Inside the David Geffen–Crypto Banana Guy Legal Brawl

In November 2021 the Macklowe collection was coming to the auction block at Sotheby’s, and crypto billionaire Justin Sun was deciding what he wanted. Earlier that year he had bought a $20 million Picasso, a $2 million Warhol, and a $6 million Beeple NFT, and he was ready to make another purchase, this time from the estate of a divorcing billionaire couple that would eventually net $922 million with fees. Though he would later become world famous as the buyer of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the $6.2 million banana taped to a wall—in 2021 Sun was new to the art world and ready to drop some serious coin.

Sydney Xiong, an art-world-savvy adviser widely credited as the director of Sun’s digital art platform, APENFT, suggested he start with the lot on the cover of the Macklowe sale catalogue: Le Nez, a glorious sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss artist whose figures of long, frail bodies wracked by the atrocities of World War II made him one of the most celebrated artists of the century. In 2015, the Giacometti bronze L’Homme au Doigt sold to Steve Cohen for $141.3 million, making it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction.

There was one problem. Justin Sun had barely even heard of Alberto Giacometti.

“Before the auction, he didn’t know anything about Giacometti,” Xiong told The New York Times in 2022. “I tried to educate him and let him know how important the lot was and why we should have it.”

When bidding began on the Giacometti, Xiong was reportedly on the phone with Yonnie Fu, the Hong Kong rep in the room at Sotheby’s HQ on York Avenue. After Xiong placed the winning bid of $67 million on behalf of Sun, the billionaire wasted no time in alerting the world. “We got it,” he wrote on X, then known as Twitter, just after the gavel hammered, posting a picture of Le Nez and tagging APENFT. With fees, the cost came to $78.4 million.

That exact work is now at the center of an explosive lawsuit that pits two generations of billionaire art collectors against each other. Last week Sun sued David Geffen, alleging that the entertainment mogul and arts patron was in possession of the “stolen” Giacometti sculpture after Xiong allegedly forged his signature on contracts and off-loaded the work behind his back, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. The complaint states that the woman who once bid tens of millions on behalf of Sun had “confessed to the crime,” and now Sun wants his Giacometti back. Or if he can’t get The Nose, he wants at least $80 million, which is what he says it’s worth. (Xiong, who is no longer in Sun’s employ, has not responded publicly to the allegations laid out in the suit, and did not respond to multiple messages sent this week.)

“Mr. Sun is a victim of theft,” William Charron, his attorney, told me. “The thief has confessed, and the evidence of her theft, including her forgeries and fabrications to cover up her theft, are overwhelming. There would have been no need for Sydney Xiong to forge and fabricate if Mr. Sun had actually been aware and approved of what she was doing. Legitimate art transactions don’t happen that way. For whatever his reasons, Mr. Geffen will not return Le Nez. That is why there is a lawsuit.”

Geffen is fighting back. His hard-charging lawyer, Tibor Nagy, said the seasoned mega-collector bought the Giacometti from Sun fair and square, and that this beef is between the crypto tycoon and the adviser he hired to make deals. Dismissing all the allegations that elements of fraud delegitimized the deal, his attorney said instead that Sun has “seller’s remorse.”

“Mr. Sun thinks his art adviser should have gotten him a higher price for Le Nez,” Nagy told me. “His seller’s remorse, coming more than a year after this transaction closed, has nothing to do with Mr. Geffen.”

The complaint spins a delicious yarn of deceit and avarice in the art-meets-crypto space. And it pits Sun directly against a colossus of cultural philanthropy with his name on museums and hospitals in Los Angeles and a business school building and music halls in Manhattan—a man who, according to sources, spends much of his time on a yacht for which he paid $590 million, Forbes reported.

BREAK

In October 2023, nearly two years after Sun purchased Le Nez, the work was put on public view at the Institut Giacometti in Paris—in a show named for and centered on the work, sponsored by Sun’s cryptocurrency organizations, TRON and APENFT. Sun posted about the show incessantly, informing his millions of X followers about the joy of seeing the public getting to enjoy works from his collection.

“Though valued at $78.4M, its true beauty lies in the shared experience,” he wrote, adding a face-with-sunglasses emoji.

Still, he seems to have never quite forgotten about the work’s price tag. The year the show opened, according to the complaint, he floated the idea that he wanted to sell the work, as long as it was for over $80 million, as he later specified, and all in cash. Xiong was the right person to ask. In her years working with Sun she’d become a pretty well-known art world figure, getting profiled on Artnet and appearing on a panel alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist, the ever-present director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.

