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Writer's pictureJenny Rozelle, Host of Legal Tea

Celebrity Estate Planning - Joan Rivers - Episode 165


Hey there, Legal Tea Listeners! This is your host, Jenny Rozelle. We’re back to “estate planning of the rich and famous” where we chat about celebrities and their estate planning (or lack thereof!). Today’s episode is on the very famous Joan Rivers, who I feel like everyone should know, but in case I have some young Legal Tea Listeners, she was one talented woman – an actress, a television host, an author, a comedian (she was hilarious!), etc. She was a woman of many talents! Actually, at her funeral, the eulogy being delivered by Howard Stern described Joan as “brassy in public, class in private … a troublemaker, trail blazer, pioneer for comics everywhere, … [who] fought the stereotypes that women can’t be funny.” I loved that description of her, so wanted to share it. Anyway, so yeah, today’s episode is on Joan – and as we always do on these types of celebrity estate planning episodes, we’re going to talk about Joan as a person, as a human first, then we will shift to what happened estate-wise following her death in ten years ago, in 2014.

According to her Wikipedia page, Joan was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York – a New York girl through and through! Did you know Joan Rivers was not her legal, real name? It was actually Joan Molinsky, but went by and was known as Joan Rivers. Kind of an interesting fun fact about her – I didn’t know that! She grew up and was raised in New York City-area and ultimately, graduated from Barnard College, a small private college in New York City, with A Bachelors in English and Anthropology. After college, we’re in the late 1950s now, she participated in a play called Driftwood with none other than Barbra Streisand. Then, in the 1960s, she got into comedy and where her world intersected with some of the comedic greats, Woody Allen and George Carlin, which George Carlin, by the way, I did a Legal Tea episode on!

The 1960s is also when she got into more “serious” acting and television, and is when she not only was in a film, Once Upon a Coffee House, but also the first time she appeared on The Tonight Show, when the host was Johnny Carson. As her Wikipedia notes, that’s really when things took off – they said “her profile skyrocketed.” Shifting to the 1970s, Joan was full-fledged involved in A LOT of different things and also when she started doing more writing – including a 3x a week article in the Chicago Tribune and she also published her very first book, Having a Baby Can be a Scream. In the 1980s and beyond, she continued to just be everywhere – on talk shows, on comedy shows, speaking, game shows, her writing, her acting, etc. She really was everywhere – hence how basically everyone knows who Joan is! This episode would be an hour long if I tried to go into everything she was involved in, honestly!

Personally-speaking, she was married twice – the first marriage was short (I think I remember reading it was like 6 months), but her second marriage to Edgar Rosenberg was much longer. Over 20 years actually – until his death in 1987. According to her Wikipedia page, the marriage was not a happy one, though, because four days after she asked Edgar for a separation, Edgar committed suicide – and some time after that, Joan described her marriage as a “total sham.” Together, however, Joan and Edgar had one child named Melissa. Joan never remarried after Edgar’s death and Melissa was Joan’s only child. Melissa had one child named Cooper – so Cooper, of course, was Joan’s only grandson.

Fast forward time to 2014, Joan was having a minor throat procedure. During the procedure, it was later released by federal officials that the clinic made several mistakes with the procedure – and sadly, subsequently she was put on life support and died a few days later on September 4, 2014. According to Wikipedia, her daughter, Melissa, did end up filing a lawsuit against the lawsuit and they ended up settling in mid-2016. Part of the settlement involved the Doctors accepting responsibility for Joan’s death.

Shifting to the estate side of things – it’s reported that Joan’s total estate was valued at around $150 Million Dollars, according to Business Insider. So, inquiring minds want to know – what happened to Joan’s fortune then? Well, if you’re a faithful Legal Tea Listener, you know that the last few celebrity estate planning episodes involved celebrities that did a good job with planning because there wasn’t a whole lot out there about their respective estates. Well, Joan here falls kind of in the middle, I suppose, because I can confirm she DID have an estate plan, which involved a Last Will and Testament. That means, her Will was put as part of public record once it was filed with the Probate Court – and I even found the actual document. I put it in the source links for this episode if you want to snoop. Interestingly, the Will DOES reference a “Rosenberg Family Trust” which was likely established while Edgar was still living.

