One year after the drowning dying of Malcolm-Jamal Warner, his widow Tenisha Warner has filed a lawsuit towards the actor’s mother, who oversees his belief, looking for greater than $1.2 million in what she says are owed funds.
The go well with was filed Monday in DeKalb County Superior Court in Decatur, Georgia towards Pamela Warner, who the authorized paperwork names as “successor trustee of the Warner family trust.”
The beloved actor died on July 20, 2025 in a drowning accident whereas vacationing in Costa Rica. He was 54.
Warner and his spouse married on May 23, 2022 and signed a prenuptial settlement on May 15 of that year, in accordance with the go well with. They share a daughter, who has not been publicly named.
The go well with states that Warner, who got here to fame taking part in Theodore Huxtable on the favored Nineteen Eighties sitcom “The Cosby Show,” had “agreed to purchase and maintain a term life insurance policy on his life in the amount of $1,000,000.00” naming his spouse because the beneficiary, however failed to take action.
Tenisha Warner additionally alleges within the go well with that the actor did not make an agreed upon cost to her of $16,000 per year on their marriage anniversaries, which might now quantity to $50,542.46; didn’t keep a Roth Individual Retirement Account for her with the utmost contribution per year; and in addition didn’t pay her a promised wage of $5,000 per 30 days for performing as his chief of workers, amounting to $195,000.
“In total, the amounts due and owing to Plaintiff under the Agreement total no less than $1,276,042.46, together with prejudgment and post-judgment interest and Plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and costs recoverable under the Agreement,” the go well with states.
All the agreements and the monetary phrases are additionally mirrored within the prenuptial settlement, which is hooked up to the lawsuit.
In an announcement to NCS offered by her legal professional on Tuesday, Tenisha Warner mentioned that for the previous year she “attempted to privately settle my beloved husband’s complicated estate and honor his last wishes,” that her husband “had every intention” to offer for her and their nine-year-old daughter and “was close to finalizing a new estate plan to replace the stale plan created in 1996 when he was 26 years old, 20 years before we met and well before we gave birth to our beautiful daughter.”
“Sadly, he was unable to do so before we lost him. I have been struggling to care for our daughter as a single mom and now as her sole provider,” she mentioned within the assertion. “Legally, I had no choice but to take action to protect our rights before any potential statute of limitations expired.”
NCS has reached out to Pamela Warner for remark.
The star stored his spouse and baby’s id non-public whereas he was alive. In September 2025, Tenisha Warner posted a tribute to him on social media and introduced that she and their younger daughter have been launching an organization in honor of him.
“I can still hear my husband’s laugh, still feel the way he made room for every part of me — every tear, every dream,” she wrote on the time on a collection of household photographs.
The actor’s mother posted a lengthy note on his memorial Instagram account Monday to honor the one-year anniversary of his dying. “It is the parent that leaves first and leaves the child/children to continue on with their lives. But what do you do when this is out of order and the child/children leave first?” she wrote.
“This is where I found myself July 20, 2025. And this is what I awoke to July 20, 2026,” his mother, who early in Malcolm’s profession additionally served as his supervisor, wrote. “How can I be here and my child is not?”