Most news junkies will remember the summer of 2024 for the dramatic events that unfolded in the run-up to this year’s presidential election. For public notice geeks, however, it will be remembered as the Summer of Celebrity Notices.
Over the last three months, the normally mundane world of public notice intersected with celebrity culture in three big stories that generated a tremendous amount of coverage. The individuals who placed or were party to the ads would have preferred to keep their business secret, but that’s not how newspaper notice rolls.
The first high-profile notice this year and the one most saturated in the world of celebrity gossip was placed by Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (photo upper left), the eldest biological offspring of divorced Hollywood power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It seems the 18 year-old had a problem with the Pitt in her surname so in May she filed a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court to change her name to Shiloh Nouvel Jolie. Ms. Jolie-Pitt’s lawyer placed an ad in the July 8 issue of the Los Angeles Times announcing the petition in order to satisfy a California legal requirement that is common in most states.
Most people don’t realize a name change requires the publication of a newspaper notice so when the news surrounding Ms. Jolie-Pitt’s petition first broke there was a great deal of speculation focusing on her motive for publicizing it. In fact, the speculation was so unhinged that Ms. Jolie-Pitt’s lawyer, Peter Levine, felt the need to reach out to the Times to explain that his client’s decision to run the ad was compelled by law.
The media “should be more careful in their reporting, especially when covering a young adult who has made an independent and significant decision following painful events, and is merely following legal process,” Levine told the Times. The newly christened Shiloh Nouvel Jolie’s name-change petition was approved last month.
That was perhaps the most widely publicized story touching on public notice legal process in media history, at least for a few days, when it was eclipsed by the Graceland Foreclosure Notice Saga.
Around the same time the former Ms. Jolie-Pitt was filing her name-change petition in California an obscure investment company purportedly based in Missouri published a foreclosure notice in several issues of the Memphis Commercial Appeal declaring that it planned to sell by public auction the Home of Elvis Presley™ (photo on right). Naussany Investments & Private Lending claimed a trust controlled by the late Lisa Marie Presley had defaulted on a $3.8 million loan that Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s only daughter had secured by executing a deed of trust on the landmark Memphis estate.
Elvis’ granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, immediately filed a lawsuit claiming the notice was fraudulent. Ms. Keough inherited the controlling trust when her mother died in January 2023.
Three months later, the Department of Justice announced it had arrested a Missouri woman, Lisa Jeanine Findley, charging her with aggravated identity theft and mail fraud in connection with the foreclosure notices, which it alleges were part of a fraudulent scheme designed “to extort a settlement from the Presley family.”
“(T)he defendant orchestrated a scheme to conduct a fraudulent sale of Graceland, falsely claiming that Elvis Presley’s daughter had pledged the historic landmark as collateral for a loan that she failed to repay before her death,” said a federal prosecutor in the announcement issued by the Justice Department.
Ms. Findley apparently thought her foreclosure notice would pass unseen. She may have read too many articles about how nobody reads newspaper notices anymore, because when her legal ads “attracted global media attention” — the Department of Justice’s words, not ours! — she quickly hatched a new scheme to conceal her involvement in the matter. According to the DOJ, she fired off a series of fraudulent emails to media outlets, claiming “Naussany Investments” was a Nigerian scam.
The third big public notice story this summer also concerned a foreclosure notice. Unlike the Jolie-Pitt and Graceland stories, however, it received only regional attention, perhaps because it involved a political leader whose celebrity doesn’t yet extend beyond the West Virginia border.
On Aug. 2, The West Virginia Daily News published a notice announcing an imminent trustee’s sale of the historic Greenbrier Resort, now owned by the family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (photo left). The governor is a former coal baron and current Republican nominee for the state’s U.S. Senate seat up for election in November. His initial reaction was to call it “fake news” and blame politics.
“This deceitful move by JPMorgan is nothing more than the latest political stunt by the Democrats to undermine the next Republican Senator from West Virginia,” said a statement issued by Gov. Justice’s family. According to the Justice family, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s “staunch ties to the Democrat party and his support for the Biden-Harris administration and continued control of the Senate by the Democrats have been well documented. This political stunt is just the latest of several rounds of attacks on Governor Justice and his businesses for political gain.”
Three weeks later, the family issued a statement that it had reached a settlement in the case with the Maryland-based investment firm that holds the mortgage on the Greenbrier. The firm had purchased from JPMorgan the Justice’s distressed loan that was secured by the property.
The great 2024 Summer of Celebrity Notices showed that if an event is significant to a particular community — whether that community is local or global — an official announcement about it published in a local newspaper will gather attention and attract an audience.