At a press conference two weeks ago, Donald Trump called his friend, Ike Perlmutter, "one of the great men of business." That was before the Marvel chairman made some legal history.
On Monday, a Florida state judge permitted Perlmutter and his wife, Laura, to move forward in a trailblazing case over the way their DNA was surreptitiously gathered at a deposition on Feb. 27, 2013. In advancing a conversion claim, circuit judge Meenu Sasser wrote that no binding authority has ever definitively answered the question of whether genetic material such as DNA constitutes "property." Now, the reclusive 73-year-old who President Trump hopes will play a role in the Department of Veterans Affairs is being given the opportunity to press various claims over allegedly stolen DNA.
"The Perlmutters plainly retain important intangible rights to their genetic information," wrote Sasser, who analyzed a handful of privacy cases around the nation and one conversion case in Iowa from fifteen years ago. "The authority discussed above makes this clear at the very least, one possesses important privacy interests in such information. The wrongful dominion of this interest is an intrusion that would not necessarily be remedied adequately by restitution... [T]he Court finds an extension of conversions definition of property to ones intangible rights in his or her genetic information is therefore appropriate."
Perlmutter is facing off against Harold Peerenboom, a Toronto businessman who founded the multinational executive search firm Mandrake Management. Both live at Sloan's Curve, a waterfront Palm Beach complex that became the scene of a nasty billionaires' fight over tennis courts.
Peerenboom is suing Perlmutter for allegedly orchestrating hate mailings to other Sloan's Curve residents, to business associates, to more than a thousand inmates in prisons across Florida and Ontario that portrayed the Canadian as an anti-Semite, a sex offender and more.
During an earlier defamation case over the tennis courts, Peerenboom and his ex-attorney William Douberley forced the appearance of the Perlmutters at a deposition. When the Marvel chairman showed up to be interviewed at a West Palm Beach law firm, he had no idea that it was part of a plot to collect his DNA and compare it with the hate mail. Peerenboom and a private investigator hired Speckin Laboratories, a testing facility, whose employee showed up at the deposition with "special paper" meant to collect DNA. They also took plastic water bottles and a bottle cap left at the deposition by the Perlmutters.
