An attorney for the last president of the defunct Mount Ida College in Newton is asking that an effort to have him removed as a trustee of trusts worth hundreds of millions of dollars be argued outside of the public eye.

It’s just one aspect of the truly complex case of the trusts left by the late Rosalie K. Stahl. The latest hearing of the years-long dispute was attended Thursday by nearly a dozen attorneys representing an array of interests — including two attorneys from the state Attorney General’s office.

It’s a case so complex and multi-faceted that Middlesex County probate Judge Edward F. Donnelly began the morning’s hearing with a joke asking for a moment of silence for the “forests of trees killed” to produce copies of recent filings.

Attorneys representing one of the two Stahl daughters, Jolie Stahl, issued an emergency motion to have trustee Barry Brown, the former Mount Ida College president, removed from the Stahl trust due to what attorney Jeff Robbins called “egregious breaches of fiduciary duty.”

“Barry Brown committed more breaches of fiduciary duty than there are sands on the seashore,” Robbins said in court. “You could write a law school exam for how many breaches of fiduciary duty were found in this record.”

That motion was scheduled to be argued at the Thursday hearing in Middlesex County probate court, but Brown’s attorney Howard Cooper said that he was blindsided by the media attention, which was represented by one Herald reporter and one Herald photographer and asked that the judge consider hearing the arguments in his chambers and away from public view.

“Not knowing that this would happen today, I was not prepared,” Cooper said, to argue the case before the media. He asked for time to file a motion requesting such a change.

Brown was the eighth and last president of Mount Ida College. He started the job on July 1, 2012, following a career at Suffolk University Law School, including as provost and also acting president from 2010 to 2011. Mount Ida College closed in 2018 and the campus has since been acquired by UMass Amherst and operated as the university’s “Mount Ida Campus.”

Cooper and a lawyer for the other Stahl daughter, Robyn, said that Jolie Stahl’s legal team continuously makes “outrageous allegations” against Brown.

Cooper also accused Robbins, a lawyer for the Herald, of alerting the press to the public proceedings.

“I’ve been a judge since 1998. This is the third time I’ve had press in the courtroom that I know of and the first time was the day marriage licenses were issued to same sex couples,” Judge Donnelly said. “That’s how long ago that was.”

Donnelly set the next meeting date of April 10 at 9 a.m. for Cooper to argue his motion, but warned that there was little chance he would make a decision that day, so the actual motion to remove Brown will wait for a later date.