The warring family of Dallas Cowboys’ Tyron Smith have been accused in a row over $1 million missing from the NFL star’s bank account.
A lawyer for Smith has claimed the player’s mother and her step children have continually demanded money from the 21-year-old offensive tackle.
Dallas-based attorney John Schorsch warned that a legal action will follow a ‘forensic’ review of the his accounts.
But Smith’s mother, Frankie Pinkney, denied that the family took any of the money without his agreement or harassed or threatened him in any way.
‘I don’t know anything about any missing money,’ Pinkney told SportsdayDFW, the official sports website of the Dallas Morning News.
‘The money that we did receive from Tyron was all accounted for and everything is in writing, and he’s authorised all of it.’
Last Tuesday police responded to a 911 call from Smith’s North Dallas home after two of his step sisters, Tiari Dennis and Brittany Pinkney, were among at least three people outside his front door.
They were there to ‘harass and torment’ him ‘in the pursuit of collecting financial gain,’ according to the police report.
The latest incident comes after Smith filed a family safety protective order in the summer against his stepfather, Roy Pinkney, and his mother to keep them from having any contact with him or his live-in girlfriend Leigh Costa.
In an email statement to the Dallas Morning News, Pinkney denied any family demands for money and blamed her son’s girlfriend for the feud.
She backed her daughters and said her that her son had ‘hurt’ and ‘betrayed’ her. Pinkney who owns a cleaning business in Riverside, California, claimed 26-year-old Costa would not let her daughters in the door.
Pinkney told the paper: ‘They had not seen nor talked to him in months due to a family disagreement, which by the way, was not about finances.’
The Morning News quoted sources which claimed the NFL player gave his family a substantial amount of money after signing a four-year, $12.5 million contract in July 2011 after he was drafted from the University of Southern California.
Pinkney would not say how much money her son gave her.
Burt Smith’s lawyer hit out at the ‘parasite mentality’ surrounding professional athletes.
He added: ‘I’m not certain of the amount of money that’s gone. I would suggest that the numbers are in the seven digits that need to be accounted for.
‘I don’t know how much of that, if any, is a legitimate gift and how much of that is squeezed out of him or how much of that is flat out taken. And I know of the latter two categories it’s a bunch.
‘I’m going to make sure all the money is justified and it’s not going to be pretty.’
Smith declined to comment to the paper when approached in the Cowboys’ locker room earlier this week.
