Aretha Franklin had almost $1 million in uncashed checks when she died

Source: Chicago Tribune / Getty

Aretha Franklin Had $1 Million In Uncashed Checks When She Died

Aretha Franklin had BIG paper stashed away at the time of her death according to Billboard.

Well, maybe it wasn’t her intention to stash them away, it’s hard to tell if the $1 million in uncashed checks that were found during an inventory of her estate were uncashed on purpose or just forgotten about.

An inventory following her death found that Franklin had a check for $702,711.90 from Sound Exchange and Screen Writers Guild as well as uncashed checks to her publishing company, Springtime Publishing, from EMI, BMI, Carlin Music and Feel Good Films in the amount of $285,944.27. In total, $988,656.17 in uncashed checks were found.

As we previously reported, the Queen of Soul never had a will so her assets were distributed equally among her four sons Clarence, Edward, Teddy and Kecalf. In a posthumous plot-twist, three handwritten wills dated from 2010 to 2014 were found in various places around her home.

The report states that although the four sons agreed to have their cousin Sabrina Owens be the lead rep for Franklin’s estate, it sounds like they’re none-too-pleased with her performance thus far…

“It is totally unacceptable that it has taken a year for the heirs to begin find out what their mother owned on the date of her death,” Kecalf’s attorneys Charlene Glover-Hogan and Juanita Gavin Hughses wrote in a recent court motion. “To date, the heirs still do not know what was owned on Aretha Franklin’s date of death.”

We can only hope that a messy legal battle over Aretha’s assets doesn’t turn the family against one another.