Chargers owner Dean Spanos sued by sister

August 2024 · 2 minute read

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Los Angeles Chargers owner Dean Spanos has been sued by his own sister, with explosive allegations including “self-dealing” and “misogynistic behavior.”

As first reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Kimberley Martin, Dea Spanos Berberian’s attorneys filed the lawsuit this week in San Joaquin County Superior Court in California.

The Chargers’ ownership stakes are complicated. The brother and sister are co-trustees of the family trust, which owns 36 percent of the franchise. Each also individually owns 15 percent, as do their brother Michael Spanos and sister Alexandra Spanos Ruhl. The remaining 4 percent is owned outside the Spanos family.

Spanos Berberian accuses her brothers Dean and Michael of recurrently behaving “out of their deeply-held misogynistic attitudes and sense of entitlement as the men in the family … and to rationalize their pitiable behavior which she believes is intended to teach her that a woman has no rights, no matter what any trust instrument might say.”

The brothers “believe to their cores that, regardless of what their parents intended and their wills specified, men are in charge and women should shut up,” the suit says.

The suit also alleges that the move from San Diego to Los Angeles in 2017 was a financial catastrophe, and that the family’s only option to satisfy the trust’s debt of nearly $360 million is to sell the team.

The suit claims that the diversion of $105 million from the trust to debts was among numerous “breaches of fiduciary duty” by Dean Spanos, and that Dean and Michael used the trust to spend $60 million on an airplane that was “wasteful” and was not used for “legitimate” business purposes.

The siblings inherited the team from their father Alex Spanos, who bought the franchise in 1984 and died in 2018.

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