Larry King
Two months after filing for divorce, he wrote a page by hand replacing the will that named his wife as executor. It became a two-year fight — over roughly two million dollars, while the assets that actually mattered sat quietly in trusts the page could not touch.
Larry King was hospitalised with COVID-19 on January 2, 2021. He recovered from the virus and died three weeks later, on January 23, 2021, of sepsis, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87.
He had signed a will in 2015 naming his wife, Shawn Southwick King, as executor. On August 20, 2019 he filed for divorce — his second petition against the same marriage, after an earlier one in 2010 that ended in reconciliation. The 2019 petition was still pending when he died, which means that on the day of his death she was still his wife.
And in October 2019, two months after filing, he wrote out a page by hand — no lawyer, no witnesses — directing that his estate go to his children.
In February 2021 that page was offered to the probate court. Shawn King went to court to contest it.
A holographic will, in the one state where that works
California recognises the holographic will: under Probate Code §6111, a will is valid without witnesses if the signature and the material provisions are in the testator's own handwriting. No notary. No attorney. No witnesses at all.
So the October 2019 page was not a curiosity or a note-to-self. Offered in a California court, it was a legal instrument competing with the 2015 will, and the later document prevails over the earlier one to the extent they conflict — if it is valid.
That “if” is where a holographic will spends its whole life. A witnessed will comes with two people who can testify that the testator signed, appeared to know what he was doing, and was not being leaned on. A handwritten page comes with nobody. The proponent has to prove the handwriting, the signature, the testamentary intent, and the capacity, all from the paper and the circumstances.
Shawn King's filing raised exactly those questions. She alleged that King's son, Larry King Jr., had exerted undue influence over his father toward the end of his life, and that the handwritten page conflicted with the 2015 will under which she had been named executor.
Those were allegations. No court finding of undue influence has been publicly reported, and none should be read into anything here.
Two million dollars, and everything else
Here is the part almost every account of this case buries.
The probate estate was reported at roughly $2 million. King's more valuable holdings were reported to be assets held in trusts — and a will has no power over a trust asset. None. A will speaks only to property that passes through probate: things titled in the decedent's sole name with no beneficiary designation and no survivorship feature.
Everything else moves on its own rails, decided by paperwork signed years earlier:
- Trust assets pass under the trust document to the trust's beneficiaries, administered by the trustee, with no probate judge involved.
- Retirement accounts and life insurance pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form — a form most people last touched when they opened the account.
- Joint accounts and joint real estate with survivorship rights pass to the surviving owner by operation of law on the date of death.
- Pay-on-death and transfer-on-death registrations do the same thing for bank and brokerage accounts.
So the handwritten page was a fight over the residue — the part nobody had bothered to retitle. This is the single most common misconception in American estate planning: people believe the will is the plan. The will is the catch-all at the bottom of the plan. If you want to change where the money goes, you change the trust, the deed, and the beneficiary forms. Rewriting the will and stopping there rearranges the leftovers.
The divorce that never finished, and the case that kept going
The pending divorce is the quiet structural fact underneath everything. A filed petition is not a finished divorce. Until a court enters a judgment of dissolution, the parties are married, and every right that attaches to being a spouse — inheritance rights, elective rights, community-property rights, insurance and retirement defaults, the priority to make funeral decisions — remains fully in place. King's petition had been pending for seventeen months when he died.
The litigation did not end with the will contest. In October 2022, Shawn King filed a separate $100 million suit against King's business management firm, Blouin & Company, and its executives, alleging that they had conspired to move money and open accounts without her knowledge. That case went to mediation on May 21, 2024 and was reported settled by July 18, 2024, on confidential terms, with both sides agreeing to dismiss their claims. A settlement is not an admission by anyone of anything.
As of August 2026, no public ruling on the validity of the October 2019 handwritten page has been reported. Five and a half years after a death, over an estate reported at about two million dollars, that is its own kind of answer.
Timeline
- 1997King marries Shawn Southwick. It is his seventh marriage.
- 2015King signs a will naming Shawn King as executor of his estate.
- Aug 20, 2019King files for divorce. The petition is never brought to judgment.
- Oct 2019King writes out a page by hand — unwitnessed — directing his estate to his children.
- Aug 2020Two of King's children die within weeks of each other.
- Jan 2, 2021King is hospitalised with COVID-19.
- Jan 23, 2021King dies of sepsis at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at 87, still married and still mid-divorce.
- Feb 2021The handwritten page is offered to the probate court. Shawn King goes to court to contest it, alleging undue influence and pointing to the 2015 will.
- Oct 2022Shawn King files a separate $100 million suit against King's business management firm and its executives.
- May–Jul 2024That separate case is mediated and reported settled on confidential terms, with mutual dismissals.
- Aug 2026No public ruling on the validity of the October 2019 page has been reported.
