A minor child doesn't file a case against the estate the parents of the child does so. That is how the parents used such as a vehicle for them to gain control of the money claiming they are going to be trustees of the money for the child.
The flaw in such is if the courts refuse to accept the naked word of the mother and do a paternity test which is what rational courts will do which in turn is why most are smart enough to not try such nonsense. In the some instances people actually had the gumption to try it anyway but those instances simply provide examples of why not to bother since they failed.
There is no doubt in my mind that if Jeremy fathered a child he would have filed a claim contemporaneously. He did filed one decades later simply to be a pest it was not sincere. I consider it quite possible that he toyed with the idea of making up a child to try to take a run at the estates but ultimately realized such would not work and would only hurt so didn't end up doing such.
Whether Mike made it up or Jeremy really did make such claim to Mike matters little, either way Mike is spreading things that harm Jeremy and that he shouldn't be spreading if he actually were out to help Jeremy was he claims. If you run around telling people things that were told to you in private that the person doesn't wan released then you can't claim you are out to help them while betraying their trust.
Absolutely. However, the estate would have to be pretty damn certain that the claim was legitimate, WHICH, in the case of an ILlegitmate, with no father's name on the birth certificate and no DNA proof is going to prove difficult.
Let's examine what we know. Mike announced that Jeremy had a daughter. I believed, apparently erroneously, as I think, did others, that Jeremy had told him, but although it seem that Jeremy HAD told him that he'd "contemplated getting her to make a claim for her share of Mabel Speakman's estate" -making it clear that they HAD spoken of it, it appears that it was the daughter's mother -a close friend of Mike's- who'd revealed the "secret."
If we consider the time frame in which this "relationship" occurred, resulting in the birth of a child, I imagine it was highly unlikely that Jeremy went, hand in hand with the mother, perhaps carrying the child, to ensure that his name appeared on the birth certificate, establishing his paternity and responsibility, AND making her his legitimate heir. One wonders, during that time frame, quite WHEN Jeremy would have had the time to devote to such a courtship -if, indeed it WAS such- when there would have been SO many other things going on AND so many "eyes" on him, watching what was going on.
If Jeremy learned of his paternity whilst in prison, it's possible that he wasn't aware of a pregnancy and if he wasn't, how would he be certain he was responsible for it? For a man whose "quickies" were allegedly once a fairly regular part of his social life, and for whom "fidelity" seemed not to be part of his vocabulary, there MAY have been several who could make such claims and making such, on unsuspecting males, isn't unheard of.......................... which puts forward the possibility of a third person, in this equation, who may have been responsible for giving knowledge to one, resulting in us being given information by another.
A possible irony has just struck me. Patterns have an uncanny knack of repeating. Jeremy's biological family have expressed a disinclination to have anything to do with him. How bitter an irony would it be -IF there was a child- that it feels similarly inclined.