The legal battle between the music executive David Geffen and the crypto-magnate Justin Sun over a $78.4m Alberto Giacometti sculpture took a new turn this week when Geffen filed a countersuit, drawing a rebuke from Sun’s lawyers.
The sculpture in question, Le Nez (1947), which Sun purchased for $78.4 million at a 2021 Sotheby's sale in New York. He later claimed he was interested in selling the piece only if a buyer was willing to pay $80m for it. In his initial lawsuit, filed in February, Sun claimed that the art adviser Sydney Xiong forged his signature on documents, taking advantage of his naïveté as a newcomer to the art market. Xiong allegedly sold Le Nez to Geffen in exchange for two unnamed paintings collectively valued at $55m, plus $10.5m in cash.
A 100-page countersuit filed by lawyers for Geffen on 18 April alleges that Sun’s position is fraudulent at best, adding: “This lawsuit is a sham.”
In a statement emailed to Artnet News, Tibor Nagy, Geffen’s lawyer, wrote: “Seller’s remorse is not a basis to sue. Fortunately, most reasonable and serious people realise that, not Justin Sun. Our filing separates his fiction from the facts and lays bare for the public the bogus claims he has brought. Courts of law are the wrong arena for publicity stunts.”
In a statement to Artnet on 17 April a lawyer for Sun, William Charron, characterised Geffen’s allegations as “extremely misguided”. “It is highly unwise for Mr Geffen to have staked his case on his proclaimed innocence of Sydney Xiong,” Charron stated. “Ms Xiong confessed to her theft, she was arrested in China and is in detention in China today.“ He added: "More very compelling details will come out through the fullness of this litigation."
Geffen, whose collection is said to be worth around $2bn, alleges in his countersuit that Sun was eager to sell the Giacometti in the wake of the 2022 cryptocurrency crash and the subsequent theft by hackers of $115m from two firms tied to Sun. The countersuit claims that Sun has engaged in multiple instances of “unethical and/or illegal business activities” with former employees and has never filed a police report against Xiong. Geffen's complaint further claims that Sun deleted incriminating WhatsApp messages in an attempt to “reclaim” Le Nez and misrepresented the collecting power of his NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace, ApeNFT.
Last November, at another closely-watched Sotheby's auction in New York, Sun purchased Maurizio Cattelan's viral provocation The Comedian (2019), a piece consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall, for $6.2m.
