Here at the Weekly we try to follow up on stories we cover, but sometimes the news is coming in so fast certain story threads pass us by. Such was the case with the story about the Michael Nesmith estate, which I covered back in 2022 after his death in December 2021.
Pam Marino here, with a short background for those who aren’t familiar with Nesmith. The Carmel Valley resident was part of the 1960s pop band The Monkees, a fictional band for a TV series that ran from 1966-1968, morphing into a very real and respected band for years after.
Nesmith went on to have a successful solo career, as well as to pursue groundbreaking projects as an entrepreneur and film producer. He preceded MTV with a TV show called PopClips, and invented a way to embed live content in virtual worlds which earned him a U.S. patent, among many other accomplishments and projects.
After Nesmith died, his estate was clouded in controversy. In 2014 he handwrote a will on a single piece of paper giving away all his possessions and rights to his music and other projects to the Gihon Foundation, which his mother, Bette Graham, created in 1977. (Graham, some might remember, invented Liquid Paper—she also held a patent.)
Nesmith’s four children then claimed there was evidence of another handwritten will created in 1994 and asked a judge to declare it the true will, but they couldn’t find a copy of it.
That’s where I left the story in 2022. I tried to follow along with the proceedings in Monterey County Superior Court, waiting for the estate to be settled. Recently one of our readers wrote to us asking what happened, so I headed over to the courthouse in Monterey to see what I could learn from the casefile. It turns out the estate was settled on Dec. 9.
According to a letter dated July 3, 2024 from a supervising deputy attorney general in the state’s Charitable Trusts Section, an investigative body, the estate at that time was worth $5 million. That included the sale of his Carmel Valley home, which sold for $3.25 million, netting a little over $1 million after expenses. His bank accounts were valued at almost $1.2 million.
The four children each inherited one quarter interest in Ranchland Company LLC, which owned Nesmith’s VideoRanch headquarters in Sand City, and one quarter interest in all of their father’s bank and investment accounts. In 2021 the building was valued at $1.43 million, minus a $1 million loan on the property.
The Gihon Foundation was given all membership interests (a type of security in a limited liability corporation) in three of Nesmith’s LLCs, all shares in two other companies he founded and “tangible personal property of the estate.” The companies include rights to his songs, valued at $2 million, and royalty rights to two films he produced, Repo Man (1984) and Tapeheads (1988).
According to court documents, the Gihon Foundation board decided not to challenge the estate because of more evidence found of a possible 1998 will that left everything to the children. It would have turned into a protracted and very expensive legal battle, so both sides agreed to a settlement.
I’ve been asked a few times: If Nesmith had a successful career and inherited a large estate from his mother—she sold Liquid Paper for around $48 million and reportedly half of her estate went to him and the other half to charity—why wasn’t his estate larger?
There were claims against the estate by creditors, and from the reporting I did back in 2022, it appeared to me that Nesmith used a lot of money for passion projects that were not necessarily profitable.
Just one example: in looking at Gihon’s nonprofit IRS filings a few years ago, it looked like his groundbreaking project, Videoranch3D, launched in 1998, an online virtual world to deliver live content, was costing many thousands of dollars annually to keep the website up and running. (It’s no longer available.)
Having served as a trustee to my late mom’s estate, I can tell you, it’s so important to get your affairs in order. Robert Michael Nesmith (his full name) did not, unfortunately. It took three years and over $200,000 in executor and attorneys fees to sort it out.