The legal battle between crypto billionaire Justin Sun and entertainment mogul David Geffen has entered a new chapter. The two parties have expanded their dispute over a $78m Alberto Giacometti sculpture into the realms of fraud, forgery and international detainment over the past three months.
In February, Sun—the buyer of the Maurizio Cattelan banana—alleged that a Giacometti sculpture he purchased at Sotheby's in 2021 for $78.3m, titled Le Nez (1947), had been sold to Geffen from under Sun’s nose by his former art adviser, Sydney Xiong. Sun claimed that Xiong pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a sale involving forged documents and fake lawyers, prompting an extensive countersuit from Geffen’s representatives calling the narrative “bizarre and baseless”.
Sun’s latest filing claims that Xiong has been detained without bail for months in a detention centre in China. In a comment to Artnews, William Charron, Sun’s lawyer, wrote: “It is highly unwise for Mr Geffen to have staked his case on his proclaimed innocence of Sydney Xiong. Ms Xiong confessed to her theft, she was arrested in China and is in detention in China today.”
The lawsuit alleges that Xiong illegally diverted the sculpture to a Delaware art storage facility before selling it to Geffen for $10.5m in cash along with two paintings. According to Sun's lawsuit, he never authorised this transaction and had stated that he would only agree to sell Le Nez if the price was $80m or more. Geffen’s countersuit claims that Sun and Xiong did not sell the two unidentified paintings at a profit, and that the attempts to get the Giacometti sculpture back were a function of “seller’s remorse”.
Geffen’s legal team pointed to alleged inconsistencies in Sun's story—no police report was filed, texts were deleted and Sun’s lawyers have been provided seemingly conflicting accounts of what kinds of fraud occurred. Xiong was listed as the director of Sun’s fractional ownership fund, ApeNFT, after his lawsuit was filed. Sun had previously claimed that he would donate Le Nez to the fund, but later walked back that statement. The work was shown at the Institut Giacometti in Paris in 2023, though it was not clear who had loaned it.
Geffen’s countersuit also points to Sun’s precarious financial situation in the wake of a $113m platform hack in 2023, the volatility of the crypto market and other legal disputes. Sun is also under scrutiny for his dealings with World Liberty Financial, the Trump-backed cryptocurrency firm. Sun allegedly spent $75m in $WLFI coins in 2024, a potential conflict of interest given his own blockchain platform, Tron, was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud in March of 2023. (In February, Trump's SEC paused its prosecution of Sun.)
