Auction of Whitney Houston memorabilia earns $500000

Bosses at the Television Academy in the USA have won their bid to block the sale of Whitney Houston’s Emmy Award at auction. The complaint states that when an artist is recognized for an achievement, it lends a copy of the Emmy Statuette to the artist to signify and symbolize the honor, and while artist’s heirs and successors in interest are permitted to retain custody, the Academy makes clear an honoree or heir can’t sell it.

Heritage was hawking the Emmy on behalf of Whitney’s estate, but the Academy sought and was granted a temporary restraining order to prevent the live auction from going down Friday.

The academy, which presents the Emmy Awards, contends it owns the rights to the trophies, and that the statuettes are nontransferable. Anderson has set a hearing on an order to show cause why a preliminary injunction should not issue for July 7 and has told the Television Academy that it needs to put up a $10,000 bond in the interim.

“We are disappointed, but we fought the good fight, and we will withdraw the Emmy from the auction”, auction house president Greg Rohan said to the Daily News.

In its lawsuit, the academy says Houston won her trophy when the Emmys carried a label stipulating they were academy property and that an heir seeking to dispose of an award must return it to the academy for storage in “memory of the recipient”. When the Academy learned early this month that Houston’s Emmy was up for sale, it contacted Heritage Auctions, which claimed there was no label attached to it and demanded evidence there ever had been one.

Houston won the award for her Grammy performance of “Saving All My Love for You”. More than three dozen other people have sold Emmys at auction, and the Academy let them slide. “God knows they’ve been through enough”, Rohan said. In 2012, the beloved singer and star of The Bodyguard and Waiting to Exhale was found dead in her hotel room in Beverly Hills.