Vanessa Bryant and other families recently settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the company that owned the helicopter that crashed and killed her husband Kobe Bryant and late daughter Gianna Bryant, CNN reports.
- “Plaintiffs and Defendants jointly report that they have agreed to settle their claims,” the filing from Bryant’s attorneys reads, according to CNN.
- The terms of the settlement are confidential. They still need to be approved by the courts before they’re made official.
Details of Vanessa Bryant’s lawsuit
Bryant first filed the lawsuit in February 2020, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
- The lawsuit claimed that pilot Ara Zobayan, who was flying the helicopter at the time of the crash, failed “to use ordinary care in piloting the subject aircraft,” according to USA Today.
- The lawsuit also accused Island Express Helicopters of showing “negligence,” adding that Kobe Bryant “was killed” because of the pilot’s actions on the company’s helicopters, USA Today reports.
- Per USA Today, “the 27-page complaint doesn’t specify a dollar amount; it seeks general, economic and punitive damages, which could total into the millions.”
In June 2020, reports from E! News suggested that Vanessa Bryant said in court documents that Kobe Bryant’s death cost the family “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
- In those court documents, Vanessa Bryant’s team wrote that the widow of Kobe Bryant sought compensation for “economic damages, noneconomic damages, prejudgment interest, punitive damages, and other relief as the court deems just and proper.”
- “Although the total specific amount of personal injury damages that plaintiff seeks is TBD, Kobe Bryant’s future lost earnings equals hundreds of millions of dollars,” the court document says, according to E! News.
Basically, the legal team argues that Kobe Bryant’s future earnings would have been worth millions. But because he died, the family will not receive any of those potential earnings.