In late November dozens of family and friends scattered ashes of Montgomery "Buttons" Kaluhiokalani into the placid water off Waikiki Beach. Meanwhile, back on shore, a storm was brewing among those closest to the iconic Oahu-born surfer.
At least $45,000 has been raised online and through several fundraisers by well-wishers across the globe to help cover health care costs and other expenses for Kaluhiokalani, who was diagnosed with lung cancer last summer. The famed waterman, widely credited with helping to revolutionize surfing in the 1970s before struggling with substance abuse for decades, succumbed to the cancer Nov. 2 in Malibu, Calif.
In the wake of his death, unanswered questions over that money have brought a simmering feud between several of Kaluhiokalani’s oldest children and his longtime partner, Hiriata Hart, to a full boil. Now both sides say they’re considering legal action.
Several of Kaluhiokalani’s eight children, including Jonas and Adreanna Kaluhiokalani, and Angelica Marrero, say that Hart, who had two children with Kaluhiokalani, has repeatedly dodged inquiries over how the money was spent. They worry that Hart and others are still raising money using their father’s name without a proper accounting.
"We want it to be right," said Marrero, 26, on a recent evening outside her Pearl City home, surrounded by about a dozen other family members and friends. "This is about not capitalizing on Dad’s name."
Marrero and other family members say they’ve asked Hart for receipts and accountings for the costs — in part to see whether the funds might help them cover nearly $8,000 in mortuary and transport costs for Kaluhiokalani’s remains — but they’ve received no response.
"We confronted her on it because nobody had money to put up front at the mortuary," Adreanna Kaluhiokalani added. "She’s not communicating. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t reply."
Eddie Rothman, leader of the famed North Shore surf tribe Da Hui, paid approximately $5,000 of that total in order to bring Kaluhiokalani’s body back to Oahu from Malibu, according to family members and others Kaluhiokalani acquaintances. Rothman did not return calls for comment.
"We tried to ask for receipts," Marrero added. Hart "said she was going to get it, and she didn’t."
Hart disputes that. The family did speak with her but never asked for a specific accounting of the spending, she said.
"They never asked me for receipts," she said. "They never did."
Most of the money raised went to alternative medicine treatments in Malibu for Kaluhiokalani’s cancer, at a rate of $6,000 per week, Hart said. She said she did not have bills or receipts available for those treatments.
However, Hart shared a separate Dec. 3 bill she just got from St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., for $47,230 for his recent care there. Additional funds paid for airfare between California and Hawaii for the couple’s two children, as well as to help pay bills at home, Hart said.
"For 61⁄2 years I was with Buttons," she said. "I took care of him. When I met him, he was living in a tent. Where were they?"
Adreanna Kaluhiokalani, 23, and her older siblings counter they usually weren’t welcome to visit with their father when Hart was around.
Meanwhile, a page on the online fundraising website GoFundMe.com, "Button’s (sic) Battle to Fight the Good Fight," has raised just shy of $30,000 from 389 donors since its Aug. 23 launch by Hart acquaintance Cynthia Banuelos. The site, dubbed "the one and only official page to raise money for Button’s" (sic), remains open for more donations. Live fundraisers held at The Fix Sports Lounge and Night Club and Turtle Bay on Oahu, and Duke’s Malibu in California, raised additional thousands of dollars — though exactly how much is not clear. Hart put the total at about $45,000, and she said about $1,000 of that remains.
In Hawaii, raising money for a cancer patient doesn’t fall under the laws that govern charities, said Hugh R. Jones, supervisor of the state attorney general office’s Tax and Charities Division. However, in situations where funding is crowd-sourced, using platforms such as GoFundMe.com, those who organized the effort could be criminally liable if the money is diverted away from its stated purposes, Jones said.
The future of Kaluhiokalani’s Buttons Surf School, a successful Haleiwa-based business the waterman launched several years ago, also remains up in the air. The business is registered under Kaluhiokalani’s name with the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, although it’s flagged as "not in good standing." Its partners are listed as "at-will," and no managers are listed by name on the DCCA website. With his death and the family infighting, it’s not clear who ultimately would assume control if Kaluhiokalani’s school ever resumes.
Hart said she has power of attorney for Kaluhiokalani. She also said that he started to draft a will but never finished the task.
After Kaluhiokalani’s death, multiple media outlets (including the Honolulu Star-Advertiser) mistakenly identified Hart as his wife — there clearly had been widespread confusion over that issue. Minutes after the November ash-scattering ceremony ended, an attendee confronted Hart over whether she had purposefully misled the public to think she was Buttons’ wife — a notion Hart vehemently denied.
The two wore matching wedding rings, and Kaluhiokalani would publicly call her his wife, but she wouldn’t marry him partly because he was so deeply in financial debt, Hart said.
Minutes after the confrontation at the ceremony, during a picnic in Kapiolani Park to celebrate Buttons’ life, several relatives gathered next to a microphone to formally raise questions about the funds Hart had collected.
Hart stood about 20 yards off to the side, watching with friends, to see what would happen. Several picnic attendees, neutral to the conflict and tipped to what was about to occur, expressed discomfort at the scene. Ultimately, the relatives decided the picnic wasn’t the proper venue to air their concerns.
"There’s no answers. The kids are feeling hurt," Kawika Kaluhiokalani, Kaluhiokalani’s cousin, said during the recent gathering in Pearl City. "The whole family needs to be at peace. They need answers from her, which she is not giving. No answers."
Hart said she’s being unfairly attacked and that Buttons Kaluhiokalani was capable of making his own decisions — which often involved her.
"I feel like taking them to court," Hart said. "I’m going to do this legally. They can talk all they want, but they’re really pushing my buttons. They’re coming after nothing."
