Phillies’ Alec Bohm seeks injunction ordering his parents to return $500,000
The request, which came amid a lawsuit Bohm filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas against his parents, also asks a Florida-based arbitration case to be halted.
Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm has asked a Philadelphia court for a preliminary injunction that would prevent his parents from using more than $500,000 he alleges they took from him in March.
The request, filed last week in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, also asks that a Florida-based arbitration case related to the lawsuit Bohm filed against his parents in March be halted.
Bohm’s legal team in the filing says the player’s parents, Daniel and Lisa Bohm, withdrew $528,618 from an account associated with an LLC related to Bohm on March 5. The parents’ intent, according to the filing, was to use the money to fund their anticipated legal expenses in the case, which is seeking a judgment of at least $3 million in Bohm’s favor.
Bohm’s request seeks to have the money put back into the account from which it was taken, or to have an order issued that would keep his parents from “dissipating” the funds. The withdrawn money was deposited in a trust associated with the couple’s Florida-based attorney, Robert Eckard, the filing says.
In an initial response, Daniel and Lisa Bohm’s Pennsylvania-based attorneys, Siobhan Cole and Justin Kadoura of Philadelphia firm Holland & Knight, wrote that the money was placed in a special legal account “openly and pursuant to their authority as Managers” of the LLC.
Bohm’s claims that his parents “transferred the funds in anticipation of civil liability” are untrue, and the move was not illegal or untoward, the filing says. Cole said in a statement that a forthcoming filing will “begin the process of correcting the careless accusations” in Alec Bohm’s injunction request.
“Dan and Lisa Bohm love their son and have only ever acted with his best interest in mind,” Cole said, adding that the parents “do not understand what motivated” their son to file the lawsuit. The wealth Bohm’s parents managed, Cole said, “is intact.”
Alec Bohm’s attorneys argue in court documents that Daniel and Lisa Bohm “sought to set aside a war chest” to pay for their expected legal expenses only weeks before the initial lawsuit was filed. Bohm, attorney Gary A. DeVito said in a statement, has “a clear entitlement to the money that was taken.”
According to a declaration from an administrator at Eckard’s law firm, about $513,600 remains in the account where the money was initially transferred.
A Philadelphia judge ruled Monday that Bohm’s parents had 10 days to respond to the injunction request. Their legal team has asked for a four-day extension.
Bohm’s injunction request also asks the court to put a stop to an arbitration case filed in Florida, where the LLCs in question are incorporated and where the Bohms live. That case alleges that Bohm himself harmed the LLCs through various actions, including through the “unauthorized transfer, depletion, and closure of company bank accounts,” according to court documents.
Daniel and Lisa Bohm’s legal team argues that because the LLCs have operating agreements signed by their son, Florida is where the arbitration case ought to be tried. Bohm’s legal team, however, says the Phillies third baseman was misled by his parents in regard to those agreements, making them fraudulent, and therefore void. Bohm, his attorneys added in court documents, spends “a significant portion of each year in the Greater Philadelphia Area” as a member of the Phillies.
Bohm himself, meanwhile, submitted an affidavit in which he says he has no recollection of signing documents for the LLCs.
In that affidavit, Bohm also says that his parents arranged for him to hire agent Scott Boras under “considerable duress” in a move he alleges was to “further their own interests.” Using a “web of lies,” Bohm adds, his parents convinced him that “under no circumstances could I ever trust a third-party to manage my affairs.”
Bohm has changed his representation, a source confirmed, from Boras to Nick Chanock from the Team, formerly the Wasserman Agency.
Despite agreeing in late March to stay with the Boras Corp., Bohm issued a letter a few days after the season through the MLB Players Association that he was switching agents. Boras negotiated nearly $22 million for Bohm through three years of salary arbitration, including winning a $4 million award in a hearing against the Phillies in 2023.
In his lawsuit last month, Bohm said his parents used several LLCs to funnel money from his personal financial accounts, which they then “converted to their own use.” The LLCs, he said in court documents, were presented as being wholly under his control, with his parents taking a 10% interest in them on paper in order to act as authorized representatives, a service that was allegedly to be provided free of charge.
Some of the money, Bohm’s legal team says, was then used by Daniel and Lisa Bohm to pay their own personal expenses. Bohm’s parents have denied wrongdoing.
Staff writer Scott Lauber contributed to this article.
