss died in 2013. You don't purge your own siblings from the building and then sell the world on family harmony.
Why the control fight is bigger than one stake
What's actually at stake, and why Jeanie is willing to sue her own blood over it, is control. Under NBA rules, she needs to hold at least 15% of the Lakers to stay governor, a role she was expected to keep for four years under the incoming Kushner and Iger group. The family trust's remaining piece is 17.8%. Sell even a chunk of it and she drops below the line. Sell it all and she's out of the chair.
This isn't a squabble over money. Her siblings want to cash out at a valuation tied to the pending $12.5 billion deal. Jeanie wants to "retain an interest sufficient to maintain control and to benefit from the continuously skyrocketing value," her petition says. She's also moving to remove Janie and Joey as co-trustees for allegedly breaching their fiduciary duty, and she's accused three other siblings of "aiding and abetting" a violation of that 2017 order. Her side calls the timing of Joey's signed vote, one day before the Walter-Kushner-Iger agreement went public, "devious behavior" and a "calculated effort to create a public fait accompli."
Those are extraordinary words to aim at your own family in a legal document.
The siblings aren't villains, and that's the scary part
I want to be fair here, because the honest version of this is messier than "Jeanie good, siblings bad." The siblings contend they only needed four of six siblings and two of three co-trustees to trigger a tag-along sale under the terms of last year's deal with Walter. Legal analysts have noted they can plausibly argue Jeanie doesn't hold veto power over a majority vote, and that it might be unreasonable to pass up a sale at a $12.5 billion valuation. There's even an open question about whether that 2017 order still binds anyone now that the family no longer owns a controlling stake at all. This could go their way.
The dispute isn't about one bad actor. It's baked into the trust itself. Jerry Buss built the thing on a "last man standing" tontine model, where surviving members absorb the shares of those who die. He designed his heirs to compete. Jeanie herself said in a 2022 documentary that her father, near the end, "wanted peace" and "didn't want disgruntled children complaining." Sources told ESPN he was "the glue that was holding a broken family together." The glue has been gone since 2013.
The league can't hide this one
The NBA loves the Buss story. When the board of governors unanimously approved the Walter sale at a $10 billion valuation in October 2025, it was sold as a watershed for franchise values everywhere. Clean and historic. Now the same family is airing a 97-page, five-count petition in open court, and the incoming ownership group's timeline runs straight through it.
Reports suggest Commissioner Adam Silver, long close with Jeanie, may try to smooth this over, though he hadn't commented publicly as of late August 2026. Treat that as rumor for now. But the fact that anyone expects the commissioner to play family mediator says something on its own. Stable ownership doesn't need intervention from the top of the league. This one might.
My take: whatever the judge decides on November 5, the ruling won't fix what this lawsuit exposed. The Lakers are one of the most valuable brands in sports sitting on top of a family structure built for conflict, run by people who keep suing each other to settle it. The result on the court has been world-class. The situation above it has been held together with lawyers.
