The Kevin Morris Mystery Grows

I've been posting about Kevin Morris for quite a while. in part because his story never quite adds up. As I posted last November,

. . . he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs.

But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, he met Hunter in 2019 at a Joe Biden fundraiser, Hunter impressed him, and the rest is history. He seems to have dropped his aspiration to become the John Updike of his generation, as well as his entertainment law career, and undertaken Hunter as his full time project.

This account of his deposition to the Comer committee last week fills in some blanks:

Comer revealed that Hollywood producer Lanette Phillips introduced Morris to Hunter Biden during a campaign event at her Los Angeles home for Joe Biden in the winter of 2019. One week later, Phillips called Morris to discuss what Morris apparently framed as an “entertainment” issue. Morris later visited Hunter at his home in L.A., according to the press release.

So Morris met Hunter via a connected intermediary at a time when he was easing out of his law firm and after his career as a writer failed to take off. It seems as if he was at loose ends, looking for something new. The story continues,

Morris testified he began providing money to Hunter Biden in January 2020. Then on Feb. 7, 2020, Morris emailed Hunter’s advisers and tax accountants, writing, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.” Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden filed his long-overdue 2017 and 2018 tax returns, although he didn’t pay his hefty tax bill at the time. Around Oct. 18, 2021, Morris paid some $2 million in overdue taxes for the president’s son.

In addition to paying Hunter’s taxes, Morris also paid for many of his living expenses and bought 13 of Hunter Biden’s paintings — two from before Hunter retained a gallerist and 11 after, with Morris paying $875,000 for the set purchased from the gallerist.

Lanette Phillips, the Hollywood producer, also introduced Hunter to George Berges in December, 2019, at the same time she introduced Hunter to Morris. However, it took another year for Hunter and Berges to establish a business relationship:

. . . in December 2020, Hunter and Berges executed a contract appointing the gallery owner as his exclusive representative, with Berges receiving a commission of 40 percent on sales. That contract, Berges testified, included a provision that required the gallerist to disclose to Hunter the identity of the purchasers of his paintings.

As Berges explained, that was not a typical contract term; he had never included a similar clause in any of his other contracts. “Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are,” Berges confirmed, adding that of the 15 or so artists he currently works with, none ask to know who purchased their artwork. Berges elaborated, stating, “It’s my collector base,” and you don’t want “your artists to circumvent you if they know your collectors.”

But it wasn't until 2023 that Morris purchased the bulk of Hunter's paintings:

Hunter Biden also knew the identity of Morris, who on Jan. 19, 2023, purchased, in the name of his LLC, Kuliaky Art, 11 paintings for $875,000. Berges explained that Morris had seen the paintings at Hunter’s exhibit in California in October 2021 and then negotiated the January 2023 sale with him by telephone.

Berges further explained that Morris did not pay the galley [sic] for the paintings, but instead paid Berges his 40 percent commission and then paid Hunter (or reduced his loan balance) separately.

. . . Why would Morris purchase paintings from Berges at all? As Berges testified, the reason gallerists don’t share the names of their buyers with the artists is so they aren’t cut out of the deal. Morris, however, likely didn’t want to ruin Hunter’s relationship with Berges, Berges reasoned. But that doesn’t explain why Morris wouldn’t have purchased art from Hunter before he had a gallerist.

Here we run into an interesting detail: Morris testified he had purchased two pieces of art from Hunter Biden before he had a gallerist. Why then wait for Hunter to enter a contract with Berges before purchasing more art? And why wait until January 2023, when he saw the art during an October 2021 exhibit?

As far as I can tell, the deal between Hunter and Berges was negotiated separately from Morris at the behest of Lanette Phillips, and Morris didn't buy paintings from Hunter via this route until months or years after that deal was made. Why did Morris buy paintings through Berges at all, especially if he'd already been giving Hunter "loans" through other channels? Nor was the deal lucrative for Berges:

Morris’ $875,000 represented a huge chunk of Hunter Biden’s total sales of $1.5 million. In fact, Morris’ purchase represented such an “outlier,” as Berges put it, that the Soho gallery owner hasn’t renewed his contract with Hunter and is considering dropping him as a client.

“I look at the totality,” Berges explained. “If I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is.”

“It’s not that impressive,” he concluded.

In other words, Berges is in business, and selling Hunter's paintings as "art" didn't make business sense, even if he earned commission from the sales. Margot Cleveland, the author of the piece, thinks the idea of funneling payments to Hunter via Berges's gallery fell apart due to public scrutiny during 2023, but it looks like Berges didn't particularly want the business, and the problem with the whole arrangement would have been that any money that went to Hunter via Berges would have been subject to a 40% commission, hardly an efficient way to do things.

What's hard for me to get around is the idea that Kevin Morris, at loose ends for a career after leaving his law firm in 2020 and having failed as a writer before that, was throwing millions of dollars around in "loans" to Hunter Biden, at least $875,000 of which was in a scheme Hunter seems to have worked out with George Berges via Lanette Phillips that never made a whole lot of sense for anyone involved, least of all Morris.

I think Morris is starting to look like one of Hunter's marks, and I'm just not sure he's all there. I've got to assume Abbe Lowell has got liens on Morris's properties to be sure he gets paid.