He once owned the Cincinnati Bengals and was a minority owner of the Reds, but that never stopped Austin “Dutch” Knowlton from calling himself a Buckeye. When the Ohio State alumnus died in 2003 at age 93, though, a $6 million pledge he made to the university became locked in a legal battle waged by two of his children who were left out of his will.
During six years of lawsuits, the two would-be heirs claimed that Knowlton’s personal attorney and longtime business partner, Charles D. Lindberg, manipulated his relationship to get himself named as trustee over Knowlton’s fortune, which includes 30 percent ownership of the Bengals. His stocks in the team are valued at nearly $300 million.
“In my opinion, I’ve said it publicly, I think it’s self-dealing,” said Stanley Chesley, the attorney who represented Knowlton’s daughter, P. Valerie, and the estate of his deceased son Peter. Another daughter, Suzanne, refused to participate in the lawsuits.
Austin Knowlton graduated from OSU’s architecture program in 1931 before leading his father’s Columbus-based construction business, which designed 22 buildings on OSU’s main campus. In 1994, he pledged $10 million to OSU to create the 165,000-square-foot Knowlton School of Architecture.
He pledged an additional $6 million in 1996, but years of litigation put that donation in limbo. In the lawsuits, Chesley contends that Lindberg used his own legal firm to draft a will that excluded Knowlton’s children, and then got the 86-year-old to sign the document without hiring a doctor to determine his competency.
“There was never a doctor’s examination before he signed his will,” Chesley said Saturday in an interview with The Lantern. “There was never a consultation with a doctor or a person who specializes in senior citizens to find out if he was competent.”
When Knowlton died, he had also been taking “excessive amounts of prescription medications, including pain and sleeping medications” for nearly a decade, according to claims filed by Chesley.
Lindberg sees things a different way.
He says Knowlton’s children had been excluded from their father’s will since 1971, when Knowlton went through a bitter divorce with his first wife. The three children from that marriage, he said, all sided with their mother and estranged themselves from their father.
“There was no basis whatever for the lawsuit,” he said. “They obviously wanted the estate to go to them some day.”
The claims against Lindberg were turned down in two court decisions before the case went to a nearly 30-day trial in 2006.
“To the best of my knowledge, it was the longest trial in Hamilton County Probate Court,” Lindberg said.
Witnesses in the complex case included a former FBI handwriting expert who concluded that the signature on Knowlton’s final will was forged, as well as P. Valerie Knowlton, who testified that her father had promised to leave her some of his estate.
“My father believed in family,” she said in a 2004 deposition. “I had a great relationship with him and he made me some promises over the years.”
Those promises, she said, included a monthly allowance of $10,000 and a painting of her and her three horses. But she admitted that he never promised to include her in the will.
“I never heard him tell me that,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have asked, either.”
In November 2008, the jury declared that the will was valid, freeing the funds for the $6 million donation to OSU and confirming
Lindberg’s role as trustee of the estate. OSU received that money in May, along with a $200,000 donation made in October from Knowlton’s estate. Both donations were used pay off bonds drawn to support the construction of the Knowlton School of Architecture, said Ann Pendleton-Jullian, director of the school.
But Chesley says the Knowlton estate is being mismanaged.
“Valerie frankly wanted to see the money go to education, and primarily to Ohio State,” he said. “But she never had the chance.”
Instead, he said, Lindberg has used the estate to make numerous donations to his own alma mater, Augustana College in northwest Illinois. Lindberg contends that Knowlton made the decision to begin donations to the college, and says he has not made any recent contributions to the school.
“We’ve made no contributions to Augustana in the last three or four years,” he said. This year, $451,000 in donations went to OSU, Urbana University and Cincinnati’s College of Mount St. Joseph.
Chesley also questions the ethics of Lindberg’s decision to name his two sons as co-trustees over the estate — especially since the trust allows them to draw unlimited personal fees. Lindberg has said under oath that he will never draw these fees, but Chesley is skeptical.
“I have trouble believing that,” he said. “And there’s no way to hold them to that.”
One of Chesley’s biggest concerns is that Lindberg and his sons have not sold the estate’s Bengals shares, which would allow further donations to universities, the primary purpose of the foundation that Knowlton established.
“You sell the stock. It’s worth somewhere close to $300 million,” he said. “People have tried to buy it and they’re not offering anything.”
But Lindberg refutes that claim.
“We are definitely planning to sell the Bengals stock,” he said, but “we don’t have a buyer.” He said the market will determine the price of the shares.
Early this year, after the jury’s decision was upheld by the Ohio 1st District Court of Appeals, Knowlton’s would-be heirs made a last-ditch effort to appeal the case to the Ohio Supreme Court. The court turned down the appeal in April, effectively ending the case.
