176: Behind the Headlines: Gene Hackman’s Estate Plan and What We Can Learn

In this episode of Absolute Trust Talk, Kirsten Howe, managing attorney at Absolute Trust Counsel, and associate attorney Jessica Colbert examine the estate of beloved actor Gene Hackman. They meticulously analyze the available court records from Santa Fe County, New Mexico, and contrast them with California’s probate procedures. The attorneys skillfully debunk sensationalized headlines about Hackman’s will, explaining the mechanics of pour-over wills and why media claims about his children being “cut out” are potentially misleading. While much of the discussion is speculation, they provide valuable insights into how proper estate planning anticipates contingencies like beneficiaries predeceasing the trustor. This episode demonstrates why understanding the difference between public court filings and private trust documents is crucial for anyone planning their estate.

Time-stamped Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

2:39 Unraveling the court filings: What exactly was submitted in Santa Fe County after Gene Hackman’s death?

3:46 Who is Julia Peters, and how did she become the personal representative of Hackman’s estate?

5:00 California vs. New Mexico: Next, let’s dive into how “informal probate” creates a dramatically different process.

7:03 Separating fact from fiction: What headlines get wrong about Hackman’s estate planning.

8:05 “His children are cut out.” Here, Kirsten and Jessica debunk the sensational claims about Hackman’s will.

10:00 The unexpected twist: What happens when a primary beneficiary predeceases the trustor?

11:44 The mysterious “GEBE” trust is revealed. Listen in as Kirsten and Jessica explore Hackman’s power of appointment.

13:32 Why Hackman’s true wishes may remain private forever – Unless litigation changes everything.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Absolute Trust Talk. This is our podcast at Absolute Trust Council, and I’m Kirsten Howe. I’m the managing attorney at Absolute Trust Council. Jessica Colbert, one of our associate attorneys, is here today with me, and we’re going to do one of our, or maybe my favorite, things that we do on the podcast we’re going to talk about a celebrity estate and then a celebrity estate plan. And this is a very timely episode.

We’re talking about Gene Hackman’s estate, and just over the weekend, some information about his estate came out. I’m excited to talk about this for a bunch of reasons, one of which is that I absolutely love Gene Hackman. His movie, “The Conversation,” is probably on my top five list of Greatest Movies of All Time. And his death happened in kind of an unusual way, a mysterious way, for a number of days. And I think a lot of us, myself included, were just kind of glued to CNN, Entertainment Tonight, and whatever we could find out about his death until we found it out.

For a variety of reasons, this is very interesting to me, and it’s also going to be educational for our audience. So, it’s a legitimate episode, but we do get to talk about a celebrity’s estate plan, so yay. I’m very excited.

I’m just going to give our typical or common caveats when we have an episode like this. We’re going to be talking about a death that happened in New Mexico, and that’s where he lived. We are not New Mexico attorneys. We do not know New Mexico law, so we might be saying some things that are really based on California law, and we’ll be drawing distinctions, but we don’t know if it’s varying from New Mexico law, we really don’t know. All we can do is speculate. The other thing is that there are estate planning documents in Gene Hackman’s case, but we have not been able to obtain or see copies of Mr. Hackman’s estate planning documents. There’s at least one news source that claims to have seen them and to have copies, and so some of what we’re going to be talking about is based on what they say they are reading in his documents.

We have been able to look at the relevant court website, so we can see what has actually been filed and transpired in the court. Jessica, let’s start talking about what we can see from the court records. These are official records in New Mexico, Santa Fe County.

Yes, so we are able to see that on March 6, there were several documents filed in probate court in Santa Fe County. Like you said, that’s where Gene Hackman had lived. On March 6, an application for informal probate of will and appointment of personal representative was filed, an order for informal probate of will and appointment of representative was filed, acceptance of appointment as personal representative, letters testamentary, and, of course, Gene Hackman’s Will were all filed on that day. Filed the very next day was a notice of appointment of a personal representative and a notice to creditors.

The individual responsible for all of this, the petitioner who filed these documents, is Julia Peters. She is also listed in the court records as the personal representative. From what I have gathered outside the court records, Gene Hackman’s Will designates his wife, Betsy, as his personal representative. There was also an alternate personal representative who predeceased Mr. Hackman, which means Julia Peters became the next appointed personal representative. Thus, it appears she was aware that her two superiors were unable to fulfill their roles due to their passing, prompting her to proceed with filing the petition.

So this, what we’re seeing in the court record is different from what we would see in California. Jessica, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, the records we’re seeing are for an informal probate of will, and we don’t necessarily know what that is. A little bit of our own research shows that for an informal probate of a will, the estate has to be less than $50,000 to qualify the personal representative. So Julia Peters would be appointed immediately, and the letters would also be issued immediately. In this informal, small estate situation, the notice to heirs would go out after the appointment of the personal representative, which is different than what we see here because the notice would go out before the appointment actually happened.

Well, let me back you up. It’s different from what we do in California in a number of ways. First of all, we don’t have anything called an informal probate of will. You either have a probate or you don’t. There either is a court process or there isn’t. In California, we do have a small estate procedure, but it doesn’t involve a court except in very, very, very particular circumstances. This is interesting – it’s a process she filed to be appointed the personal representative. But because she’s asking for an informal probate, it appears that, as far as she knows, the estate is actually less than $50,000. And it looks like in this informal process, they just go ahead and issue it right away. You get your letters right away, and she’s appointed right away, which is in a California probate; you got to wait; you got to get a hearing. You got to go and talk to the judge and get your appointment.

