Joan Rivers' $150 Million Will Includes Family, Friends, Charities
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Court documents reveal comedian Joan Rivers' wishes for her estimated $150 million fortune.
Rivers' 2014 will was filed in New York state Surrogate's Court. In it, she made her only child, Melissa Rivers, the executor with "the broadest and most absolute permissible direction'' over her fortune.
The late comedienne asked that her business manager Michael D. Karlin and interior designer Robert Higdon be named co-executors of the living trust.
Unspecified amounts are going to national and New York-based charities, including Guide Dogs for the Blind, Jewish Guild Healthcare and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Other charities she singled out were the food pantry God's Love We Deliver, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Home and Hospital Foundation in Manhattan.
Bequests were made to her assistants, Sabrina Lott and Jocelyn Pickett, her publicist Scott Currie, and Rivers' niece and nephew, Caroline Waxler and Andrew Waxler.
Rivers died in September, a week after going into cardiac arrest at Yorkville Endoscopy on the Upper East Side following a minor, elective vocal cord procedure. She was 81 years old.
The New York City Medical Examiner's office said Rivers' cause of death was "anoxic encephalopathy due to hypoxic arrest during laryngoscopy and upper gastrointestinal endoscopy with propofol sedation for evaluation of voice changes and gastroesophageal reflux disease."
That means she suffered brain damage due to a lack of oxygen.
The clinic soon afterward was placed under investigation by the New York State health department. A state report issued in November said the clinic failed to identify her deteriorating vital signs.
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