The Will names three people as the Executors, the ones in charge, which include her daughter, Melissa, her business manager, Michael D. Karlin, and her good friend, Robert Higdon. From there, the Will is fairly undescriptive since it essentially said 1) these people are the ones in charge, my Executors, and 2) dump everything into my Trust. This kind of Will, as we have talked before here on Legal Tea, is informally in my own world called a Pourover Will. They call it a Pourover Will because, in essence, any assets of Joan’s going through her Will would “pour over” into the Trust. We don’t know specifics about the Trust, however, which is pretty common – but that’s where we’d find who SPECIFICALLY got what. Of course, as we’ve talked about, that’s the handy dandy thing about Trust planning. We don’t know. It’s private.

Now, there is one part of the Will which touches on something pretty specific – it relates to a property located in California that the Will claims that Joan owned a partial interest in. It states that Joan owned an interest and the other interest was owned by a Trust named Smallfish Trust that was being managed by … none other than Michael Karlin. Not sure what that was all about, but it seems to be that this house had something to do with her daughter, Melissa, because I believe, if I’m sort of connecting the dots in the Will, that Melissa was a beneficiary of the Smallfish Trust. I did some further digging and found an article from 2019 that shared Melissa was selling that specific house … so maybe it is where Melissa lived or something and Joan just had a partial ownership interest in the house. That’s my best educated guess!

Beyond that, there are plenty of articles out there that talk about all of these people inheriting from Joan’s estate – Melissa, of course, but also Cooper, her grandchild (Melissa’s child), niece and nephew, staff members, assistants, charities, etc. That was reported in Business Insider and Page Six (among some other resources I saw). I think we only know this … NOT because of seeing the Trust document, but some of those people and organizations have actually come out and said things about getting money. I suppose they could be makin’ stuff up, but I don’t know why they would! laugh So, here is what is being reported about some of those people:

-         According to Page Six, Joan’s nephew, Andrew Waxler, is married and his wife, Laurie Waxler, shared with The Post that Andrew received an inheritance. She said, “We didn’t know. She was an incredibly generous woman.” So, I’ll take that for her word … because that sounds like a confirmation Joan left something to her nephew (and likely niece, Caroline Waxler).

-         Also according to Page Six, Joan’s staff members, like assistance Jocelyn Pickett and Sabrina Lott Miller, as well as her publicist, Scott Currie, received money. Much like Joan’s nephew’s wife, Sabrina Lott Miller, who supposedly got something, said that Joan was “generous to a fault.” Scott Currie also essentially confirmed he got something and said, “Nothing can ever make up for the loss I feel every day. She was such a big part of my life for 25 years. She was an incredible lady.” Along these lines, Page Six said that a source close to things said that Joan was very, very close to her staff. Said source actually said, “I know that she [Joan] put some of their kids through school.”

-         Lastly, according to Page Six, Joan left money to some of her go-to and favorite charities like: Guide Dogs for the Blind in California; God’s Love We Deliver, which was a food pantry in Queens, New York, the Jewish Guild for the Blind in Manhattan, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and the Jewish Home and Hospital Foundation in Manhattan.

You know what I love about this episode? I think it beautifully exemplifies Joan being very giving with her money and it may sound cheesy to say, but her heart – to those that were near and dear to her. I say that after hearing about her possibly putting some of her staff members’ kids through school. It reminded me of something that I hear my own every day and normal clients say, which will be a positive little takeaway from this episode, which is … if you can and if it makes sense, you can gift things to those near and dear to you now. I don’t even mean money … I also mean things in your house, like jewelry or tools or whatever. I hear clients say that they get a lot of joy out of seeing their kids, grandkids, or friends wearing their jewelry, using their tools, driving a car they gave to someone, etc. So many people wait until AFTER they die and at that point, often I see things get tossed and donated quickly just to get the house cleaned out. I don’t know – just something to know and think of as we all age and accumulate money and things!

Alrighty, let’s wrap this episode up and shift to a sneak peak at next week. Next week we’re back to a “cautionary tale” episode where we talk about real-life clients, real-life cases that I, or my office, have worked on -or- maybe they are just generally good things to know/be aware of so you don’t slip up and turn into a cautionary tale one day. Next week, we are going to talk about something that may be a little taboo … and if not taboo, maybe a little juicy to talk about. It’s going to be about disinheriting people in your estate plan – and “how” to do it and “how” to NOT do it. So tune in for that next week, but until then, Legal Tea Listeners…take care and be well!

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