A lawsuit that alleged sexual assault by the late artist Norval Morrisseau was tossed out by British Columbia’s Supreme Court this week, according to the Canadian Press.
Filed against the artist’s estate, the lawsuit by Mark Anthony Jacobson claimed that Morrisseau had touched his buttocks without his consent. Jacobson claimed that he had visited Morrisseau in 2006, roughly a year prior to the Anishinaabe artist’s death, after an assistant told Jacobson that Morrisseau could heal his back pain.
The estate vigorously contested these claims, saying that Morrisseau had by this point been battling an advanced form of Parkinson’s disease and was “confined to a wheelchair.” The artist “was in no position to be physically or socially aggressive,” the estate said in a filing, and “had no libido.”
Jacobson was seeking $5 million in damages. According to the Canadian Press, the lawsuit was dismissed “for all purposes” and at no cost to any of the parties.
Morrisseau was acclaimed during his lifetime for paintings that abstracted images of nature using the stylings of Anishinaabe art. Those paintings, which are owned by institutions ranging from the National Gallery of Canada to the Detroit Institute of Arts, earned him the moniker of the “Picasso of the North.”
Since his death, the Morrisseau estate has regularly made headlines as it battles a range of forgeries that have appeared on the market. In 2024, a Canada man pleaded guilty to overseeing the production of thousands of faked Morrisseau works. Some of those works were made using a paint-by-numbers process, he said.