Sun alleges in the complaint that Xiong began to make arrangements with the art dealers David and Cole Tunkl to move Le Nez. David Tunkl had a Los Angeles gallery in the ’90s; a 2001 opening of his lured in celebrity collectors such as Steve Martin, Kirk Douglas, and Mike Ovitz. But he’s been less active in recent years—especially after the late billionaire Sam Zell alleged in 2011 that he gave Tunkl two Légers and a Balthus on consignment, only for Tunkl to sell the works and keep the proceeds. (The Zells received $5.775 million from their insurer, Chubb, which then filed a lawsuit against Tunkl. The suit was dismissed a few months later.) Cole Tunkl graduated from NYU in 2021, and a recent LinkedIn account lists him as an “art adviser & broker.” (David Tunkl didn’t respond to calls. Cole Tunkl did not respond to a request for comment.)

Per Sun’s complaint, the Tunkls were represented by Ralph Lerner, the art world lawyer who has advised some of the biggest collectors in the country. (In 2013 the Cy Twombly Foundation accused Lerner of fraudulently taking $750,000 in fees from the artist’s estate; Lerner denied any wrongdoing, and a settlement was reached in 2014. Also in 2013 he was suspended from practicing law in New York state for a year after charging his clients $50,000 for his and his family’s car-service rides over a decade’s time. Lerner did not respond to an email.)

The suit alleges that Xiong never had authority to sell the work, but at the end of the show, it nonetheless shipped to a storage unit in Delaware controlled by the Tunkls. The suit says Xiong told the Tunkls and Lerner that the deal should go ahead without Sun’s involvement due to her insistence that it was actually owned by APENFT, of which she represented herself as president. After all, Sun himself had tweeted that he was going to donate the work to the platform, and various NFT blogs had reported the transaction as fact.

But this was not the case—according to the complaint, Sun never transferred ownership, which is why the work was listed as on loan from the Justin Sun collection at the museum. (The suit refers to Xiong as a “freelancer,” but multiple news outlets prior to the suit referred to her as “director” of APENFT.)

According to the complaint, also included in the exchange was a lawyer named Laura Chang, from a large Beijing-based firm, who claimed to represent APENFT and Sun and who had been instrumental in reassuring the Tunkls and Lerner of the legality of the deal that Xiong allegedly orchestrated. Chang used a Gmail email address, the suit alleges. Even weirder: The suit claims there was no one named Laura Chang among the thousands of attorneys at the firm she said she represented—and it speculates whether Laura Chang was actually Xiong.

The suit says they all soon drafted an exchange agreement, in which Le Nez would be traded for two of Geffen’s works that were valued at $55 million (valued by whom, the suit does not say) and $10.5 million in cash—well below the $80 million Sun had initially given as his number, with most of the value tied up in two as-yet-unidentified works that had to be off-loaded in order to access the cash. Xiong also allegedly arranged for Geffen’s funds to be wired directly to her via the Tunkls—in crypto.

In late March they drafted an authorization agreement, with Sun’s signature on it—forged, the suit alleges, by Xiong. Geffen released the two works, and transferred $13 million to the Tunkls. According to the filing, the duo sent $10.5 million to Xiong, and then she took $500,000 for herself. She sent the rest to a crypto wallet held by Sun. As the suit claims, Le Nez, the work that was in the Macklowe collection for nearly 30 years and the Sun collection for three, went to David Geffen’s penthouse at 785 Fifth Avenue, which he reportedly bought for $54 million in 2012.

In December 2024, Sun circled back on Le Nez in the midst of a busy few weeks. He had just become one of the most famous collectors in the world after he dropped $6.2 million on Cattelan’s Comedian and then proceeded to eat the banana live in front of reporters in Hong Kong. (The work is still his, as the banana is meant to be periodically replaced.) On December 3, he invested $30 million in then president-elect Donald Trump’s crypto concern, World Liberty Financial. He’s been extremely vocal about his love for the current president. He is also, it’s worth noting, facing charges from the SEC for allegedly fraudulently manipulating the crypto market by, among other methods, having a rollicking grab-bag of celeb gadflies—including Lil Yachty, Lindsay Lohan, and Jake Paul—promote his coin without disclosing they were being compensated. TRON filed a motion to dismiss the following March, and last August a New York judge denied the SEC’s wishes to request a pretrial conference. At the time reps for Sun declined to comment on “pending legal matters.” (Lil Yachty, Lohan, and Paul agreed to settle with the SEC without admitting wrongdoing.)

