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Celebs Who Completely Stiffed Their Spouses In Their Wills

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Even in death, some marriages end with one spouse getting absolutely nothing.

Estate planning gets messy for anyone, but when a celebrity dies with an estranged, divorcing, or simply unloved spouse still on paper, the will becomes a public battlefield. Nicki Swift’s video “Celebs Who Completely Stiffed Their Spouses In Their Wills” runs through four cases where a famous name deliberately cut a husband or wife out of the estate — sometimes decades before the marriage even happened. The results ranged from quiet settlements to courtroom sagas that dragged on for years.

• Ric Ocasek excluded estranged wife Paulina Porizkova from his will before his September 2019 death, claiming she had “abandoned” him even though she was living with him and caring for him after surgery when she found his body.
• Larry King used a handwritten holographic note in late 2019, amid his divorce from seventh wife Shawn Southwick King, to direct that 100% of his estate go to his children — a change contested in court after his January 2021 death.
• Brittany Murphy left her entire estate to her mother, Sharon Murphy, in a will written before she married Simon Monjack and never updated, meaning Monjack inherited nothing when she died in December 2009.

Ric Ocasek’s Final Word to Paulina Porizkova

The Cars frontman and the supermodel were technically still married but going through a divorce when Ocasek died in September 2019. They were, by Porizkova’s own account, still living under the same roof — she had been nursing him through recovery from surgery and was the one who discovered him unresponsive. Despite that, Ocasek’s will explicitly cut her out, framing her as having “abandoned” him during the split.

That language mattered because it went straight at the legal protections a surviving spouse normally has. Most states allow a spouse to claim an “elective share” of an estate even if a will tries to disinherit them — but that right can be challenged if the deceased argues abandonment. Porizkova’s situation became a flashpoint for exactly that debate, with her finances left in limbo despite decades of marriage to a rock icon.

Larry King’s Handwritten Override

Larry King had already built out a formal estate plan, but in late 2019, while his divorce from Shawn Southwick King was pending, he scrawled a new instruction by hand: everything, split entirely among his children, with Shawn getting nothing. That kind of document is called a holographic will, and it’s legal in many states — but it’s also exactly the sort of thing lawyers love to fight over.

King died in January 2021, and the note surfaced almost immediately as a point of contention. Shawn’s team argued the handwritten change didn’t meet the legal bar to override his prior, formally drafted estate plan, setting up a battle over whether a few scribbled lines from a man in the middle of a divorce could really erase a spouse’s claim to everything he’d built over a decades-long broadcasting career.

King’s note gave 100% of his estate to his children and nothing to Shawn — a single handwritten paragraph written amid a divorce that was never finalized before he died.

Brittany Murphy Never Updated Her Will

Brittany Murphy’s case is less about spite and more about inertia — though the outcome was the same. She drafted her will before marrying Simon Monjack, naming her mother, Sharon Murphy, as the sole beneficiary. After the wedding, she simply never went back and revised it. When she died suddenly in December 2009, that old document stood, and Monjack was left with no inheritance at all, despite being her husband at the time of her death.

Anna Nicole Smith and the Marshall Fortune

The oldest and most drawn-out case belongs to Anna Nicole Smith. Oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall married Smith in 1994, when she was 26 and he was in his late 80s. When Marshall died just 14 months later in 1995, his existing will named his son as the sole beneficiary — Smith wasn’t in it at all. She spent years afterward arguing in court that Marshall had promised her half his fortune outside the formal will, a fight that outlived both Smith and Marshall and became one of the longest-running estate disputes in celebrity history.

The Pattern Behind the Paperwork

What links Ocasek, King, Murphy, and Marshall isn’t just bad luck — it’s timing. Every one of these disinheritances happened either right before death, in the middle of a divorce, or simply because a will was left frozen in time before a wedding ever took place. It’s the same dynamic that shows up again and again in celebrity divorce fallout — money and paperwork outlasting the marriage itself, and lawyers left to sort out what a spouse actually promised versus what they legally wrote down. It’s also why prenups and postnups get so much attention in cases like multiple-marriage celebrity estates, where the paper trail ends up mattering more than the relationship ever did.

Larry King’s estate fight was still working through the courts when he died in January 2021, with Shawn Southwick King’s attorneys continuing to press the case that the handwritten note shouldn’t stand. However that one gets resolved, it’s already a case study lawyers will cite for years on exactly how much a few lines of handwriting, dated in the middle of a divorce, can or can’t override a lifetime of estate planning.