DNA Solves Bobby Fischer Paternity Case
Well that settles it. It turns out that Jewish chess-champ-turned-rambling anti-Semite Bobby Fischer is not the father of a 9-year-old Filipino girl, Jinky Young, whose mother claimed to have been impregnated by Fischer.
As we reported in June, four parties, including young Jinky, were caught in a legal battle over Fischer’s $2 million estate following the chess champ’s death in 2008 from kidney failure. The other claimants included a Japanese chess official named Miyoko Watai, who says she was married to Fischer in 2004; Fischer’s two American nephews, Alexander and Nicholas Targ, and the American government, which claims Fischer’s money in compensation for unpaid taxes.
To settle the matter, the Supreme Court of Iceland — where Fischer spent his final days — decided to exhume Fischer’s corpse for DNA testing. According to Icelandic law, if the girl was indeed his daughter, she’d be entitled to two-third of his estate.
But it turned out that Fischer was not the father, as reported in a BBC article yesterday. “The DNA report excluded Bobby Fischer from being the father of Jinky Young, and therefore the case has come to a close,” lawyer Thordur Bogason was quoted saying in the article.
With three claimants remaining, the court case over the inheritance is still before an Icelandic court. Proceedings will continue next month, according to the article.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO