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Trek auction winner suing Christie's and CBS |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Friday, 28 December 2007
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 Star Trek memorabilia collector Ted Moustakis has filed a $7 million lawsuit against Christie's auction house and CBS, alledging that items sold at the highly-publicized Trek auction last year were not authentic. Moustakis won three items through the auction - a uniform worn by Brent Spiner (Data) on The Next Generation, a poker table used on the series, and a poker visor worn by Spiner. When Moustakis recently showed the visor to Spiner, who said that it was not the real visor - he had sold it years earlier on eBay. Spiner also claims to have warned Christie's that both the visor and poker table were not authentic - items for which Moustakis paid $12,000.
 To ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the auction, Christie's enlisted the help of Denise and Michael Okuda to catalog every one of the 1000 lots, including verifying the onscreen use by referencing DVDs to see where the prop, costume, or model was used. The process and the auction itself where chronicled by The History Channel in both a live internet stream of the auction, and the documentary Star Trek: Beyond the Final Frontier as part of their celebration of Trek's 40th anniversary.
The auction was expected to bring in between $1.2 and $1.8 million and blew all expectations when it closed at over $7 million. In total, over 90% of the lots sold for higher than their estimates, some exceeding the estimates by over 50 times. Notable items included the Enterprise-A filming miniature ($240,000), a Klingon Bird-of-Prey filming miniature ($260,000), Picard's Ressikan Flute ($40,000 - it doesn't play), the Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterpries-E filming miniatures ($110,000 each), and the Enterprise-D principal visual effects model ($500,000!!!).
Considering the amount of attention paid to the auction by the media, the Okudas, and Trek fans world-wide, it seems unlikely that fake items would have been put up for bidding, though it has been pointed out that at least two items in the auction were mislabeled (but were still used on screen).
Moustakis' suit is seeking a refund for his purchases ($12,000) and punitive damanges - meant to deter future misdeeds - of $698,000.
Discuss: TrekUnited Forum
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