Prince Rogers Nelson died in April 2016 without a will. No spouse. No children. An estate later valued at roughly $156 million, and not one sentence anywhere saying who should get any of it.
What followed wasn’t privacy or a quiet transfer to family. It was six years inside a Carver County, Minnesota courtroom, in front of a judge named Kevin Eide who had to referee all of it. Within weeks, people started coming forward — siblings, half-siblings, a man in a Colorado prison named Carlin Williams who claimed to be his son. A paternity test later ruled him out, but not before the court had to take the claim seriously. Every person who came forward had to be investigated before anyone could even agree on who legally counted as an heir. Bremer Trust was appointed to manage the estate. Then Comerica Bank took over instead — efficiencywasn’t exactly the theme of those six years.
A year in, six heirs were finally confirmed: Prince’s sister and five half-siblings. But confirming who counted as family didn’t confirm who got what — that took years more, plus a will that surfaced out of nowhere and turned out to be fake.
In the middle of all this, Paisley Park — his home and recording studio in Chanhassen — sat under estate control while the fight went on, eventually opening to the public as a museum before the case was anywhere near resolved. By the time it finally settled in 2022, more than $ 45 million had gone to lawyers, accountants, and administrators. Money that never touched a single person Prince might have actually wanted to provide for.
None of that $45 million bought clarity. None of it bought speed. It bought six years of strangers in a courtroom, deciding what happened to a life’s work, because the one document that could have told them what to do was never written.
