Jeanie Buss has filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking to block her siblings from selling the Buss Family Trust’s remaining 17.8% stake in the Lakers, according to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. The petition, filed Monday, also asks the court to remove Janie and Joey Buss as co-trustees of the family trust.
“Jeanie never agreed to any sale, was never consulted, and was never even informed,” the filing states, according to Shelburne’s reporting. The petition goes further, alleging the siblings’ push to sell is personal rather than financial: “Their conduct is not driven by financial necessity but by animosity toward Jeanie.” A hearing on the petition is scheduled for Nov. 5 in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The dispute traces back to Aug. 18, when Jeanie’s five siblings, Johnny, Jim, Janie, Joey and Jesse, issued a joint statement reaffirming their intent to sell the family’s remaining Lakers stake to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and businessman Josh Kushner. That sale would be separate from, but connected to, the Lakers’ primary ownership transition: Mark Walter, who acquired majority control of the team in a deal the NBA Board of Governors approved in October 2025, agreed in mid-August to sell to Iger and Kushner for a reported $12.5 billion, a deal that still needs its own Board of Governors approval. The Buss family’s remaining 17.8% stake is a separate piece of that larger transaction, one the siblings control jointly as trust co-trustees alongside Jeanie.
The stakes for Jeanie personally are specific and steep. If the sale of the family’s stake goes through, her personal ownership share would fall below the 15% the NBA requires to serve as a team’s governor, ending the formal authority she has held over the Lakers’ organization since 2013. Jeanie’s petition leans on a 2017 court-supervised settlement of an earlier Buss family ownership dispute that designated her as the team’s controlling owner for as long as the Lakers remain family-owned, arguing that the siblings’ vote to sell cannot lawfully override that arrangement. The two sides are, in effect, fighting over what “family-owned” still means once the trust’s stake shrinks to a minority position within a franchise now largely controlled by outside owners.
For now, the family fight is not reported to be holding up the larger sale. Mark Walter’s sale of his majority stake to Iger and Kushner is not reported to be affected by Jeanie’s petition, which concerns only the trust’s separate minority share, meaning the ownership transition at the top of the franchise can proceed on its own timeline regardless of how the family dispute resolves. What role, if any, Jeanie would retain with the Lakers if she loses her governor title has not been addressed in the reporting so far.