One year after the drowning death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner, his widow Tenisha Warner has filed a lawsuit against the actor’s mother, who oversees his trust, seeking more than $1.2 million in what she says are owed funds.
The suit was filed Monday in DeKalb County Superior Court in Decatur, Georgia against Pamela Warner, who the legal paperwork names as “successor trustee of the Warner family trust.”
The beloved actor died on July 20, 2025 in a drowning accident while vacationing in Costa Rica. He was 54.
Warner and his wife married on May 23, 2022 and signed a prenuptial agreement on May 15 of that year, according to the suit. They share a daughter, who has not been publicly named.
The suit states that Warner, who came to fame playing Theodore Huxtable on the popular 1980s 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 wife as the beneficiary, but failed to do so.
