Kardashian sisters launch legal war with stepmother over leaked diaries

Kim Kardashian and her sisters are suing their stepmother for leaking excerpts from their late father's journal.

Ellen Pearson handed over diary extracts to sister magazines In Touch and Life & Style for an expose on alleged infidelities that ended lawyer Robert Kardashian's marriage to the reality TV stars' mother Kris Jenner.

The journal entries detailed Kardashian's feelings about his wife's alleged extra-marital affair.

Now the siblings are suing Pearson claiming the copyrighted property belongs to them, and she had no right in allowing the magazines to publish extracts.

In a lawsuit filed in California on Thursday (04Apr13), the Kardashian sisters and Jenner claim Pearson has engineered a "despicable and unlawful scheme to hold in secret and convert, and now exploit... private personal and copyright protected" documents.

According to the complaint, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Kardashian bequeathed the "bulk of his personal tangible and intangible property" to his four children, and, as a result, the diary and family photo albums are "incontestably" their inheritance and property.

The sisters and their mother claim Pearson kept these belongings "with the express intent to one-day capitalize and exploit the valuable property".

The Kardashians insist they had no knowledge of the diary until extracts were published in February (13), and they have accused Pearson of attempting to "peddle and exploit... the private and valuable personal papers of Robert Kardashian".

The sisters are suing for conversion and copyright infringement and at least $500,000 in damages, profits, statutory damages, punitive and exemplary damages.