The Angels stopped paying legal fees for imprisoned former communications executive Eric Kay after the team reached a settlement with the family of deceased pitcher Tyler Skaggs in December.
In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, lawyer David Gerger stated he was withdrawing from representing Kay, who was convicted of providing Skaggs the drugs that killed the ballplayer.
“A third party that agreed to pay his legal fees and costs has refused to pay, leaving Kay’s current counsel with more than $130,000 in unpaid fees and out-of-pocket expenses,” Gerger wrote.
The third party is the Angels, who acknowledged during the Skaggs family’s wrongful death civil trial that they had been paying for Kay’s legal fees for months. The case settled Dec. 19 during jury deliberations, although terms of the agreement, which followed 31 days of testimony and years of legal wrangling, have not been disclosed.
Lawyers for the Skaggs family expressed alarm when they learned months ahead of the trial that Gerger was being paid by the Angels, writing in a court filing, “Since his termination, the Angels have distanced themselves from Kay. The Angels have now reversed course.”
Kay is serving a 22-year sentence for supplying Skaggs with a counterfeit pain pill that contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. Skaggs, 27, snorted the pill and died in a Texas hotel room on July 1, 2019, choking on his own vomit. Kay was found guilty in 2022 of distribution of a controlled substance resulting in death and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances.
Kay’s appeal was rejected in November 2023 in a terse four-page ruling by a federal court. He contended that the evidence at trial was insufficient to sustain the conviction or to show that the proper venue for the trial was Texas. Kay also challenged the propriety of statements made by the prosecutor during her closing arguments.
The Angels declined to comment on Gerger’s court filing, in which he wrote that the Angels offered in November 2024 to pay Kay’s legal bills and did so for the following eight months.
The payments ceased when the judge in the Skaggs family’s civil case made a pre-trial ruling that both sides must accept Kay’s conviction and the facts established in his criminal proceedings. In other words, the Angels could not essentially re-try the criminal case against Kay, which eliminated their need to keep Kay’s appeals effort alive.
Gerger never received payment following the judge’s ruling.
