The estranged daughter of 77-year-old Kathleen Allman has petitioned a Hawaiian court to establish a limited conservatorship to protect her parents’ share of her brother’s stake in Ondo.

  • A legal battle over control of Ondo Finance has intensified after founder Nathan Allman died without a will, leaving his parents to inherit an estate that includes a controlling equity stake and a large holding of ONDO tokens.
  • Allman’s mother, Kathleen Allman, sued acting CEO Ian De Bode over an alleged attempt to seize corporate control and secure a compensation package worth about $11 million.
  • Allman’s half-sister and Ondo investor David Chen are seeking a limited conservatorship over Kathleen Allman’s share of the estate, alleging cognitive impairment and financial mismanagement, claims she denies.

The succession crisis at Ondo Finance in the wake of its young founder Nathan Allman’s recent death is getting messier, as Allman’s family wages a legal battle against acting CEO Ian De Bode, and now, against each other.

Allman’s half-sister, Dr. Lani Clinton, and Ondo investor David Chen have petitioned a Hawaiian court to establish a limited conservatorship over Clinton’s 77-year-old mother Kathleen Allman’s share of the Ondo Founder’s estate, which includes a “controlling equity interest in Ondo Finance” and a “very large holding of ONDO tokens” including unlocked tokens and tokens that will unlock over the next three years.

Nathan Allman died suddenly and without a will at age 32 in May, leaving his estate — including his stake in Ondo Finance — in limbo. A probate court subsequently named his parents, Kathleen Allman and Lawrence Allman, his inheritors.

In the wake of Allman’s death, De Bode took the helm at Ondo. Shortly after De Bode’s ascension to acting CEO, Allman’s mother appointed herself and another of her children, Tahnee Towill, to Ondo’s board, named herself chair and interim CEO, and attempted to remove him from all company positions (he remains acting CEO and a member of Ondo’s board as of a Sept. 3 court order).

Ondo Finance declined to comment, and CoinDesk’s call to De Bode went unanswered.

Kathleen Allman subsequently filed suit against De Bode, accusing him of a “brazen usurpation of corporate control” and alleging that he began plotting a new $11 million compensation package within a week of Allman’s death. Her suit seeks to establish that De Bode and Chen, an early Ondo backer who De Bode sought to appoint to the board, were not validly appointed, that the disputed compensation awards are void, and seeks damages for alleged breaches of fiduciary duties.

De Bode’s compensation package included a $900,000 annual salary and bonus, a $1 million signing bonus and 26 million restricted token units valued at more than $9 million, Allman’s complaint said. The package also included awards covering 846,000 shares that would have increased his stake from 0.33% to 8%, or roughly 24-fold. Vesting was set to begin May 25, the day after Allman died.

“The writers of Game of Thrones could not have scripted Ian’s usurpation of power any better,” the estate said in its complaint.

But the new court filings call Kathleen Allman’s competency into question. Dr. Clinton, a professor of medicine at Duke University, told the judge that her mother “suffers from a long-standing alcohol use disorder and from a progressive impairment of executive function, judgment, insight and social cognition, which renders her unable to manage property and business affairs of this character and magnitude.”

In a statement to CoinDesk provided by her lawyers, Kathleen Allman denied the allegations in the petition, calling them baseless, and adding: “The petition in Hawaii has been filed by an associate of Mr. De Bode as a desperate next step after his attempts to wrest control of Ondo and wrongly enrich himself were declared invalid by the Delaware Court of Chancery. We are confident that this latest action will similarly fail. Kathleen has prioritized good governance from day one and will continue to focus on supporting the long-term success of Ondo while upholding the vision and values of her son Nate Allman.”

In addition to claiming her mother has a decades-long history of “consum[ing] alcohol at pathological levels,” Dr. Clinton asked that the court review her mother’s medical records and evaluate her for dementia, claiming in the court documents that a pattern of behavior over recent years was consistent with the “behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia.”

In her filing, Dr. Clinton claimed to have been estranged from her mother since 2022 after an incident during a family vacation when Kathleen Allman allegedly told Dr. Clinton’s young children, aged 10, six and two, that “they were worthless, that she should have aborted all of them, and that she might be fortunate if they drowned in the ocean during the visit.” Afterwards, Kathleen Allman denied saying anything of the kind, according to the filing.

The court filings also hint at a pattern of lavish spending, claiming that Kathleen Allman “came to depend on [Allman] for…a scale of living her own resources had never supported.” In June 2025, according to court documents, Allman bought his parents a beachfront home in Honolulu for $18.5 million.

“Petitioners note also that despite substantial earnings [Kathleen Allman] has a history of financial strain, including an occasion on which she could not meet a single month’s mortgage payment and borrowed from her own mother,” lawyers for Dr. Clinton and Chen wrote in their filing.

Before Allman’s death, the filings claim, Kathleen Allman “purchased or attempted to purchase a Zeelander yacht in Florida at a price on the order of $4 million; traveled by private aircraft, including a request that [Ondo Finance] bear a six-figure cost of a flight from Hawaii to California, and lodged at approximately $4,000 per night.”

Nine days after her son’s death, according to filings, Kathleen Allman texted Chen saying: “Hi, I feel confident everything will sort, in time. But my #1 concern is cash flow, liquidity! Soon! Like I have a 200K invoice from people building pool in Newport. I really want to get that…boat, etc.”

Read more: Power struggle erupts at Ondo Finance after founder’s death

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