Robin Williams
He did everything right: a funded trust, a prenuptial agreement, two homes carefully allocated. Then his widow and his three children spent a year in a San Francisco courtroom arguing over what the word “memorabilia” means, across a list of roughly 1,200 objects.
Robin Williams died on August 11, 2014, at his home in Marin County, California, at 63. He died by suicide; an autopsy later found diffuse Lewy body dementia.
He had done the planning. There was a revocable trust, amended more than once. There was a prenuptial agreement with his third wife, Susan Schneider Williams, whom he married in 2011. Two houses were separately accounted for — the Tiburon home he shared with Susan, and a property in Napa. His three adult children from earlier marriages — Zak, Zelda, and Cody — were provided for.
This is more than most people ever sign. It is more than Prince, Aretha Franklin, and Chadwick Boseman had between them.
It still produced fourteen months of litigation, because of a handful of nouns.
Four nouns and a house full of objects
The trust left the Tiburon residence and its contents to Susan. It then carved certain categories out of that gift and directed them to the children. The carve-out, as described in the filings, reached his clothing, jewelry, personal photographs taken before the marriage, memorabilia and awards from the entertainment industry, and the tangible personal property at the Napa house.
Read that on paper and it is perfectly clear. Now walk through the actual house.
Williams collected. Watches — reportedly close to ninety of them. Bicycles — more than fifty, high-end, several of them collectible. Antique weapons, theatre masks, rare books, art, action figures, and forty years of the accumulated debris of a career that ran from stand-up clubs to the Academy Awards.
Almost every object in that house could be argued into two categories at once:
- Is a watch “jewelry”? In December 2014 Susan Schneider Williams filed a petition in San Francisco Superior Court asking the court to construe the trust, taking the position that the watches were not jewelry in the ordinary sense and that certain items were property acquired during the marriage.
- Is a tuxedo “clothing”? The tuxedo he was married in was on the list. So were photographs from his 60th birthday — taken after the marriage, and so arguably outside a carve-out limited to photographs taken before it.
- Is a prop “memorabilia”? The children's side responded that objects around the house had informed their father's work and characters, and were exactly what the entertainment-memorabilia carve-out was written to capture.
Nobody here was inventing an argument. Both readings are available on the page. That is the definition of an ambiguous instrument, and an ambiguous instrument is an invitation to a judge.
A trust is private until someone asks what it means
The petition landed in front of Judge Andrew Cheng of the San Francisco Superior Court. Susan Schneider Williams also asked the court to address funds to maintain the Tiburon house, which she said she could not carry on her own. The children's side filed a response opposing what it characterized as an attempt to change the trust's terms.
In March 2015 the judge sent the parties to mediation over an itemized list of roughly 1,200 objects, directed the lawyers to meet before April 10, and set a further court date for late July. Two months of mediation later, several hundred items were still contested.
Here is the part worth flagging for anyone who chose a trust specifically to keep their affairs private. It worked, right up until it didn't. A funded revocable trust is not filed with the court and is not read into a public record — but the moment a beneficiary asks a judge what a clause means, the clause, the inventory, and the argument all become filings. Williams's bicycle count, his watch count, and the fight over his wedding tuxedo were reported worldwide because of a construction petition.
The same filings surfaced something nobody had known about.
What they agreed, and what it cost to get there
On October 2, 2015, the lawyers announced a settlement. Terms were not fully disclosed, but the reported shape of it was this: Susan Schneider Williams kept the Tiburon home for life, with funds provided to maintain it and pay its expenses; she kept the wedding gifts, selected clothing, a watch he often wore, and the bicycle the couple bought on their honeymoon. The children received the bulk of the collections — the bicycles, the watches, and the awards, including the Academy Award for Good Will Hunting.
Note what that settlement actually is. Stripped of the personal property, it is a life estate in the house for the widow, with a remainder to the children — the most common structure in blended-family estate planning, and one a lawyer could have drafted in an afternoon in 2011.
The family litigated for fourteen months and arrived at an arrangement the documents could have specified from the start. That is not a criticism of anyone in it. It is the ordinary gravity of an ambiguous clause: everyone behaves reasonably, everyone reads the same sentence differently, and the only body authorized to break the tie charges by the hour.
Attorneys for both sides said afterward that the parties were glad to have it behind them. The estate stayed quiet after that, which is more than several other names in this archive can claim.
Timeline
- Oct 2011Williams marries Susan Schneider. A prenuptial agreement is in place; his trust is later amended.
- Aug 11, 2014Williams dies at his Marin County home at 63.
- Dec 2014Susan Schneider Williams petitions the San Francisco Superior Court to construe the trust's tangible-property terms and to address upkeep of the Tiburon house.
- Early 2015The children's side responds, opposing any change to the allocation of memorabilia and awards.
- Mar 2015Judge Andrew Cheng directs the parties to mediation over a list of roughly 1,200 objects and sets an April deadline to meet.
- Mar–Apr 2015Filings make public a deed restricting exploitation of Williams's name, image and likeness for 25 years, with the rights transferred to the Windfall Foundation.