According to Sun’s complaint, he asked Xiong for an update on the buyer for the Giacommeti—back in May she had said that David Martinez, the Wall Street titan who has been said to have a $140 million Jackson Pollock hanging in his New York apartment, was interested in buying it. Months had passed—did Xiong have an update?

According to the complaint, Xiong’s response was “incoherent.” She initially put Sun on a text thread with the Tunkls, saying they were responsible for the delay. Sun hopped on the thread and told them, in “imperfect” English, he was killing any potential deal because it was taking too long. At this point, the lawsuit claims, Xiong allegedly copped to the entire scheme, and Sun had his attorneys reach out to Nagy to demand the work be returned. A month later, in late January 2025, another letter was sent. The suit claims that Geffen’s team then said they would not be returning the work, which they said was rightfully theirs.

“Receiving the letter from Mr. Sun’s attorneys, nearly a year after the transaction, claiming that Le Nez had been stolen, was a total surprise,” Nagy said. Nagy contends Sun knew all about the deal, but became dismayed when he couldn’t sell the two Geffen paintings for his desired price.

“The litigation filed by Mr. Sun is a desperate and bizarre attempt to hide reality,” Nagy said. “Mr. Sun received two paintings and $10.5 million for the sculpture he knowingly sold. After trying and failing to sell the paintings, he now wants to re-trade the deal based on the implausible claim that his own art adviser and liaison to the art world duped him.”

The art world is torn on whom to side with here. Sun is one of the few young collectors buying at high prices at auction, going after a wide variety of artists—but he’s also using his crypto billions to do it, in a world that’s not always enamored with such arrivistes. And then there’s Geffen, who has spent the last few decades unwinding his biggest trophies and donating to a dizzying number of cultural institutions, making him a hero to many art, music, and theater lovers. That goodwill aside, the sort of machinations that the suit alleges resulted in Geffen’s ownership of Le Nez are the stuff of blue-chip-collector nightmares.

Whatever happens, the case is barreling ahead. Barring a settlement, legal counsel for both parties will be present before Judge Analisa Torres at the Patrick Moynihan US Courthouse on Pearl Street bright and early in the morning on April 7.

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…Sotheby’s is getting ready to move into the Marcel Breuer–designed landmark on Madison Avenue later this year, and we here at True Colors have been fixated on one thing in particular: What restaurant is gonna take over the space in the basement? When the Met Breuer had the lease it was occupied by Flora Bar, a restaurant from Estela owner Ignacio Mattos; when it was the Frick Madison, the space had a Joe Coffee. Now we can reveal that the new Sotheby’s HQ will come with a restaurant owned, run, and dreamed up by the duo Roman and Williams—the nom de design of Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer. They’ve designed a number of iconic spots in the city, such as the Boom Boom Room and Le Coucou. This will be the second restaurant where they are the proprietors as well, after La Mercerie in lower SoHo. Perhaps that spot’s chef, Marie-Aude Rose, will be at helm in the kitchen as well? We can only speculate. Regardless, great choice all around.

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…Cattelan’s Comedian may have been the starriest artwork in the Meta ads for its AI collaboration with Ray-Ban—but if that’s all you watched, you missed another equally awesome artist cameo. In one of the shorter spots, we see Chris Hemsworth in front of Urs Fischer’s Untitled, a 2011 work that’s a self-portrait of the artist sitting with a bottle of wine, a life-size sculpture made of wax that’s meant to be melted down and then replaced. Sort of like the banana, if you eat it. And then Chris Pratt walks up and asks the Meta AI function inside his glasses, “Hey, Meta, tell me about this artist.” “Urs Fischer is known for his unconventional work,” says the AI, in what I suppose is meant to be the robot’s curator-like lilt. And then they knock off Fischer’s wax head and freak out. What a time for conceptual art! Urs Fischer and Maurizio Cattelan in Super Bowl ads!

…Big news for Justified fans: Walton Goggins has a pretty decent art collection upstate. Our pals at Architectural Digest visited the Hudson Valley home of Goggins and his wife, Nadia Conners. Not only does it have a speakeasy where Edna St. Vincent Millay scrawled her name on the wall, there are works by Danny Fox, Wes Lang, and Tracy Nakayama. “Walt doesn’t buy a Porsche; he buys a Kerry James Marshall. That’s what he’ll stretch for,” said Conners. Amen to that.

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