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‘Old Man’ From Pawn Stars Cuts Son Completely Out Of His Will

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A reality TV patriarch’s final act wasn’t on camera — it was in his will.

Richard “Old Man” Harrison, the gruff face behind History Channel’s Pawn Stars, died on June 25, 2018, at age 77 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease. Court documents that surfaced weeks later revealed he’d quietly rewritten his will in 2017, and the change was deliberate: his youngest son was written out entirely. The filing didn’t just skip Christopher Keith Harrison — it stated, in his father’s own words, that the omission was intentional.

• Richard updated his will in 2017, naming co-star and son Rick Harrison as executor of his estate and trust, filed in Clark County, Nevada.
• The amended will expressly cut out son Christopher Keith Harrison and his descendants, while leaving the estate to widow JoAnne and sons Rick and Joseph.
• The Blast first reported the will’s contents on July 17, 2018, prompting a brief statement from Rick Harrison calling it “a private matter.”

Legal Analysis of the Will

The original version of Richard’s will had named his wife JoAnne and all three sons — Rick, Joseph, and Christopher — as beneficiaries. The 2017 amendment changed that arithmetic without softening the language. Rather than simply omitting Christopher’s name, Richard addressed him directly in the document itself, a detail that made the story impossible to spin as a routine estate update.

“I would like to express my love and affection for Christopher Keith Harrison; however for the purposes of this Will, I have intentionally and with full knowledge failed to provide for him and his issue.”

That single sentence did two things at once — it affirmed affection for Christopher while permanently shutting him and any future heirs out of the estate. Neither the court filing nor the family offered a specific reason for the decision.

Rick Harrison’s Response

As executor, Rick Harrison was the one fielding questions once The Blast’s report went public. Through family spokesperson Laura Herlovich, he kept it short: “The family had previously discussed this information and it is a private matter.” No further explanation followed, and Rick — who has spent nearly a decade as the show’s central figure alongside his father — didn’t expand on what those prior family discussions entailed.

Fans looking for the kind of blunt honesty Pawn Stars built its brand on found themselves comparing this quiet handling to the way other celebrity families have managed inheritance disputes in public — usually with a lot more noise.

The Missing Harrison

Christopher Keith Harrison never appeared on Pawn Stars, a show that turned his father, brother, and nephew Corey into household names over its History Channel run. Corey Harrison, asked about the situation, made clear he had no interest in wading into the legal side of things and revealed something that underscored just how distant the relationship had become: he hadn’t seen his uncle Christopher in roughly 20 years, not since junior high school.

That gap — two decades without contact between an uncle and a nephew who spent his entire adult life on camera at the family pawn shop — did more to explain the will than any legal filing could. Whatever drove the estrangement, it long predated Richard’s 2017 revision.

A Private Matter, Publicly Litigated

The story broke the same week the country was still processing Richard Harrison’s death, and it turned a family’s private estate planning into tabloid fodder almost overnight. It’s the kind of scrutiny that tends to follow reality TV families once cameras stop rolling — the same dynamic that’s played out in coverage of other long-running reality TV family sagas once the cast’s real-life relationships spill past the edited version audiences saw on air.

Rick Harrison remains executor of an estate now divided between himself, his mother JoAnne, and his brother Joseph — with Christopher and any children he might have permanently excluded from whatever comes next.