There’s family feuds, and then there’s the Barbanera family feud.
The Sydney family’s argument was so bitter and intractable that the siblings involved couldn’t even agree for long enough to ensure the painful details of their legal battle stayed out the public eye.
John Barbanera took his brother Peter and sister Nancy to court after he was cut out of their father Antonio’s will. Antonio wrote a detailed explanation of why he’d excluded his eldest son from a shared windfall worth more than $2 million.
“While living at the family home at Haberfield, he was constantly abusive towards me, my wife and his siblings,” Antonio wrote in a statement attached to his will. “He was often physically violent towards his siblings, beating each of them on a number of occasions. To my shame, my wife and I felt too scared and intimidated by him at the time to intervene in relation to his abusive and violent behaviour towards his siblings.”
But John argued that Peter and Nancy had unfairly influenced Antonio’s opinion of him.
The court heard a long list of unflattering allegations about the siblings, including attacks with crowbars and firearms, alleged extramarital affairs, and the decision by Nancy and Peter to hire security guards to watch John at their mother’s funeral.
The judge warned the family that unless they managed to put aside their differences and resolve the dispute, his findings would have to be made public as most court findings are, adding that the findings were “unlikely to make comfortable reading.”
“The Court made clear that its findings in the proceedings would be available on the Internet and that one of the advantages of a consensual resolution of the proceedings was that such public findings would not have to be made,” the judgment said. “Despite those warnings, the proceedings did not resolve. The Court now has to determine them. The Barbanera family history recited here could have been saved from public disclosure. But there was insufficient family cooperation to prevent even that outcome.”
As a result, the lengthy findings were published on numerous legal websites this week, and aired in a long report by the The Sydney Morning Herald.
And despite John’s argument that he deserved a share of Antonio’s fortune, the judge ruled against him, saying that while Nancy and Peter influenced Antonio and his wife Maria against John, the eldest son was “the prime aggressive mover in creating family chaos and disharmony over the years” and that his relationship with his parents was “characterised by abuse, threats and intimidation towards them”.