Okay, so that’s what we can see and kind of deduce from what has been filed in the Court. Then, the other source of information we have about Mr. Hackman’s estate is what we read in the news. And I’m talking about like USA Today, Entertainment Tonight, these kinds of sources where you can see what they’re saying. One of the sources, and now I can’t remember which, said that they got a copy of the will, and we tried to get the copy of the will, but I think you have to go down to the courthouse to get it. We were not able to get that online. We’re not in Santa Fe, and I’d love to go there, but I’m not doing it this week. Not happening this week.

So, what we have read in the news, Jessica, you want to start with some of these things?

Yes. One headline we’ve been seeing is, you know, “Gene Hackman’s Will leaves everything to his wife. His children are not included.” So, right? You know, drama, his children are cut out. They’re not getting anything. But actually, what we’re seeing is that the will appears to be a pour-over will. And if you tune in somewhat regularly to our show, you know what that is. It’s a will that pours everything over to the trust. So, what the pour-over will say is that everything goes to Gene Hackman’s wife as trustee of the Gene Hackman living trust, not to her individually, to her as trustee. And we don’t know what the Trust says. The trust very well may say that his children receive something, but we don’t know because we can’t see that.

Yeah, and we would not expect to see any kind of disposition in a true pour-over will. The purpose of the pour-over will is just to say, “When I die, I leave everything to my trust,” and it’s in the trust document, which is not filed. It’s not a public record. It’s a private document. That’s where Gene Hackman would have said, who gets what on my death? We don’t know. It might be that he left everything to her, and then, on her death, everything would go somewhere else, including his three children. He might have left some to his kids, some to her. We don’t know, but you can’t, you can’t tell anything, really, from what this appears to be, which is a pour-over will.

Another sort of headline – you know, news people need to make money. So how they make money is they get people to read their news, and so they like to jazz things up a little bit. Another headline, or sub-headline, is that the sole beneficiary of his will is his wife, and she’s pre-deceased him. That was established last week; the medical examiner established that Betsy Hackman died before Gene. Now that the sole beneficiary has deceased, the whole thing is going to have to go through probate, and there’s going to have to be laws of intestacy applied.

Naturally, that’s not what we’re reading according to the documents that we’ve read about. We are going to have to read the trust to know what happens now that we know that his wife pre-deceased him. And I’m just going to say it is almost 100% a sure thing that Mr. Hackman’s Trust has a plan for what happens if his primary beneficiary, his wife, pre-deceases him. I mean, that would just be unheard of – poor estate planning, not to ask that question. That’s what we do. That’s what estate planners do. Half of our meetings are, “Well, what if this happens?” And the first question you’re going to ask is, “Okay, that’s great. We leave everything to your wife. What if she dies before you?” You ask that question. I guarantee you; it’s written in that document.

What else have we gleaned from the documents? There is another Trust, the GEBE Trust, which was created in September 1994. The will refers to this trust, and it looks like Gene Hackman had a power of appointment over the assets of that trust, which he exercised in his will. What that means is he had the power to appoint in his will what he wanted to happen to those trust assets upon his death, and it looks like he exercised that. We don’t know what those assets are, but that’s standard. Nothing too exciting or dramatic there, unfortunately.

Yeah, and I think that the name of that other trust is – you might say G-B, it’s G-E-B-E. So, to me, that looks like a portmanteau, like a combination of their two first names, Gene and Betsy. I don’t know, pure speculation, but he appears to have exercised his power of appointment over whatever that trust owns, saying, “I also leave that to the Gene Hackman living trust, or revocable living trust.” And so, really, it comes down to what that Gene Hackman Living Trust says, and nobody knows. Well, there are people who know – you and I don’t know. USA Today, I suspect, doesn’t know. But anyway, there’s nothing really as dramatic or exciting as the news sources we’ve seen seem to think.

So, the trust is private, and it will remain private unless there’s litigation, which there could be, who knows. But because the estate is below $50,000 there’s not even going to be any further court action unless, you know, something’s probably got to get completed in that little informal probate. But that’s not going to be very interesting either.

Anything else, Jessica, you wanted to add to this conversation?

I mean, I’m just hoping that whatever source has the will allegedly or has the trust will eventually get to take a peek at it. Until then, we’re really just speculating.

Yeah, but isn’t that fun?

So, if there are further developments in the Gene Hackman case, you know where to come to find out about them. We’re going to tell you about it and pick it apart so that it really makes sense. We hope you learned something here today about good estate planning and that none of this is very surprising for our frequent listeners. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to connecting with you next time.

Resources Related to This Episode:

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Asset DistributionBetsy ArakawaBetsy Arakawa DeathBetsy Arakawa Hackman DeathBetsy Arakawa Hackman New Mexico Court RecordsCalifornia vs New Mexico LawGene HackmanGene Hackman DeathInformal ProbateLitigationMedia MisconceptionsPodcastsPour-Over WillPower of AppointmentTrust Document
Kirsten Howe:
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