Carrie Fisher's brother Todd responds to Billie Lourd's claims he tried to 'capitalize' on her death
Carrie Fisher's brother, Todd Fisher, is hitting back after his niece Billie Lourd publicly accused him and his half-sisters of trying to "capitalize" on her mother's death.
"I take issue with what she said on every level," he told ET on Wednesday, hours after Lourd issued a statement confirming that her mother's siblings hadn't been invited to the late Star Wars icon's Hollywood Walk of Fame induction ceremony this week. Lourd also said, "They know why."
"There was no money made on anything," Todd Fisher insisted. "I did one 20/20 interview, and I didn't charge for that. I only did that because the pundits were making a big deal out of the fact that my mother died of a broken heart. And it was really annoying me because I didn't agree with that analysis."
Robert Smith/Patrick McMullan;Paul Archuleta/Getty Images Todd Fisher and Billie Lourd
He added that "months and months later, I wrote my personal memoir, called My Girls, which is a book about my sister and my mother and our life together over 60 years. That book, it's an homage to them. And it's not about their death, it's about their life. There's less than one chapter about death."
Carrie Fisher died Dec. 26, 2016, and her and Todd's mother, Debbie Reynolds, died the next day.
The family spat began to spill into public view on Tuesday, two days before Carrie was to be posthumously honored with a star on the Walk of Fame. Todd told TMZ that it was "heartbreaking and shocking" not to be invited to the event, and a day later his and Carrie's half-sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, shared similar sentiments on Instagram.
The remarks spurred Lourd to issue a rare public statement Wednesday, saying in part, "Days after my mom died, her brother and her sister chose to process their grief publicly and capitalize on my mother's death, by doing multiple interviews and selling individual books for a lot of money, with my Mom and my grandmother's deaths as the subject. I found out they had done this through the press. They never consulted me or considered how this would effect our relationship."
Lourd added, "To be clear — there is no feud. We have no relationship. This was a conscious decision on my part to break a cycle with a way of life I want no part of for myself or my children."
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