In an explosive 100-page countersuit filed Wednesday, music mogul David Geffen slams crypto magnate Justin Sun’s attempt to claw back a prized Alberto Giacometti sculpture, Le Nez, that Geffen acquired from Sun’s collection. Geffen alleges that Sun’s lawsuit, alleging that the piece was sold without his knowledge, is an utter fraud, and he is asking for a court to grant him clear title. The conflict pits an established, 82-year-old billionaire collector against a 34-year-old billionaire who admits that he is newer to the art game and who says that he was duped into selling the piece by an employee. Sun argues that Geffen should have known the sale was bogus all along.
“Seller’s remorse is not a basis to sue,” Tibor Nagy, Geffen’s attorney, said in an emailed statement. “Fortunately, most reasonable and serious people realize that, not Justin Sun. Our filing separates his fiction from the facts and lays bare for the public the bogus claims he has brought. Courts of law are the wrong arena for publicity stunts.”
Hong Kong-based Sun filed a suit in February in New York, where the sculpture now resides, claiming that one of his employees, a woman named Xiong Zihan Sydney, stole it from him and sold it to Geffen without his knowledge. Sun bought the bronze, steel, and iron sculpture (conceived in 1949 and cast in 1965), featuring a stylized human head with an extended nose in an open metal frame, with Xiong’s assistance at the Sotheby’s New York auction of the Macklowe collection in November 2021 for $78.4 million. He admits that he later expressed interest to her in selling the piece, but only if a buyer was willing to pay at least $80 million.
Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez. Conceived in 1947; this version conceived in 1949 and cast in 1965. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
In the meantime, he said on social media that he would donate the work to his APENFT organization, a cyber-exhibition platform. He never made that donation, he now says (he previously said he did), but he did lend the work to an exhibition at the Institut Giacometti in Paris in 2023. Through a series of subterfuges, possibly made-up lawyers, fictitious other interested parties, and forged documents, Sun says, Xiong swindled him out of the work, “with the intention of pocketing at least hundreds of thousands of dollars for herself.”
Sun claims that Xiong exchanged Le Nez for two unnamed paintings from Geffen’s collection, valued at $55 million, plus an additional $10.5 million in cash. The total sale price, according to Sun, was $65.5 million—far below the $80 million he wanted.
Sun alleged that Geffen should have noticed red flags in the transaction, including the unusual inclusion of a Chinese lawyer with a Gmail account. Sun alleges that in May 2024 Xiong confessed to the fraud, in which she wrongly had the work transported, after the Paris exhibition, not to Sun’s storage facility in Singapore but rather to an art warehouse in Delaware under the control of art dealers David and Cole Tunkl.
Chinese-born crypto founder Justin Sun eats a banana artwork composed of a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape, in Hong Kong on November 29, 2024, after buying the provocative work of conceptual art by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan at a New York auction for $6.2 million. Photo: Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images.
Geffen’s blazing filing goes point for point, itemizing and responding to Sun’s claims. “Denied… Denied… Denied,” is the refrain, sprinkled with some “Geffen lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief about the truth of the allegation,” for example about the extent of Xiong’s role working for Sun.
Geffen, who features in ARTnews’s top 200 collectors list, has a collection that is reportedly worth $2 billion and features works by iconic artists like David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Sun famously bought Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) at Sotheby’s New York for $6.2 million, and then, in a predictable publicity stunt, ate the banana at a press conference. (He then moved to quash a skeptical CoinDesk article on the gag.) At about the same time, he invested some $30 million in World Liberty Financial, U.S. President Donald Trump’s crypto business, even as he was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. World Liberty is seen by critics as a means for people to buy influence with the White House.
David Geffen in New York City, 2019. Photo: Paul Bruinooge / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.
Fifty-two pages in, Geffen begins leveling dramatic counterclaims.
“This lawsuit is a sham,” he begins, saying that after Sun and Xiong tried to resell the two paintings they received from him as part of the deal, they cooked up the lawsuit. “In or about November 2024,” claims Geffen, “Xiong stated on a phone call with David Tunkl that, since the Tunkls were unable to sell the Two Paintings at a high enough price, Sun intended to hire U.S. lawyers to contrive a lawsuit to pressure Geffen to rescind the deal.”
Why was Sun so eager to sell the Giacometti? The suit points out that cryptocurrency markets were crashing throughout 2022 and 2023, and that in November 2023, hackers stole some $115 million from platforms owned by Sun.
Despite working for over a year, the pair could allegedly find no buyers for the two paintings included in the Geffen deal.
A fraudulent lawsuit would be, the complaint says, in keeping with past misdeeds: “Sun has been sued by numerous former employees who have alleged that he forced them to engage in ‘unethical and/or illegal business activities.’”
The filing points out that Sun, who insists he be referred to as “His Excellency” (he refers to himself that way on his website) inexplicably lists Xiong, who has supposedly conspired against him, as director of APENFT on the organization’s website to this day; he also has never filed a police report against her for the supposed theft, according to the suit.
The suit names other alleged inconsistencies and irregularities. For example, it claims that Sun deleted incriminating WhatsApp messages with the Tunkls about wishing to “reclaim” Le Nez before filing the suit. It says that successive lawyers for Sun (Pryor Cashman at first, followed by the improbably named Harder Stonerock) have given conflicting claims about where the $10.5 million payment ended up. And at different times, Xiong has indicated two different dates on which she supposedly forged Sun’s signature, and different reasons for the forgery, first saying it was simply the result of time constraints, later confessing that it was fraud.
Sun alleges to have only limited knowledge of APENFT, which he founded (and which was initially called JustFNT, after him). The organization never collected artworks, he says, even though he has very publicly declared that he made donations of works by market titans like Pablo Picasso (a $20 million canvas) and Andy Warhol to APENFT, ultimately making its collection worth $100 million, he has claimed.
How, the suit asks, can Sun claim that Xiong never had authority to make deals on his behalf, when in fact she bid on the Giacometti on his behalf in the first place? It furthermore provides abundant evidence of her central role as advisor to Sun on his collecting works by Cattelan, Giacometti, Picasso, and Warhol.
UPDATE, April 17, 2025: On Thursday, Sun’s lawyer, William Charron of Pryor Cashman, emailed a statement refuting essential aspects of Geffen’s countersuit.
“It is highly unwise for Mr. Geffen to have staked his case on his proclaimed innocence of Sydney Xiong,” said Charron. “Ms. Xiong confessed to her theft, she was arrested in China and is in detention in China today. In spite of these facts, Mr. Geffen goes all-in on the idea that Ms. Xiong was not a thief; that she supposedly spoke for Mr. Sun at all times; and that she is walking freely in China today. Mr. Geffen’s pleading is extremely misguided.
“More very compelling details will come out through the fullness of this litigation,” said Charron. “We eagerly look forward to litigating this case and to recovering Mr. Sun’s property.”
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