[Holmes] Jeanie Buss to her half-brother Jesse Buss in 2019: “You should’ve never been born.”
Kind of a wild twist and turn to a story that starts with the AD trade press conference.
On July 13, 2019, the Lakers held a news conference at the team’s practice facility to introduce superstar big man Anthony Davis. The trade with the New Orleans Pelicans to pair Davis with LeBron James instantly vaulted the Lakers back into title contention after the team had struggled for nearly a decade under Jeanie’s stewardship.
Jesse called Jeanie later that day, and he asked about Pelinka’s remark about Johnny. The conversation took a dark turn, multiple people told ESPN, when Jeanie began to tell a story about her mother, JoAnn.
Six months earlier, in December 2018, the six siblings had learned about a woman named Lee Klose, who had written to Jeanie and said that she had been the first child of JoAnn and Jerry Buss.
Lee was born in 1953, and, at the time, JoAnn and Jerry Buss lacked the financial resources to support her, so they made the difficult decision to place her up for adoption. But JoAnn made Buss promise her that he’d never have children with anyone else. He agreed. The couple would later divorce in 1972.
Janie learned about that promise many years ago from her mother, JoAnn, who said she was heartbroken when Buss later had two sons with his girlfriend Karen Demel in the mid-1980s. But Janie said that JoAnn ultimately supported Buss and those two sons, who were named Joey and Jesse.
Given that promise between her mother and father, Jeanie told Jesse, “You should’ve never been born.”