Dolly Parton Estate Drops Lawsuit Against Late Star’s Nephew Over Alleged Threats

Dolly Parton’s estate has ended its lawsuit against Bryan Seaver, the late country star’s nephew and longtime head of security.

A Thursday (Nov. 5) court filing, obtained by Billboard, voluntarily dismisses the Parton estate’s claims against Seaver without prejudice, meaning they could be refiled again in the future. Lawyers for both sides did not immediately return inquiries as to whether the dismissal reflects a settlement, though Seaver’s attorneys wrote in a court filing last week that they had recently been “engaged in good faith discussions in an attempt to resolve this matter.”

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She’s Alive LLC, the entity managing Parton’s posthumous affairs under the leadership of her longtime manager Danny Nozell, sued Seaver in September. The estate alleged Seaver had been trying to extort money since Parton’s death a month earlier by sending violent threats like “I’m a killer” and “all I do is warfare.”

Seaver denied this, saying Nozell had taken his text messages out of context and “turned a private, profane and ultimately friendly exchange between two longtime friends into a claim of terror.” Parton’s estate had been seeking an injunction to bar Seaver from interfering with the business (Seaver’s financial inheritance was never at issue in the legal case).

A hearing on the injunction request was delayed numerous times and had been set to finally begin this coming Tuesday (Nov. 10) in Nashville. That court proceeding is now canceled.

When Parton was alive, she was intentional about planning her estate to avoid the type of infighting that’s roiled grieving families of so many famous artists before her. But as the Seaver matter demonstrated, all the organization in the world still does not guarantee peace. “It only takes one to upset the apple cart,” estate attorney Scott Rahn told Billboard when the lawsuit was filed. But Rahn said the fact that Parton’s estate brought the matter to court so quickly was a sign that she had put the right people in place to take care of things.

“You cannot plan for every possible eventuality,” said Rahn at the time. “Your documents would fill libraries talking about every single thing. At the end of the day, what you need to do, which is I think what Dolly did, is pick a capable team for managing your affairs. And that’s what’s happening here.”