Angels stop paying jailed staffer Eric Kay’s legal fees, attorney says
The Angels stopped paying the legal fees of jailed former communications executive Eric Kay after the team reached a settlement with the family of deceased pitcher Tyler Skaggs in December.
In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorney David Gerger said he was withdrawing from representing Kay, who was convicted of providing Skaggs with the drugs that killed the baseball player.
“A third party who agreed to pay her legal fees and costs refused to pay, leaving Kay’s current attorney with more than $130,000 in unpaid fees and personal expenses,” Gerger wrote.
The third party is the Angels, who admitted during the Skaggs family’s wrongful death civil trial that they had been paying Kay’s legal fees for months. The case was settled Dec. 19 during jury deliberations, although the terms of the agreement, which followed 31 days of testimony and years of legal wrangling, were not disclosed.
Lawyers for the Skaggs family expressed concern when they learned months before 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 prison sentence for providing Skaggs with a counterfeit painkiller containing 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 convicted 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 argued that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to support the conviction or to demonstrate that the proper venue for trial was Texas. Kay also challenged the validity of statements made by the prosecutor during his 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 fees and did so for the next eight months.
The payments stopped when the judge in the Skaggs family’s civil case issued a pretrial ruling that both sides had to accept Kay’s conviction and the facts established in his criminal proceedings. In other words, the Angels could not essentially retry the criminal case against Kay, eliminating the need to keep Kay’s appeal efforts alive.
Gerger never received any payment following the judge’s decision.
