Recently, we just so happened to stumble across this tweet:
Tucker Carlson’s mother Lisa McNear Carlson left him $1.00 in her will. He sued her estate for five years and prevailed in CA.
— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@NotHoodlum) February 21, 2023
Yes, that says that Tucker Carlson’s — the infamous (now former) Fox News talking head that’s been peddling some of the alt-Right’s most heinous and dangerous lies across national television for years now — mother only left him one single, measly dollar in her will, upon her passing.
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This was a rather interesting claim, to say the least, and prompted us to do a little digging to figure out its validity.
It didn’t take long to find this article from the fact-checking site Truth or Fiction, whose tagline is “seeking truth and exposing fiction since 1999.”
According to the publication, this claim is absolutely true.
Truth or Fiction digs into the various tweets that went semi-viral across social media in the last couple of years, regarding the final wishes of Tucker Carlson’s mother Lisa McNear Carlson, before citing the proof they found to back up the claims.
Apparently, the matter was touched on in articles from a couple of reputable publications, including a 2019 piece from the Washington Post that wrote, “His birth mother, who passed away in 2011, left her two sons $1 each in her will. It’s a topic that Carlson doesn’t like to discuss,” as well as a 2022 profile from Insider that claimed Carlson’s “bohemian artist mother… cut Tucker and his brother out of her will.”
However, the fact-checking publication was able to dig up even more concrete proof on the matter when they found a case file from a 2019 appeal on CaseText.com that exposed all the dirty details:
Lisa met Michael Vaughan in the spring of 1987. Michael, like Lisa, was an artist. He was born in 1938. They were married in February 1989, had no children together, and maintained homes in Beaufort County, South Carolina and Cazac, France. In 1995, they prepared and executed substantially similar wills, each leaving all their assets to the other. Lisa’s will was a one-page handwritten document that stated: ‘I leave all of my earthly goods and possessions to my husband, Michael Erroll Vaughan. This includes but is not limited to; all of my shares of our jointly owned real estate, personal property, common stock, mutual fund shares, bank accounts, silver, paintings, jewelry and vehicles.’ Codicil #1 appeared immediately after her signature and stated: ‘I leave my sons Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson one dollar each; $1.00 each.'”
It appears that the document hails from Carlson’s attempt to contest his late mother’s will and final wishes, though we’re unable to verify with certainty whether or not he was successful.
Read the full report from Truth or Fiction here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
