As Britney Spears continues to speak out against her conservatorship, recently scoring a major victory when her father announced he would step down as conservator, another high-profile actor is facing their own years-long conservatorship battle. Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played the beloved Nyota Uhura in Star Trek, is currently at the center of a tense legal battle involving three different people – her only child, Kyle Johnson, her former manager Gilbert Bell, and her friend, Angelique Fawcett. Nichols, now 88, suffers from dementia.
According to a detailed report from the Los Angeles Times, Johnson is his mother’s current appointed conservator. Fearing that his mother could be exploited due to her dementia, he sought a petition for her conservatorship, claiming that his mother has “severe short-term memory loss impacting her executive functioning.” In the petition, he claimed that Bell committed elder abuse, alleging that he used his influence to take control of Nichols’ assets and personal affairs, stating that “certain individuals have unduly exerted themselves into Ms. Nichols life to her detriment.” He said he filed the 2018 petition after learning that Bell in 201 had transferred his mother’s home into his name as power of attorney. In a lawsuit, meanwhile, Bell claimed Johnson is orchestrating an “aggressive” attempt to remove him from Nichols’ guest home been intimidating him and Nichols for years.
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The third player in the case is Fawcett, a producer and actress who met Nichols in 2012. Fawcett, whom the actress named as her successor, went to court in 2018 to object to Johnson’s petition for conservatorship. She argued that Nichols was able to manage her personal and financial affairs with limited help and also accused Johnson of wanting access to her income and personal property. She also claimed that Bell left Nichols’ home in a state of “disrepair” and also proposed that he marry Nichols.
As Spears’ conservatorship case made headlines following the release of the Framing Britney Spears documentary, Nichols’ case also grabbed headlines over the summer after her sister, Marian Smothers, started a GoFundMe to raise money for Nichols’ legal fees. The page included a summary of the legal battle and allegations made, claiming that they “believe that Bell has taken financial advantage of Nichelle to the tune of well over a million dollars” and claiming that “Bell has done the only thing left for him to do – he has slandered Kyle’s good name in numerous publications.” However, in a statement obtained by IndieWire, Bell’s lawyer, William Bowen, refuted the claims made in the GoFundMe as “false statements.” The GoFundMe, which is still active, has raised more than $146,000. The page says the “funds are necessary for defending Nichelle from Gilbert Bell’s baseless but damaging suit, our counter-suit and associated expenses of discovery, trial, etc, and to recover all or some of what he has stolen and mitigate the damage he has inflicted upon her.”
