PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Brown University has filed a federal lawsuit to try to block the sale of the college application of John F. Kennedy Jr., which the school says was stolen.

The lawsuit filed Friday in California asks the court to bar the website MomentsInTime.com from auctioning off the documents and demands that the records get returned to the university.

“These records have significant historical value, not only to Brown, but to the country and the public at large,” the lawsuit says.

Website operator Gary Zimet referred comments Saturday to his attorney, who didn’t immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press.

MomentsInTime.com is asking for $85,000 for the documents to Kennedy’s time at Brown, which include his application and letters from his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to a Brown staffer discussing her son’s time at the school.

The lawsuit says Kennedy’s student file was stolen from the university sometime after 1983. It says after Kennedy graduated from Brown that year, his file was transferred to a “secure location” at Sayles Hall on campus, where it was put with other former students’ confidential files.

Zimet told The Providence Journal that a person hired to clean out a home in East Hampton, New York, found them, and Zimet got them through an intermediary about a week ago. Zimet told The Brown Daily Herald that “it would be nice if Brown ended up buying” the documents.

Kennedy died in a plane crash in 1999.

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