What actually went wrong
- A will rewritten by hand, alone. A witnessed instrument brings two people who can speak to the signing. A handwritten page brings nothing but the page — which is why it invites a capacity-and-influence fight even where the form is legally valid.
- A divorce filed and left pending. Seventeen months of spousal rights, unchanged, because a petition is not a judgment. Filing changes your intentions; only a decree changes your legal status.
- The wrong document amended. The page reached about $2 million of probate assets. The trusts, the beneficiary designations, and the jointly titled property were untouched by it — and those were the valuable ones.
- No coordination between the estate plan and the divorce. These are two lawyers who often never speak to one another. Everything signed during a pending dissolution has to be reviewed against everything signed before it.
- Two beneficiaries who died first. Two of the children died in 2020, between the writing of the page and the death. A document written for a family and never revisited is a document written for a family that no longer exists.
Would it have gone that way in Florida?
The page is worth nothing in Florida. And it would barely have mattered, because a will only ever reached about a tenth of this estate.
Three Florida rules apply, and they answer three different questions.
Is the page a will? No. Fla. Stat. §732.502(1) requires a Florida will to be signed by the testator at the end, in the presence of two attesting witnesses, who must then sign in the presence of the testator and of each other. Handwriting is fine — witnesses are not optional. And Florida closes the escape route: §732.502(2) honours an out-of-state will if it was valid where executed, except a holographic or nuncupative one. So a California-valid holographic will, brought here by a person who retires to Florida, is still void. The 2015 will would control, and the October 2019 page would be evidence of nothing but a state of mind.
Did the divorce filing cut out the spouse? No. §732.507(2) provides that a provision of a will affecting the testator's spouse is void upon dissolution of the marriage, and the will is then read as if the spouse had died at the time of the dissolution. The operative word is dissolution — the entry of a judgment. A pending petition does nothing at all. Someone who dies with a divorce halfway through dies married, with a spouse who holds every statutory right a spouse holds. Florida practitioners see this constantly, and it is almost always a surprise to the family.
Could a Florida spouse be cut out by moving everything into trusts? No — and this is where Florida is unusually strong. A surviving spouse may elect to take 30% of the elective estate under §732.201 and §732.2065, and §732.2035 defines that elective estate to reach far past probate: property in a revocable trust, pay-on-death, transfer-on-death and in-trust-for accounts, the decedent's fractional share of joint property with survivorship, life insurance on the decedent's life, pension and retirement benefits, the homestead, and certain transfers made within a year of death. Florida deliberately built the elective share to defeat exactly the manoeuvre of leaving a small probate estate and a large trust. In California, community property does related work by a different route; in Florida, it is a single statutory percentage reaching almost everything.
The honest caveats. The elective share can be waived — by a valid prenuptial or postnuptial agreement satisfying §732.702, which needs no financial disclosure if signed before the marriage. And it has a hard deadline: §732.2135 requires the election within 6 months after service of the notice of administration, or 2 years after death, whichever is earlier. Miss it and the right evaporates, regardless of merit.
One more Florida rule worth knowing for a case like this. Two of King's children died between the writing of the page and his death. Florida's antilapse statute, §732.603, saves a gift to a beneficiary who predeceases the testator only if that beneficiary was a grandparent or a descendant of a grandparent — which a child is. So a child's share would generally pass to that child's own descendants rather than lapsing into the residue. That is the default; a well-drafted document says so expressly instead of relying on it.
The practical instruction: when a marriage ends, treat the estate plan as part of the divorce file, not a separate errand — and remember that until the judgment is signed you are married for every purpose the law cares about. Then go past the will. Pull the trust, the deed, and every beneficiary form, and make them all say the same thing. A will you rewrite by hand at midnight changes the smallest part of your estate and the largest part of your family's next two years.
What people ask us about this.
Further reading
Third-party sites. Not ours, not endorsed, not kept current by us — just the places worth going next.
Sources
- Larry King — Wikipedia (Estate section, with citations)
- Larry King: talk show host's widow contests handwritten will — BBC News, Feb 17 2021
- Larry King had a secret will that excluded his wife — estate planning gets messy — MarketWatch, Feb 2021
- Larry King's widow settles legal battle with his management firm over his fortune — Yahoo Finance, Jul 18 2024
- Larry King dies at 87 — CNN, Jan 23 2021
- Larry King, TV host who interviewed everyone, dies at 87 — The New York Times, Jan 23 2021
- Fla. Stat. §732.502 — Execution of wills — The Florida Senate
- Fla. Stat. §732.2035 — Property entering into the elective estate — The Florida Senate
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Nearly every case in this archive turned on something ordinary — an unwitnessed page, a stale beneficiary line, a document nobody could find. Those are cheap to fix while you're alive and expensive to fix afterward.