- Mehmet Oz and his two sisters are in an inheritance battle spanning both US coasts and Istanbul.
- Dr. Oz and one sister are accusing another sister of forging their father's will and looting millions from his estate.
- That sister counter-claims Dr. Oz has deprived her of years of rental income from two NYC condos.
New court papers in Manhattan reveal that TV personality-turned Pennsylvania GOP congressional candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz is embroiled in an intensifying inheritance battle in the US and Turkey — complete with accusations of a forged will and millions of dollars looted from an Istanbul bank account.
"A complex and fact-intensive family drama," a lawyer for Dr. Oz called it in papers filed Monday night.
On one side of the battle is Nazlim Oz, who lives in Istanbul but is suing her brother in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan.
She said in her ongoing 2020 lawsuit that for more than three years, the former "Dr. Oz Show" host has failed to pay her $15,000 a month.
She alleged that the money is her share of the rental income from a pair of three-bedroom, Upper East Side condos once owned by their father Mustafa, a wealthy Turkish surgeon and investor.
Fighting back against this claim are Dr. Oz and a second sister, Seval Oz, of California.
They said in their own court papers that Nazlim is the real thief and allege Nazlim began looting their father's bank accounts in late 2018 — as he lay dying in an Istanbul hospital.
Dr. Oz, his California sister and their widowed mother, Suna, are now of one mind in believing that Nazlim forged the father's signature, and has secreted millions of dollars away in Holland, India, and the Cayman Islands, they said in court papers.
A Turkish handwriting expert has confirmed the forgery, and the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office is investigating, Dr. Oz alleged.
And as to the monthly $15,000 Nazlim claimed she'd received from 2011 until their father's death, when Dr. Oz took over the condos' management and allegedly started stiffing her out of payments? Nazlim has not produced a single check, wire transfer record, deposit slip, or bank statement showing she ever received any rental income while the father was alive, Dr. Oz argued.
Those rents were paid directly to the parents' account in Istanbul until the father's death, and are now being held in the New York bank account of "Oz LLC," pending an outcome to the inheritance dispute, he said in court papers.
"The available evidence strongly suggests (if not proves outright) that Nazlim never received any monthly $15,000 distributions at all," Dr. Oz said in a sworn affidavit filed Monday night.
"This is also one of many issues deeply intertwined in our family's ongoing litigation in Turkey," he said in the affidavit, "in which it is alleged that Nazlim stole millions of dollars from our father, including rents [from the two Manhattan condos] that had been deposited into our parents' accounts — the very same rents she now claims I have been depriving her of."
Nazlim has denied any wrongdoing; her lawyer in the New York lawsuit declined to comment to Insider Tuesday. She is asking a Manhattan judge to issue an immediate ruling in her favor.
Dr. Oz, in turn, is asking that the condo-rent dispute be put on hold until the inheritance battles in Turkey are resolved. His lawyer, Michael J. Cohen, said the next step in the New York lawsuit will be for the judge to set a date for oral arguments.