JC Lee wants to set the record straight.
The daughter of Stan Lee, the comic book legend behind some of the Marvel Comics’ most memorable characters, has been framed for years as a villain in her father’s story; the spoiled, impossible child who exploited him, then failed to protect him in his final years. There was even an accusation that she physically abused Stan and her mother Joan.
But according to JC, 75, it was all “a lie.”
Marking the first time JC has spoken on the record about her life as the heiress to her father’s Marvel empire, she vehemently denies that she ever hit her parents.
“I never ever touched my parents,” she told me as I sat in her house in the Hollywood Hills last summer.
Months after her mother died at the age of 95 in 2017, stories began appearing in the press that painted a dire picture of Stan’s life, including accusations that his closest confidants were fleecing him.
In 2018, The Hollywood Reporter presented a particularly unflattering portrait of JC, describing hysterical demands for money and a “powder-keg relationship” with her father. The story included an allegation that JC attacked her parents in 2014 after she discovered that her new Jaguar was actually leased in her father’s name.
According to the story, JC violently grabbed Joan’s arm and slammed Stan’s head against the back of a chair. The Hollywood Reporter was provided photos of a bruise on Joan’s arm. The Lees did not go to the authorities because they felt their daughter was in a fragile state.
JC says she took the advice of the people around her not to make a public denial at the time of the accusation.
“You think I haven’t regretted it to this day?” she said. “They are all lies. That photo is insane. I never did it.”
JC, who can be volatile and prone to fly off the handle, concedes that she often screamed at her parents, usually over money, but it never got physical. Five people BI spoke with who were close to Stan at the time said they never saw JC commit any physical abuse.
“They were equally abusive, the way they screamed at each other,” said James MacLean, JC’s former assistant and business partner who spent many hours in the house with the Lees. “But then it would be like, ‘Let’s sit down and have dinner.’ That was their relationship.”
Stan Lee died on November 12, 2018 after collapsing at his home. JC, arriving for a visit with her father, pulled into his driveway just as he was being loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. “They wanted to do all these terrible things to his body to see if they could bring him back,” she says. “I said no. He appeared to be gone.”
In the span of a year, JC lost her mother and father, who were also her best friends. Since then, though she’s tried to get her own projects off the ground, including a T-shirt line and a Stan Lee board game, she’s been unable to capture the same success her father had. She also believes the confidants who were around in Stan’s final years took everything after his death.
“I feel these people have taken my life, and they’re eating off gold utensils and I’m eating off plastic,” she said.
Read BI’s full story on JC Lee here.
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