- Jul 2015Mediation narrows the list; several hundred items remain in dispute at a further hearing.
- Oct 2, 2015Settlement announced. Susan keeps the Tiburon home for life with maintenance funded; the children take the collections and the awards.
- Aug 11, 2039Earliest date any authorized commercial use of Williams's name, image or likeness may begin.
What actually went wrong
- Undefined ordinary words. “Jewelry.” “Clothing.” “Memorabilia.” Every one of them is obvious until it has to be applied to ninety watches and a wedding tuxedo. A defined-terms paragraph is cheap; a mediation over 1,200 objects is not.
- No schedule of tangible personal property. A signed, dated list — this watch to her, the bicycles to them — resolves the entire dispute on one page. Collections in particular need naming, not categorising.
- No stated answer for the marital home. Whether the surviving spouse gets the house outright, for life, or for a fixed period is the first question a blended-family plan has to answer in writing. Here it was answered by settlement, a year late.
- No mechanism for a tie. The trust named no arbiter for allocation disputes. A clause letting an independent trustee or a named appraiser make the final call on tangible property keeps that fight out of court entirely.
- Privacy assumed rather than engineered. The trust was never filed — but a construction petition put its terms, its inventory, and the family's arithmetic on a public docket anyway.
Would it have gone that way in Florida?
Partly. Florida would have handed the widow by statute much of what she got by settlement — and the word “memorabilia” would have been just as ambiguous here.
Three separate Florida rules bear on this, and only one of them is about vocabulary.
The house. The Tiburon property has a Florida analogue that is far less negotiable. If a Florida decedent's residence is homestead and a spouse survives, Fla. Const. Art. X, §4(c) and Fla. Stat. §732.4015 restrict how it may be devised at all. Where the restriction applies, the property descends under §732.401, which gives the surviving spouse a life estate with a vested remainder to the decedent's descendants. The spouse may instead elect, within 6 months of death, to take an undivided one-half interest as a tenant in common. Read that against the October 2015 settlement: the widow's life estate, with the children behind her, is the Florida default. It is available without a mediator, and it arrives whether the documents mention it or not.
That default can be waived — but only by a written waiver satisfying §732.702. A prenuptial agreement signed before the marriage can do it, and Florida does not require financial disclosure for a waiver signed before marriage. Signed after, disclosure is required. Williams had a prenuptial agreement; in Florida the first question anyone would ask is what, exactly, it waived.
The contents. Florida also removes a slice of the tangible property from the fight before a petition is ever filed. Under §732.402, the surviving spouse takes exempt property free of creditors and outside the will's directions: household furniture, furnishings and appliances in the decedent's usual residence up to a net value of $20,000 at the date of death, plus two motor vehicles. That does not reach ninety watches. It does mean the argument starts from a different place.
The words. On the central question, Florida offers no rescue. §732.6005 provides that the intent of the testator as expressed in the instrument controls, and a Florida court construing a trust does exactly what Judge Cheng was asked to do: read the instrument, and where a term is genuinely ambiguous, take evidence about what the drafter meant. A Florida judge would have had the same list of 1,200 objects and the same two defensible readings of “memorabilia.” Ambiguity is not a California problem.
The likeness. Williams's 25-year moratorium would work here, and it would sit comfortably inside Florida law. §540.08 makes unauthorized commercial use of a person's name, portrait, photograph or likeness actionable, and expressly extends that protection 40 years after death, enforceable by a surviving spouse, surviving children, or a licensee or assignee. Florida gives the right forty years; Williams's own deed silenced it for the first twenty-five. A Florida-domiciled Williams would have owned a clean statutory asset and could have restricted it the same way — by written deed, before death, with a named holder.
The practical instruction: if you own collections, do not describe them — list them. Sign a schedule of tangible personal property naming the significant items and who takes each one, refresh it when the collection changes, and name one person with final authority to allocate whatever is not on the list. If you are on a second or third marriage, put the answer for the house in writing in the same sitting, and confirm whether it is homestead before you assume you can leave it to anyone at all.
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Further reading
Third-party sites. Not ours, not endorsed, not kept current by us — just the places worth going next.
Sources
- Robin Williams' widow, kids settle fight over estate: attorneys — NBC News / AP, Oct 2 2015
- Robin Williams' family ends legal battle over actor's estate — Fox News / AP, Oct 2015
- Robin Williams' wife, children agree to meet out of court in estate fight — ABC7 / AP, Mar 2015
- Robin Williams' wife wants to keep his wedding tuxedo — ABC7 / AP, 2015
- Robin Williams' widow seeks clarification of trust terms — WealthManagement.com, 2015
- Robin Williams restricted use of his image for 25 years after his death — CBS News, Mar 2015
- Robin Williams restricted exploitation of his image for 25 years after death — The Hollywood Reporter, Mar 2015
- Robin Williams' hotly contested estate settles amicably — Archer Law, 2015
- Why Robin Williams won't be making millions beyond the grave — Forbes, Oct 27 2015
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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.