WASHINGTON – The late multimillionaire owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, Irvin Feld, left a renowned business stunningly at odds with a bitter family legacy.

He built an empire of wholesome entertainment meant to bring families together, yet his own two children are so estranged they couldn’t even mourn with one another in peace.

The often sad family history behind “the greatest show on Earth” is being aired in court at a trial that starts Monday before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. Karen Feld filed a $110 million suit against her younger brother, Kenneth, for assault when they came together in the Jewish rite of sitting shiva for their dead aunt.

The suit filed by 63-year-old Karen Feld says her 62-year-old brother long wanted to harm her and control her life because he feared she would reveal facts about their father and family that could tarnish the image of the family business. Irvin Feld created Feld Entertainment, which Kenneth Feld now runs and bills as the world’s largest source of live family entertainment, including the circus, Disney on Ice, drag racing and monster truck shows.

Kenneth Feld has gone to great lengths to protect the family’s privacy; he even hired a prominent former top CIA covert operative to run a secret 8-year operation to spy on and divert an author who wanted to write a family history. The author’s revelations included Irvin Feld’s homosexuality, his wife’s suicide and his children’s long-running feud.

“What is more wholesome than Disney and the circus, on the surface? But I think what people have to realize is sometimes there’s a big difference between appearances and reality,” Karen Feld said in an interview with The Associated Press, the first either sibling has given on the case.

Karen Feld says her brother’s vendetta against her led to his ordering guards to throw her and the toy poodle that is her constant companion out of their aunt Shirley’s shiva in the Washington penthouse where they grew up. She said the guards beat her, inflicting severe injuries that required surgeries on her brain and knee.

Kenneth Feld, who lives in Tampa, Fla., declined to be interviewed.

But in court filings he denies her allegations and has filed a counterclaim against his sister for trespassing, accusing her of desecrating their aunt’s memorial with a blasphemous outburst. “She acted in an absolutely outrageous manner, completely disregarding the feelings of myself and everyone else that was in attendance at the shiva service,” Kenneth Feld said in a deposition.

In court filings, Kenneth Feld’s lawyers describe his sister as narcissistic and prone to “temper tantrums” during which she behaves unreasonably, yells obscenities and becomes extremely aggressive.

They point out other incidents in which she was restrained by authorities after explosive confrontations in the months after the shiva, including a fight with Transportation Security Administration agents before she boarded a flight and another confrontation during an Arlo Guthrie concert. Feld’s attorneys say Karen Feld tried to argue the same injuries and medical treatment arose after the concert as she did after the shiva.